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Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

• l0ngyap 3y ago
  [flagged]
• Klonoar 3y ago
  > But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine. I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a real loss for the web. However. Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right patterns/etc to hook people. Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.
  • tentacleuno 3y ago
    > Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Arguably, it works less than more traditional forums though (a la Reddit). The fact that web search isn't supported means that users will keep asking the same questions. Searching for topics is harder too (as it's a long line of intertwined topics). I moderate a room and see this a lot, so...
    • tester457 3y ago
      I don't like discord but new users can be directed to the Forum Channels and search those. That new feature has helped me.
    • Klonoar 3y ago
      I also moderate and run support in a Discord. We see that it's harder/less efficient/etc; you and I also both know full well that users don't think about this at all. Like, tell me the last time a user who came in for support actually used the search bar. I'll wait, lol...
      • tentacleuno 3y ago
        Oh 100% this. To play Devil's Advocate though, I run a Matrix room too and the search functionality on that is a lot worse than Discord (it takes around a minute to actually find something), so most users end up asking again because it's easier (...for them, of course).
• re-thc 3y ago
  Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn't really work. Slack was popular before Discord. I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve. More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.
  • musicale 3y ago
    Forums don't seem to work well for Q&A. Technical systems that we need help with are always complete garbage, users are clueless/eternal September, spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and providing high-quality answers for free. Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over, previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible. Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site' posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-driven oversight, etc.. The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell. But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.
• nozzlegear 3y ago
  If I had to guess, Reddit has a huge overlap with gaming where Discord is already immensely popular. It’s easy to set up from both a user and server owner’s perspective, and most Redditors probably already have it installed or have heard of it at some point.
• frou_dh 3y ago
  According to you it's overwhelming and "not a real KB", but many will consider it a more natural UI for conversing than a web forum. That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a proper KB.
  • timbit42 3y ago
    And then it goes into a black hole and no one else will ever benefit from that knowledge. It's a major reduction in the utility of the internet.
• LordKeren 3y ago
  Many Reddit moderators are interested in Pc Gaming, and Discord is ubiquitous in that space. It’s free, infinite scaling, and there is a big overlap in the user bases. > But discord is far from a real knowledge base I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • 7speter 3y ago
    >Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect. Maybe to subreddit moderators but to reddit admins and executives and stakeholders, they see it as a major plus that reddit is an ever growing and indexed knowledge base.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    PC gaming in general is an experience, not knowledge. However, specific niches of PC gaming are a different thing. There's a myriad of subreddits focused on narrow things like assembling gaming PCs, evaluating GPUs, playing a particular game, modding a particular game, etc. Many of those have a knowledge-generating nature, and among them plenty are maintaining Wiki pages, so that valuable knowledge is not lost (and so that the same questions aren't being asked a hundred times a day). In general, this is the case with many (most?) subreddits focused on topics that have a knowledge component - be it a hobby like woodworking, a specific diet, a support group for specific mental issue, etc. Where tools for it are present, people maintain knowledge bases, for their own reference as well as to let newbies get up to speed without flooding the group with questions.
• hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that. It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum. It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • kitsunesoba 3y ago
    "I already have an account there," is a much more powerful force than some realize. Signup fatigue is real, and a lot of people will just hit the back button if it turns out they need to register a new account to participate.
    • Zak 3y ago
      This is something federation (e.g. Lemmy) solves, but it has its own signup fatigue that's higher than average. OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow. Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only widely-accepted providers. Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism for independent forums and reduced signup fatigue.
  • wyclif 3y ago
    IRC had "one account, infinite communities" too.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Sorta, kinda. The total set of communities you wanted to participate in were likely spread across 2 or 3 major IRC servers, and possibly several smaller ones. Though out of all UX problems IRC had, this was arguably a minor issue. At the very least, registering an account didn't come with so many strings attached as it does on the web. That said, IRC was an information black hole in just the same way Discord is, for the same reasons. In my personal experience, running an official channel alongside the official community mailing list was a huge PITA, as the very existence of that IRC channel required constant oversight and regular reminders of its subservient/non-binding role, as otherwise it would quickly end up with the whole community being taken over by a small group of people who had too much free time, and therefore could coordinate everything amongst themselves on IRC, in near real-time. You could call it "OODA loop mismatch" - IRC and Discord run through their OODA loops an order of magnitude faster than mailing lists and discussion boards, and as a result, unless actively prevented, they take over the community and cut out people who can't keep pace.
• cowsup 3y ago
  The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others later on, so they can re-read prior information. Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care. Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.
  • michaelmior 3y ago
    Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.
    • Kye 3y ago
      Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on, say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute, is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community personally by existing community member, who themselves were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind of "word of mouth". Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to be an outsider looking to learn something or start to participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby groups moving to Discord - or worse, Whatsapp groups - there's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the thing it's worth it. This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.
