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Discord is not documentation

• tchock23 3y ago
  There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support. It is an awful experience for users/customers for the reasons this post cites. It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer. If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business. Instead of having information available publicly that can be found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a question that most likely already was answered before? It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something like that up to date instead?
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      One of the reasons everyone hates writing documentation is precisely because nobody reads them. So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted" writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering the same question again and again and again and again and again.
      • capableweb 3y ago
        I guess that's true. I also guess one should consider the fact that you could (as long as things don't change) "waste" your time writing the documentation once, and saved time accumulates, while "saving" your time today not writing documentation will accumulate time spent on answering questions over and over. Saved time today VS saved time tomorrow, the constant question for startups :)
      • williamdclt 3y ago
        even if people ask the same question rather than looking for docs, it's still a huge timesaver to direct them to the documentation rather than re-explaining from scratch everytime. Plus, after having been shown the docs they _might_ now be aware that they exist and self-serve the next time
        • dizhn 3y ago
          Plus it's an opportunity to fix the documentation. You will figure out quickly if a section of it is too confusing. It would also help you to realize if it's not easily discoverable.
        • Spivak 3y ago
          Most servers have a bot that people use to store and retrieve common answers so contributors don't have to type it out every time. Now you could be like clearly that should just be in the web documentation but people still show up and ask even when it is and RTFM isn't exactly nice.
      • simonw 3y ago
        If nobody reads documentation, it means they don't trust it. Trust is something that documentation for a project has to earn over time. People will assume the documentation is incomplete and out-of-date, because that's the default for most things. If it's comprehensive and stays up-to-date with new changes, the project community will eventually come to realize they and start trusting it. But it takes time to build up that track record!
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • palata 3y ago
          I think we also tend to teach people to not read documentation (or spend time learning anything, really). Maybe there is some kind of negative reinforcement, too. The way it feels to me is: "I won't write documentation, because users don't read it -> Oh great, I will use ChatGPT to support my users -> The users don't know how to read documentation (or anything other than a 500-letters answer to a chat question) because they do everything with ChatGPT-like prompts -> I won't write documentation, because users don't read it". Same for many things: most people tend to complain about CMake, but almost every time, I quickly realize that they don't know how to use CMake. Either they complain about it and never used it, or they complain and use it wrong. Therefore many devs try to build alternatives that will solve that problem by "being better than CMake". Turns out I have seen Meson projects that were a big mess, it's not just a CMake thing. On the other hand, people who learn how to use Autotool/CMake/Meson usually manage to make it quite maintainable. Here the negative reinforcement would be: "People don't learn how to use the tools properly -> They make a mess -> They complain about the tool -> Someone makes a "better tool" -> People don't learn the new tool and make a mess -> repeat. I truly believe that we could solve many problems by teaching people how to learn, instead of building technology that helps them being productive without learning.
          • rcxdude 3y ago
            CMake has a bit of a documentation problem, though. Firstly because the tool really was pretty bad at the start and the correct way to use it is the new way, but all the examples people run into in the wild are generally using it wrong, and this becomes self-perpetuating. The second issue is that the main documentation is actually really light on examples, it's just a fairly dry (and not always helpful) description of each part of it. I know there's some pretty good books but that isn't the kind of resource a lot of people are going to use when learning a tool, especially a tool they regard as secondary to their actual goal.
      • reaperducer 3y ago
        If nobody reads the documentation, that's an indication of success, not failure. It means you've done a good job with the product and people don't need help to use it.
        • zokier 3y ago
          I find this prevalent attitude actually harmful. It is kinda weird thing to think that the tools we use should not need any learning or training, that anyone should just be able to pick them up and be productive. Of course I understand it is reflective of the current situation where naturally it is not worth seeking expertise when software gets at minumum a redesign every six months if not thrown out completely. But I'd really question is that actually good situation to be in?
        • the_gipsy 3y ago
          Yes, but don't confuse cause and effect.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • esafak 3y ago
          That is one of the explanations but you should not dismiss the others.
      • nerdponx 3y ago
        1. Of course people read it. 2. People read the docs when you send them a link to the relevant doc page. Having docs makes your chat support a matter of linking to the right page.
