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Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition. - Forums are easy for search engines

Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition. - Forums are easy for search engines to index - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable - Forums have good threading in general - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) - It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums Tell me how Discord does each of these better.

faangsticle 3y ago
It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different. Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.
  - faangsticle 3y ago
    The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.
hardware2win 3y ago
You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable
- bovermyer 3y ago
  I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'. Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.
capybara_2020 3y ago
You might be thinking of a very different user base. I have been using discord for a while and even more so now(unfortunately) after the whole reddit thing. But normal users probably do not care about any of that. You literally have people come in and ask a question that was literally asked and answered in the previous reply. People want an instant reply, they do not want to google for an answer. And the nature of the chat makes that possible. Plus search engines not indexing things is probably seen as a benefit by some community owners. For example people who run private course communities or small groups want their communities open only to invited people. Something else to think about is how discord differs, it is a chat app that transformed into a forum. While reddit has been trying to do the reverse. Maybe more people want a easy to chat app with some forum features tagged on, rather than the reverse.
- esafak 3y ago
  That disrespects the other people's time. The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. Which means the community becomes deprived of experts, and people who value their time, possibly becoming useless and dying. I might have put up with it as an adolescent, but there's no way I'm doing that as an adult. As you suggest, the user base evolves as a result of product choices.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. No one ever called humans rational beings. Of course that's the proper behavior to instill in a quality, knowledgeable internet user and foster a high quality community. We lost that battle decades ago, however. We're also losing the battle where it is okay to gatekeep lazy people. I argue the opposite: the product evolved based on user affordances, which is typically a good UI/UX paradigm to follow. If people are going to be lazy, lower the barrier of entry, and leave any curation to each server's community and moderators. And if we're being honest: most experts aren't sharing their information on social media. Not all of it, at least. Certainly not in public communities.
ravenstine 3y ago
Discord is better than forums for casual chatting and sharing memes. As far as acting as a repo of frequently asked questions to be left open for information to be amended and appended, forums are far superior to Discord. It's surprising that there are people who think Discord is better in every way when, to me, it's clearly not true. I wonder how many of those Discord-type users actually grew up with the chat rooms and forums/BBSes of Web 1.0. For those who didn't, maybe Discord superficially seems like a huge advancement over forums. The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.
- bbradley406 3y ago
  Of course it depends on those running the server and moderating, but most of the larger Discord "servers" I've joined have extensive information as pinned messages. I did grow up with PHP forums, but they feel a bit clunky now. I'm sure a well-made one with a more modern stack and new features could be superior to Discord for text discussion though.
- kingaillas 3y ago
  I'm old enough to remember anonymous ftp to grab the FAQ text file for various games, typically including a walkthroughs (e.g. the kind of thing now aggregated on sites like gamefaqs: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/25809 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/...) So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user. Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on. I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially. Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?
Lockyy 3y ago
When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up. I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison. Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete. This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.
- eitally 3y ago
  You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.
  - Hermitian909 3y ago
    The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher. Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot. Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.
  - hewlett 3y ago
    zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow
bee_rider 3y ago
Discord is good for real-time interactions. Discord+Wiki seems to hit the forum from both sides.
- esafak 3y ago
  That doesn't work because nobody will search the wiki when chat is around, and it might be outdated so people will ask anyway "just in case".
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    sounds like a Wiki problem. Maybe we should instead ask why people feel wikis are always outdated?
    - esafak 3y ago
      Because it's probably something sucky like Confluence, and because people go back to work instead of editing the wiki to help the next person once they find the answer.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
One thing that I’ve not seen any traditional forum software do particularly well is search. For some reason, forum search sucks to the point that if the forum is visible when logged out you’re better off doing a “<query> site:forums.foobar.baz” search with Google. Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  You say that as if using the site operator is the only way to do it, which it's not. Most people can figure out that just adding the name of the forum to their query is often sufficient. And this is often how people find forums at all. If you're googling for something in general and not looking for it on discord, you won't find any discord chats. You might find a forum though. Also, your at worst scenario is a bit contrived. There's plenty of ways to not get an answer, to get a wrong answer, or to be berated by gatekeepers because "you don't actually want that". It's still the internet, don't make it out like discord has somehow changed that fundamental fact, because they really haven't.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    The core point that forum search is bad and pulls down their user experience stands, however. Don't get me wrong, my preference definitely leans towards forums… I grew up on them after all. They have a lot of the type of rough edges that people aren't very forgiving of these days, though.
d3nj4l 3y ago
From the perspective of the average user: - Forums are easy for search engines to index : don’t care - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable : don’t care - Forums have good threading in general : don’t care - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) : don’t care - It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums : don’t care And this is why discord won. :)
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  If the average user is just someone who wants look at memes all day, sure.
  - esafak 3y ago
    This is the tragedy. People who don't want to put with this nonsense are being dragged into it because the communities of products they use live there.
pndy 3y ago
The only thing counting in favor of discord is the ability to use as many servers as you like with a single account, while you might face forums where links in the posts gets visible only if you register an account. I don't recall seeing any discord server so far that would lock posted content from their users. Tho there are servers that request you to agree on terms and go thru some simple verification to prove that you're a human being and not a bot. Personally, I'm not a fan of situations where communities suggest you joining their discord in order to get in touch with them or receive help faster, because most of the time it feels like I'm joining a playground full of adults behaving like kids.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  It's actually capped at 99, unless they changed it since the time I bumped into that limit.
  - pndy 3y ago
    That's still a big number and you can always leave servers you don't think you'll find useful or enjoyable
msabalau 3y ago
Discord is great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new. Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that. It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd. A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"
- bovermyer 3y ago
  My point is that saying Discord is universally better than forums ignores context and is not a useful comparison.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    TBF, you're ignoring their context.It's clear they aren't saying it's the best archival service that lets you search for anything in seconds. They clearly want a place of community and Discord gives that.
whoopdedo 3y ago
Forums aren't popular more the same reason email isn't. Spam. Forum operators fought a valiant yet losing battle against spambots. While tools like fail2ban eventually came around to make it easier, a generation of users grew up learning that forums suck and Discord was the right app at the right time to lure them away. "Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention. There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny. Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.