• Solvency 3y ago
  Everyone here ignores Discourse because it's not "cool". Some might complain about its UX issues. Yet those same people are tolerating the mountain of issues with Lemmy or Mastodon because they are approaching "cool" status.
  • Zak 3y ago
    I think people are more tolerant of issues with Lemmy and Mastodon because federation is a major benefit that inherently adds some UX complexity. I think Discourse is fine for what it is, but it's less OK to be a siloed forum in 2023 than it was in 2013. Yes, I'm aware federated forums are just reinventing Usenet, but there was a good idea there we lost sight of in the web era.
• razodactyl 3y ago
  If Discord works - it will adapt. It and its users will grow together. This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss. They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.
• justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Why not use a forum-like solution Because it's serverless *badum tss*
• ksec 3y ago
  The same reason why Reddit took over Forums in the first place. No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling. Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up. Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• superkuh 3y ago
  Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.
  • Vermyndax 3y ago
    I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving to yet another corporate-controlled entity.
    • Macha 3y ago
      IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result. Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.
    • ixwt 3y ago
      Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features. The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols have more complexity built into them because that's what the average user expects. But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and effort streamlining onboarding. There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.
• spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer. Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment. The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example. LLMs also excel in this area.
  • jachee 3y ago
    Also: any discord mod worth their salt will have set up a #faqs channel with the most-frequent questions and their answers. We went a step further on the iRacing community discord and wrote a bot that will search that channel and spit out answers. …because users will nearly always just ask a FAQ instead of reading one.
  • firesteelrain 3y ago
    > The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example. Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its Experts Exchange killer website consortium.
    • wyclif 3y ago
      SO is pretty much dead to me except for search. A lot time ago I stopped trying to even use it or participate in it in the intended way after getting my answers or questions killed for what seemed like no reason.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    The democratization of the internet with smart phones have had the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the internet with questions that are easily answered by looking just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer, when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?" Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted? 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close the tab and get on with their life. Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very soon.
• tikkun 3y ago
  The meta-answer is that: Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use. If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly). With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use. I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that). This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use. The two things needed to break that network effect are: 1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content 2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)
  • alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't feel real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the character of groups that try to migrate. I don't say it'll be objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind of participation.
    • tikkun 3y ago
      Agreed, I think Discord is substantially worse. I do think it's the best of a bad set of alternatives, though.
• stavros 3y ago
  I've been wondering about this myself, and I wonder if anyone here knows: Would Zulip with public conversations be a good alternative? (I've never used public conversations in it and I don't know how they work, but I love Zulip itself). Presumably they can also be indexed, but I'm not sure at all.
• deleted 3y ago
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• marginalia_nu 3y ago
  A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent cash. This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock. Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.
  • black_puppydog 3y ago
    I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
    • Semaphor 3y ago
      They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.
      • canadianfella 3y ago
        Missing?
        • Semaphor 3y ago
          *modding
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • 3y ago
• whalesalad 3y ago
  I think Discourse is terrible, too. The beauty of reddit/hn is that the more relevant discussions/comments get pushed to the top of a thread. The community constantly shapes the thread such that when you revisit it 5 years later you can quickly glean what is important. A forum is really terrible for that.
  • anononaut 3y ago
    It doesn't work so well with controversial subjects, even here. Instead, only the more popular ideas, often the same, get pushed to the top. In retrospect, I view this more negatively than not.
• gsmo 3y ago
  It's puzzling. Discord is for real-time chat, not static posting/branching. Completely different in my eyes.
• Daegalus 3y ago
  Others have made great points already, but one thing I see mentioned is "I don't want to manage separate logins for all these forums". We need to remember that most people don't use password managers and don't like "logging in" to things. They see it as a hassle. 1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won't bother.
• samtho 3y ago
  Reddit is popular for many reasons but one reason for engagement among multiple communities (subs) stands out above the rest: the cost to join is a single button. You are already logged in and all you need to is discover communities that already exist on the platform, which Reddit facilitates by automatically linking certain strings like /r/subreddit which will naturally (or unnaturally) pop up in conversation. This is a contrast to the way that Web 1.0 and 2.0 BBSes and forums operated where each fiefdom operates independently, requires a user account, and admins or moderators typically had strict rules about linking to other communities out of fear of loosing their own members because the cost for their members to join other communities means an reduction of time spent on their own. Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one. I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process. A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.
• acedTrex 3y ago
  I dont like having technical discussions over forums, its far to slow
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Funny, I have the opposite - I hate technical discussions over chat, because they move way too damned fast, and I just can't keep track of them and remain focused on anything else - like, say, my job. Perhaps the difference is that I don't typically start technical discussions - instead, I search for prior ones, which 99% of times solves my problem faster than any chat would.
  • timbit42 3y ago
    Assuming the same number of users, I don't see why it would be any slower than Reddit. That's not a problem of forums but of the number of users. My biggest complaint with forums is the lack of reply indentation.
• jerjerjer 3y ago
  Lowest friction, but yeah I agree. Reddit was useful because it was searchable and self-discoverable, and Discord does not have any of that.