      • mrweasel 3y ago
        People read the documentation and fails to understand it. Writing good clear documentation that successfully guides your users or customers to gain the most value from your product is incredibly hard. It's fine to have Discord, or something similar, for when you users come to you with a problem, but then you need to consider if you have to go back at update the documentation. Early in my career hanging out on mailinglists was much more popular, frequently you'd ask a question and the maintainers of whatever software you where using would take the answer and put them into the regular FAQ or documentation. Now we replaced Discord with mailinglists and that might be sensible, the feedback loop just should not be excluded. Discord is terrible place to store knowledge.
        • j0057 3y ago
          If it's hard to write documentation that people will comprehend, doesn't that make it equally hard to write near real-time chat messages that people will understand?
          • mrweasel 3y ago
            Yes and no, but at least they'll be able to provide real-time feedback and you can tailor your response to they specific situation.
      • sowbug 3y ago
        That is survivorship bias. You hear only from the customers who don't read it. (I like writing documentation.)
    • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      > I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business. Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the shots, then that would make-sense. ...just something I've noticed.
      • jasonlotito 3y ago
        Honestly, I’d take it over other archaic forms of documentation that came before. These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord solves: Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website. Paying for documentation. Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls. Documentation on just a website. No documentation. Random forums I have to sign up for that are separate from the help desk sign up that are separate from the actual services signup. Not be able to search across others issues and to solve problems without needing to ask. Using HN to get assistance. Using Twitter to get assistance. Hoping my email doesn’t get lost or stuck in spam either way. Having notifications so I can respond. Not having to sit on some website in some chat window. Not having to use some crappy web form that won’t take my screenshot because it’s 2MB instead of only being at most 1MB. Not being able to add attachments at all. Being able to have a real time conversation with someone. Still having a search function. Have something that works well on mobile and desktop. (Oh, but websites work well on both… OH no they don’t have to. People can easily screw that up and make websites that work horribly on difference devices). All of these things can be solved, but they aren’t. And keep in mind, the context of the discussion here isn’t documentation that ONLY exists on Discord. Rather, documentation that exists on web AND also stuff that exists on Discord. So, stuff that has yet to make it to the website.
        • xigoi 3y ago
          What's wrong with documentation on a website?
          • Per_Bothner 3y ago
            The complaint was about having to sign up to (register for) yet-another website.
    • duped 3y ago
      People are just going to post their question on your forum anyway, even if it's been answered a hundred times. And at least with discord it's easy to source answers from your community instead of paying developers to handle support.
      • bombolo 3y ago
        You don't see the majority of people that do not do this, because they never interact with you in any way.
      • patmorgan23 3y ago
        There's always going to be people who don't read your documentation and just post on your form but I think it's a pretty big fallacy to say for that reason it's useless for us to create and publish good documentation. You'd need data on customers that look through your documentation and never post to make that assertion.
    • safeimp 3y ago
      The majority of the time they aren’t thinking about the customer, they’re (selfishly, or naively?) thinking about themselves and how they can crowd source their support versus providing real personal solutions.
    • Retr0id 3y ago
      Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam). The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic. There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach. I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.
      • patmorgan23 3y ago
        It's still good for finding documentation if you know the domain it's hosted on, which for product documentation you should. Just add "site:documentation.com" to your search query.
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        Give me an example of a search for a given tools documentation that doesn’t have the result on the first page. Google seo is bad but I think this is hyperbole because I use it to find documentation easily most every day.
        • Retr0id 3y ago
          Search "python __init__" (sans quotes) The the first page of results are from, in order: mygreatlearning.com udacity.com geeksforgeeks.org stackoverflow.com w3schools.com micropyramid.com edureka.co pythonmorsels.com tutorialspoint.com pythontutorial.net Some of these resources are alright, but none of them are python.org or other primary source. As a python user and google expert, I know how to tweak my query to get better results, but if I was a novice I wouldn't. On the other hand, if I went to the python community discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from a real human in seconds. (the python discord is particularly excellent, by the way)
          • Joe_Cool 3y ago
            Surprising, the same search on duckduckgo gives me: www.w3schools.com stackoverflow.com docs.python.org and a sidebar quoting the 2nd result which is the top voted answer to: "What is __init__.py for" on Stackoverflow. Google is in a sad state it seems.
    • mooreds 3y ago
      We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software. Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We even have an internal slack channel where we capture questions that have been asked on other media (including private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it to post on the forums. This helps future questioners. Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software. I think chat is great for companies, just not communities. > Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.
    • janoc 3y ago
      The whole point is that they don't have to answer. They hope someone else from the community will before they get to it. It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the communication at all yourself. Win!