faangsticle 3y ago

It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.

bovermyer 3y ago
I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different. Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.
- faangsticle 3y ago
  The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.

hardware2win 3y ago

You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable

bovermyer 3y ago
I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'. Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.

capybara_2020 3y ago

You might be thinking of a very different user base. I have been using discord for a while and even more so now(unfortunately) after the whole reddit thing. But normal users probably do not care about any of that. You literally have people come in and ask a question that was literally asked and answered in the previous reply. People want an instant reply, they do not want to google for an answer. And the nature of the chat makes that possible. Plus search engines not indexing things is probably seen as a benefit by some community owners. For example people who run private course communities or small groups want their communities open only to invited people. Something else to think about is how discord differs, it is a chat app that transformed into a forum. While reddit has been trying to do the reverse. Maybe more people want a easy to chat app with some forum features tagged on, rather than the reverse.

esafak 3y ago
That disrespects the other people's time. The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. Which means the community becomes deprived of experts, and people who value their time, possibly becoming useless and dying. I might have put up with it as an adolescent, but there's no way I'm doing that as an adult. As you suggest, the user base evolves as a result of product choices.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. No one ever called humans rational beings. Of course that's the proper behavior to instill in a quality, knowledgeable internet user and foster a high quality community. We lost that battle decades ago, however. We're also losing the battle where it is okay to gatekeep lazy people. I argue the opposite: the product evolved based on user affordances, which is typically a good UI/UX paradigm to follow. If people are going to be lazy, lower the barrier of entry, and leave any curation to each server's community and moderators. And if we're being honest: most experts aren't sharing their information on social media. Not all of it, at least. Certainly not in public communities.

ravenstine 3y ago

Discord is better than forums for casual chatting and sharing memes. As far as acting as a repo of frequently asked questions to be left open for information to be amended and appended, forums are far superior to Discord. It's surprising that there are people who think Discord is better in every way when, to me, it's clearly not true. I wonder how many of those Discord-type users actually grew up with the chat rooms and forums/BBSes of Web 1.0. For those who didn't, maybe Discord superficially seems like a huge advancement over forums. The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.

