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My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not

My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. In the age where the media and those with an axe to grind (and frankly the person interviewing you for a job in 10 years) have figured out how to dig up anything you ever said in under 10 minutes the web ideal is less than ideal. Part of learning is saying stupid things and semi-private forums makes that easier I feel.

andybak 3y ago
I'm more concerned about the people that need help with something, but don't ask on Discord for any number of reasons. I suspect 1000 people use Google to solve a problem for every 1 that joins a Discord and asks.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.
  - andybak 3y ago
    It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.
    - skinnymuch 3y ago
      Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  That depends. Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? The OP clearly said their project got significantly more involvement since moving to Discord. The problem with lack of community involvement is that it puts more work on the contributors which means less questions are answered and burnout is much more likely.
  - andybak 3y ago
    > Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? I don't understand why these are the only choices offered. In fact - they feel fairly orthogonal. There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier - in fact I would argue it's demonstrably worse than many alternatives. It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency. As someone that does maintain a community. I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else.
    - eropple 3y ago
      > There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier It exists, it requires minimal competence or attention to technically administer, and it provides adequate (though not great) tooling for moderation (which is then significantly improved at scale with third-party tools). It also provides a unifying umbrella with a single set of affordances where everything is, from shitposting friend groups to technical projects. IRC exists, at least in a technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct sense. It requires nontrivial competence and attention to technically administer (and like, I wrote an IRC server once and still don't ask me to tell you, or to give a damn, what the alphabet soup of flags does). Moderation is actively bad, helped only by it being sufficiently annoying to get onto IRC that you probably are putting up a "you must be this tall to ride" gate. It also just sucks to use. Phones exist and supporting them adequately is not optional in 2023. Bouncers are not a solution, they are an additional problem. There's also limited space in people's brains for all the alternatives. Most people seem to find that That One Friend Who Uses Telegram (or Signal, or WhatsApp) when everybody else you know is on the Signal (or Telegram, or WhatsApp) island to be drifting away--it's not dissimilar. This also ejects Zulip--which is quite nice, IMO--and Mattermost-- which is not--and similar because when you've already got Slack and Discord fighting for cognitive space, a third option had better be step-change better, and they're not. > It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency. Sure? It was good enough, soon enough. Other things weren't good enough or soon enough. > I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else. Great, but most people...don't, and it's not hard to understand why. Chat has won because the world is an increasingly frustrating place and people have steadily decreasing ability to care about fucking with stuff. Forums are, for the most part, fucking with stuff. And worse: it's fucking with stuff for an unclear payout with regards to the thing that the prospective visitor cares about. Other people don't care about your stuff as much as you care about your stuff, and that's not a dig, that's just how people's brains work. You can go stand alone, and appeal to the sliver who want to deal with creating an account and validating an email address and figuring out where the reply button is (oops it was the post button, now I created a new thread and people think I'm a rude jerk)...or you can use the thing everybody already does use, understands, and at least is willing to tolerate. Unless you have a forum that has a genuine raison d'etre to stand alone as a thing, and are willing to consider a low-cut filter a feature of your community, it's a bad choice. And if you do qualify for those maybe it's a great choice, but most things simply do not. Something Awful provides a real reason to be a distinct thing. Most other attempts at forums don't, regardless of topic.
avian 3y ago
> it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. It also encourages more people to be assholes in my experience. I'm sure there are well moderated chats out there associated with open source projects, but I had several such abysmal experiences with Discord in the past that I'm completely done with it.

andybak 3y ago

I'm more concerned about the people that need help with something, but don't ask on Discord for any number of reasons. I suspect 1000 people use Google to solve a problem for every 1 that joins a Discord and asks.

skinnymuch 3y ago
Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.
- andybak 3y ago
  It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.
marcinzm 3y ago
That depends. Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? The OP clearly said their project got significantly more involvement since moving to Discord. The problem with lack of community involvement is that it puts more work on the contributors which means less questions are answered and burnout is much more likely.
- andybak 3y ago
  > Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? I don't understand why these are the only choices offered. In fact - they feel fairly orthogonal. There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier - in fact I would argue it's demonstrably worse than many alternatives. It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency. As someone that does maintain a community. I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else.
  - eropple 3y ago
    > There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier It exists, it requires minimal competence or attention to technically administer, and it provides adequate (though not great) tooling for moderation (which is then significantly improved at scale with third-party tools). It also provides a unifying umbrella with a single set of affordances where everything is, from shitposting friend groups to technical projects. IRC exists, at least in a technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct sense. It requires nontrivial competence and attention to technically administer (and like, I wrote an IRC server once and still don't ask me to tell you, or to give a damn, what the alphabet soup of flags does). Moderation is actively bad, helped only by it being sufficiently annoying to get onto IRC that you probably are putting up a "you must be this tall to ride" gate. It also just sucks to use. Phones exist and supporting them adequately is not optional in 2023. Bouncers are not a solution, they are an additional problem. There's also limited space in people's brains for all the alternatives. Most people seem to find that That One Friend Who Uses Telegram (or Signal, or WhatsApp) when everybody else you know is on the Signal (or Telegram, or WhatsApp) island to be drifting away--it's not dissimilar. This also ejects Zulip--which is quite nice, IMO--and Mattermost-- which is not--and similar because when you've already got Slack and Discord fighting for cognitive space, a third option had better be step-change better, and they're not. > It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency. Sure? It was good enough, soon enough. Other things weren't good enough or soon enough. > I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else. Great, but most people...don't, and it's not hard to understand why. Chat has won because the world is an increasingly frustrating place and people have steadily decreasing ability to care about fucking with stuff. Forums are, for the most part, fucking with stuff. And worse: it's fucking with stuff for an unclear payout with regards to the thing that the prospective visitor cares about. Other people don't care about your stuff as much as you care about your stuff, and that's not a dig, that's just how people's brains work. You can go stand alone, and appeal to the sliver who want to deal with creating an account and validating an email address and figuring out where the reply button is (oops it was the post button, now I created a new thread and people think I'm a rude jerk)...or you can use the thing everybody already does use, understands, and at least is willing to tolerate. Unless you have a forum that has a genuine raison d'etre to stand alone as a thing, and are willing to consider a low-cut filter a feature of your community, it's a bad choice. And if you do qualify for those maybe it's a great choice, but most things simply do not. Something Awful provides a real reason to be a distinct thing. Most other attempts at forums don't, regardless of topic.

avian 3y ago

> it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. It also encourages more people to be assholes in my experience. I'm sure there are well moderated chats out there associated with open source projects, but I had several such abysmal experiences with Discord in the past that I'm completely done with it.