      • hinkley 3y ago
        Here we all are pretending like there aren’t groups that expect people to look for support on an IRC channel. This isn’t some new degradation today’s youth have inflicted upon us. Discord is just the new IRC.
    • op00to 3y ago
      Even worse the “community” in the Discord gets angry and berates you for asking a question!
    • abe94 3y ago
      We were considering using https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ for our own slack group for this reason - it surfaces information from these chat groups and makes it available via search. Anyone here tried them out?
      • 0xEFF 3y ago
        The platform slack with over 10,000 users uses linen. It’s good. Wonder how long it will last though.
  • RunSet 3y ago
    > There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support. Which in many cases is, effectively: "To read the FAQ just provide your phone number to verify your newly-created Discord account even though you just verified your email address." Previously treated on Hacker News: "Discord is a black hole for information" https://knockout.chat/thread/33251/1 https://knockout.chat/thread/33251/1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982
    • throwawaymobule 3y ago
      in my experience, discord is more likely to demand a phone number after you 'claim' an account by adding an email address. and don't even think about not getting phonewalled if you use a commercial VPN.
  • EGreg 3y ago
    Why Discord? Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one). Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting all their content on some third party centralized service? I don’t get it. Aren’t all Discord “servers” controlled by one company? And why did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?
    • judge2020 3y ago
      Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication", it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that matches the way we want to communicate". Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history. Matrix (https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level. Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.
      • EGreg 3y ago
        What is QOL? What is so bad about Matrix or Keybase or Gitter? Seems great
        • danhor 3y ago
          (Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.
        • judge2020 3y ago
          Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is just a bunch of hacks put together. For example - Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related, - No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0]) Not a great bet to go to keybase with the Zoom acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210 0: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/1951/files#diff-a9eadd5747c674f5a07d7fa4570a2ed844d5a942eb1380dfd0be719011ef3051R26-R47 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...
  • tvanantwerp 3y ago
    Putting all your community resources on Discord is the surest way to repel me from joining your community.
  • koonsolo 3y ago
    The thing is, Discord might be 99% effortless. For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to moderate, it's basically almost no effort. To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it just does.
    • wpietri 3y ago
      The question I'd be asking: works for whom? Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people, but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving community that feels good to you. So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is only people who are already happy Discord users." But that should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move toward the broader audience and that will include addressing concerns like in the article.
      • charcircuit 3y ago
        You can configure your server to not require discord accounts. Anyone can join Zia the web via clicking a link and simply typing a name.
      • koonsolo 3y ago
        You don't need user interviews, you just see where they are going. Are they discussing this on twitter or reddit? Are they making YouTube videos? Did one of them start a Discord with lots of people there? Once you see what works, make an official one. Funnily enough Discord was the only one I didn't start myself. I liked something async with proper Google searching better. So even when I tried, I wasn't able to steer them.
        • wpietri 3y ago
          Your entire TAM is composed of people you can observe on Twitter, Reddit, and Discord? That sounds like a pretty unusual business.
  • RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Yeah, community-driven support + documentation sucks. That's how Ory just lost me as a customer. Couldn't even get a reply from the DX dude, wanted to pay for onboarding. A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground, documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's how it should work.
    • vinckr 3y ago
      Hey there, I'm the "DX dude" so you were probably messaging me in the Ory Community Slack. Very sorry about a missing response, that should not have happened! I usually take time to answer each and everyone in the community within 24 hours so apologies that I missed your message. Ory does offer onboarding for commercial clients, for that you can set up a call in 1 click here: https://www.ory.sh/contact/ https://www.ory.sh/contact/ - we can kick off a guided onboarding session on the same day if you want to move fast.
  • kobstrtr 3y ago
    [dead]
  • sholladay 3y ago
    The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can “do it all” in terms of how people want to communicate. It supports voice, video, and text. It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction. It supports web, desktop, and mobile. I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways. Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.
    • vkou 3y ago
      The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information' incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the chat app part of a support channel, it is not even a passable replacement for a website, or a wiki. Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.
      • edandersen 3y ago
        Maybe some users of Discord want the satisfaction of answering a question raised by another community member, but don't want the answer to be publicly indexable and searchable forever? In this case, Discord is working perfectly.
        • vkou 3y ago
          Good for them. While they are getting whatever social satisfaction they care about (which is fine, if you're an enthusiast, you can seek out whatever validation for your volunteer effort you want - I don't judge)... I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten. I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.
  • ShamelessC 3y ago
    Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g. GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence, which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier) outrage. You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?" Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.