bbradley406 3y ago
Of course it depends on those running the server and moderating, but most of the larger Discord "servers" I've joined have extensive information as pinned messages. I did grow up with PHP forums, but they feel a bit clunky now. I'm sure a well-made one with a more modern stack and new features could be superior to Discord for text discussion though.
kingaillas 3y ago
I'm old enough to remember anonymous ftp to grab the FAQ text file for various games, typically including a walkthroughs (e.g. the kind of thing now aggregated on sites like gamefaqs: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/25809 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/...) So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user. Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on. I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially. Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?

Lockyy 3y ago

When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up. I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison. Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete. This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.

eitally 3y ago
You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher. Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot. Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.
- hewlett 3y ago
  zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow

bee_rider 3y ago

Discord is good for real-time interactions. Discord+Wiki seems to hit the forum from both sides.

esafak 3y ago
That doesn't work because nobody will search the wiki when chat is around, and it might be outdated so people will ask anyway "just in case".
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  sounds like a Wiki problem. Maybe we should instead ask why people feel wikis are always outdated?
  - esafak 3y ago
    Because it's probably something sucky like Confluence, and because people go back to work instead of editing the wiki to help the next person once they find the answer.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

One thing that I’ve not seen any traditional forum software do particularly well is search. For some reason, forum search sucks to the point that if the forum is visible when logged out you’re better off doing a “<query> site:forums.foobar.baz” search with Google. Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
You say that as if using the site operator is the only way to do it, which it's not. Most people can figure out that just adding the name of the forum to their query is often sufficient. And this is often how people find forums at all. If you're googling for something in general and not looking for it on discord, you won't find any discord chats. You might find a forum though. Also, your at worst scenario is a bit contrived. There's plenty of ways to not get an answer, to get a wrong answer, or to be berated by gatekeepers because "you don't actually want that". It's still the internet, don't make it out like discord has somehow changed that fundamental fact, because they really haven't.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  The core point that forum search is bad and pulls down their user experience stands, however. Don't get me wrong, my preference definitely leans towards forums… I grew up on them after all. They have a lot of the type of rough edges that people aren't very forgiving of these days, though.

d3nj4l 3y ago

From the perspective of the average user: - Forums are easy for search engines to index : don’t care - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable : don’t care - Forums have good threading in general : don’t care - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) : don’t care - It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums : don’t care And this is why discord won. :)

Workaccount2 3y ago
If the average user is just someone who wants look at memes all day, sure.
- esafak 3y ago
  This is the tragedy. People who don't want to put with this nonsense are being dragged into it because the communities of products they use live there.

pndy 3y ago

The only thing counting in favor of discord is the ability to use as many servers as you like with a single account, while you might face forums where links in the posts gets visible only if you register an account. I don't recall seeing any discord server so far that would lock posted content from their users. Tho there are servers that request you to agree on terms and go thru some simple verification to prove that you're a human being and not a bot. Personally, I'm not a fan of situations where communities suggest you joining their discord in order to get in touch with them or receive help faster, because most of the time it feels like I'm joining a playground full of adults behaving like kids.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
It's actually capped at 99, unless they changed it since the time I bumped into that limit.
- pndy 3y ago
  That's still a big number and you can always leave servers you don't think you'll find useful or enjoyable

msabalau 3y ago

Discord is great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new. Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that. It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd. A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"

bovermyer 3y ago
My point is that saying Discord is universally better than forums ignores context and is not a useful comparison.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  TBF, you're ignoring their context.It's clear they aren't saying it's the best archival service that lets you search for anything in seconds. They clearly want a place of community and Discord gives that.

whoopdedo 3y ago

Forums aren't popular more the same reason email isn't. Spam. Forum operators fought a valiant yet losing battle against spambots. While tools like fail2ban eventually came around to make it easier, a generation of users grew up learning that forums suck and Discord was the right app at the right time to lure them away. "Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention. There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny. Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.