• braza 3y ago
  (Marginally related): the thing that holds me to move to discord it’s because their “conversational” nature instead to be an idea board. At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.
• taubek 3y ago
  If you don't have your own infrastructure or knowledge to deploy Discourse there are some costs related to it. As far as I know there is no free tier when it comes to Discourse. [1] [1] https://discourse.org/pricing https://discourse.org/pricing
• barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Personally, I’m not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All the packages I’ve tried weren’t what I wanted: missing features, clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain for something I should be using a package for. And I’m not sure how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people might post There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit/discord accounts though
  • soared 3y ago
    ^ likely the best answer. Forums are difficult to manage whereas on Reddit and discord any user can click one button and have their own community. No user management, etc etc
• shortrounddev2 3y ago
  Discord is more popular because it gives more instant feedback. This makes it far more addictive than forums
• bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional forums. It's less friction when you don't have to sign up. If you already have an account, you need only subscribe to the channel/subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in turn makes your platform more relevant. The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.
  • wyclif 3y ago
    I'm in a few Discord communities, but I don't enjoy using Discord. Even though I'm only on a few servers it feels like a firehose every time I open it. I get information fatigue. Reddit is similar but to a lesser extent. Plus I get so tired of the captcha-"You're not finished yet"-/verify flow. If you sign up to several servers at once it's not really a good user experience.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• jrflowers 3y ago
  A lot of people already have Discord for various reasons. It’s easier to convince somebody to use something that’s already on their phone.
• Buttons840 3y ago
  The barrier to first participation is so much lower on Discord. > i need help lol That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.
  • awithrow 3y ago
    Eternal September was a problem in old chat rooms and IRC servers too. Discord isn't unique here.
• SirMaster 3y ago
  Simple, because Discord is real-time chat. Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new messages etc. And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users. I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.
  • culopatin 3y ago
    The question was about replacing a Reddit subforum with a chat, not a discord chat with a forum. Reddit is a slow async platform, forums are too, I don’t see what part of the things you mention makes Discord a no brainer.
  • halfdan 3y ago
    > I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord. That wasn’t what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time chat where there’s no easy way to search through history.
• Marsymars 3y ago
  I don’t think I can personally reconcile that reddit/forums are incredibly different products to Discord. To me, a move from reddit/forums to Discord is akin to a move from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.
• beardog 3y ago
  Because gen z uses both discord and reddit heavily
• egypturnash 3y ago
  People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the updates and maintenance. Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people. Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators. Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?
• altairprime 3y ago
  Discord has a very good anti-abuse system in place that prevents most sockpuppet and spam attacks. The moderation burden on a Discourse is vastly higher than on a Discord as a result, and since most public forums have no paid moderators, the optimization of effort is strongly in favor of Discord over Discourse.
• nicbou 3y ago
  Because the web is a dark forest. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk there.
• cft 3y ago
  Aren't discourse.org comments usually embedded into third party web sites? Also it appears they are paid.
• bhu1st 3y ago
  I don't understand why we would want everything to be accessible from search engines. What's wrong with joining a Discord server and searching there?
• meotimdihia 3y ago
  I think the main reason: the forum is expensive. They cost a big chunk of money to set up for a large community. And they missed so many features like a mobile app and notifications. And a lot of things that Discord offered.
• bradgranath 3y ago
  The problem with fleeing one VC funded startup for another VC funded startup has nothing to do with the technology. We're talking about a BBS. We solved the tech problem forty years ago. Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit? If Reddit didn't need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn't pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.
• ImAnAmateur 3y ago
  Because the people who "generate content" value participation. Creating a searchable knowledge base is always secondary.
• dusted 3y ago
  I'm not arguing for Discord, but I can see why it "won".. It's centralized, which, philosophically, is terrible, but practically is awesome; Nobody wants to maintain more logins/identities than they want to, most want one, few wants a few, even less wants many. If I'm "on Discord" I can join so many different servers, without ever having to register another account, AND have this one single program keep track of all that goes on within those communities, that is a giant pull for me. There's a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don't need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to "catch up" via a side-channel. It's just too convenient. Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.
• MINIMAN10000 3y ago
  Reddit is nice because with 1,000s of eyes information moves quickly. Discord is nice because when you can't get the quantity of reddit, you can mimic the quantity via discord because the rate of chat goes up enormously due to the nature of being realtime
• seydor 3y ago
  Because you have to maintain it, you can't monetize it, and people are afraid of the legal trouble as well
• zelifcam 3y ago
  Why? Because some of those children who supported the platform while playing games with friends are now adults and putting their projects behind it. I am so disappointed Discord took off. What an absolute privacy nightmare of a site. It boggles my mind people are working on projects with open source components/ideas and then forcing people to sell their soul just to read a CHANGELOG or find some simple instructions. I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.
• nektro 3y ago
  Discourse's demographic is not small communities