  • aledalgrande 3y ago
    And usually there is no responsive mods.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • rPlayer6554 3y ago
    Watch discord have it's reddit moment where they raise prices and people aren't willing to pay, but they are locked in due to hosting huge communities in it.
  • micromacrofoot 3y ago
    your complaints make it sound like a forum
  • userbinator 3y ago
    It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users. It will also stop many potential users from ever becoming actual users. I do wonder if those doing this are self-selecting for the "right" type of user.
  • Modified3019 3y ago
    Worst of all, there’s no way to discover previously fixed solutions with a web search, all the help and effort are essentially obfuscated. Discourse is what people want as a modern forum. Two good examples are https://discourse.nixos.org/ https://discourse.nixos.org/ and https://forum.level1techs.com/ https://forum.level1techs.com/
    • efreak 3y ago
      Discourse is just as bad. A forum should not require the use of javascript. A forum shouldn't silently remove parts of the DOM that are off screen. A forum should allow me to load an entire thread (or however many posts it decides a page is) in my browser, and use the native browser search function to find things.
  • grishka 3y ago
    Another thing I dislike about Discord is how it deals with notifications. The default notification settings are absolutely bonkers. Everything is unread, all the time, everything is important, everything has red badges every-damn-where. Then whenever you join a new "server", first thing you have to do is right-click and select "suppress @everyone and @here" and "suppress role mentions". But even if you do that, the messages with @everyone @here @role STILL get the yellow highlight like they mention you personally. Broadcast mentions are the stupidest thing ever. They should've never been invented because people can't be trusted to not abuse them. Then the message input field tries to be way too smart and is way too dumb at the same time. They've somehow broken macOS's native text replacements, iirc the thing eats some characters if your message starts with them, BUT — if you just type someone's @username and don't select the completion that pops up, the mention wouldn't work. The UI to add reactions to messages is comically bad. It shows your recent emojis, then 5 kilometers of the custom emojis from all the servers you're on (that you can't use anyway because you don't have the subscription), and only then the rest of the unicode emojis. Then there are all the incredibly obnoxious popups, banners and tooltips that promote the paid subscription. And the "what's new" popup. That's also obnoxious. Like, maybe, just maybe, if I'm not paying you, and have been using your service on the free tier for several years now, you should consider me a lost cause and stop raping my eyeballs with your stupid upsells in the hopes of converting me into a paying customer? Also, my files are way too often "too powerful" with no option to have the server compress them to its liking — it's rare that I need to send a bit-perfect copy of an image or a video. I'll be building a modern multi-protocol desktop IM client as my next project sometime in the future. Discord will definitely be at the top of the list of services to support.
  • roguas 3y ago
    Ok, let's backtrack a bit. If you have startup and no docs + complicated product -> discord is super easy first step. It also has a nice loop: if you see a question over and over, move it to faq, if its still repeated perhaps add better labeling/hints to your forms, if it still persists, damn maybe rethink your offering/product(or accept CS as vital part). In the end I don't want to deal with meta stuff. I want a nice seamless product period. Discord while awkward is a good first thing that you should absolutely have - you can bootstrap it in 10 mins. (Depending on your customers ofcourse, if you are selling insurance to old folks, for obvious reasons it's not good)
  • BowBun 3y ago
    It's quite popular in the indie game community and seems to work well, but that's a different beast than software and software support.
  • DropInIn 3y ago
    Perhaps the intent is to create impediments specifically to reduce support requests.... I've heard of crazier happening in the industry...
• UnixSchizoid 3y ago
  Exactly! I don’t use discord for privacy reasons and I don’t want to just to learn something that should be included in the README file or in documentation!
• discordsucks 3y ago
  Discord IS harder to sign up to than other stuff. They sometimes force you to sign up with a mobile number and thats just a huge NO NO.
  • MicropenisMike 3y ago
    The alternative is being overrun by spam, which is already really bad on discord. What's your solution?
    • anthk 3y ago
      HTML files. Or a PDF.
    • vaylian 3y ago
      That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold together with their other data which can lead to more nasty problems.
    • nerdponx 3y ago
      Documentation
      • yard2010 3y ago
        Documentation is really cool, but it doesn't support voice chat yet :)
        • helf 3y ago
          [dead]
        • nerdponx 3y ago
          Right, but that's "support", not "documentation". Completely different thing, and the latter is not really a substitute for the former, whether it's on Discord, IRC, XMPP, or at the bar after a conference.
    • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
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• andybak 3y ago
  We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice features and handles issues around consent nicely. If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so further down the line. A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting the community made this the best option for us. The best solution might be not to use Discord in the first place but it does have familiarity in its favour (for some communities at least) We also do maintain "proper" documentation but it's hard to capture everything and the Discord contains valuable content that's not recorded elsewhere.
  • toastal 3y ago
    Or at least mirror in the opposite direction. Keep your ‘primary’ communications on something open like XMPP MUCs, Matrix Spaces, IRC–or the likes of Zulip, Mattermost. If the chat flavor of the week changes, at least home base wasn’t ran by a megacorp that could rug pull & turn off the service like they do with sanctions, or just new paywalls.
• handwarmers 3y ago
  Meta comment: HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting. Obviously a lot of the current commenters didn't even read what the article was about and just wanted to vent about the good old days of mailing lists and half-assed docs that at best had a code sample, but on average were just a "table of contents" for the source code that you'd ultimately have to read. I for one wish these projects had BBS-es in addition to Discord, but man I love just chatting with people working on the thing I am also interested in and making friends along the way. Actual comment: When it comes to Watchy, I found the docs to be a good starting point - https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started . They give you the architectural diagrams, have a few code examples for some of the more common use cases, and do a pretty good job at letting you know that this is very much going to be an "adventure" type project with a lot of surface to cover. They could expand one day and add links to articles/projects other people have made, but I am not sure many of those exist. It is sort of a niche product.
  • tchock23 3y ago
    Chatting with the creators and making friends is a great reason to create a Discord. But maybe don’t push everyone there for everything?
    • handwarmers 3y ago
      I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas. But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        The greatest communities in technology all have good documentation. There’s no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right and document your tools.
• dcw303 3y ago
  There should be a good opportunity for whoever can implement an LLM that listens in on chat platforms like slack and discord and constructs a wiki from it. Bonus points if it also chats back with answers to questions, linking to the docs as needed.
• mdev23 3y ago
  This is why I’m working on an AI discord docs/support bot: https://recurai.com/discord https://recurai.com/discord Reach out if you’d like to get it set up with your server -> contact@recurai.com
  • vikmals 3y ago
    There is also embedchain which you can use in conjunction with a discord bot (create QnA pairs, feed them into embedchain along with your documentations). I don't know how recurai works under the hood since the discord invite link is broken and there seems to be no documentation on it, so not sure if its worth paying for it.
• vikmals 3y ago
  Interesting, I've experienced the opposite. People would join the discord server and ask questions that are already answered in the documentations, so you're ending up just sending them the link.
  • kaycebasques 3y ago
    This is close to an ideal outcome, IMO. For us technical writers it's a sign that we're doing our job correctly when support/software engineers answer customer questions by linking to our docs. It's viewed as a good thing because presumably it wasn't too much work for the engineers to find and send that link. Much less work than recreating ad hoc explanations for the same question every time that it comes up, at least. If something feels off about the situation, you might argue that it could be a symptom of suboptimal design. I.e. "this is covered in the docs, why aren't customers finding it?" But in my experience there will always be a subset of new, inexperienced who default to asking for help in the forums. Once they see that the engineers keep linking to the docs to answer their questions, they usually get the hint that they should just check the docs first.
  • richbell 3y ago
    The Internet is flooded noobs. You don't experience the people who don't join your Discord because they've already read the docs.
    • donmcronald 3y ago
      Yep. Reading the docs first used to be expected and they were worse and harder to find in the past. There’s a lot less willingness to make a solid effort before asking for help these days (IMO). I can’t even count the times I’ve solved my own problem by spending an afternoon trying to build a reproducible example.
      • dazed_confused 3y ago
        gone are the days where RTFM applied
      • 3y ago
• mynameishere 3y ago
  I am confused. Why would anybody use Discord for anything other than...well, I don't know. I guess the same thing the old Yahoo! chat rooms were for 20 years ago.
  • haunter 3y ago
    >Why would anybody use Discord for anything It's a replacement for Ventrilo/Mumble/Teamspeak. At the time (and still) there were no voice chat + text chat service integrated into one that can be used for free both on web, desktop, and mobile.
  • crtified 3y ago
    I don't use it, but have done in the past, and can see why it became popular. Textual communication is nothing new. But a relatively platform agnostic system which enabled anybody to quickly set up a room, or form and administer a private or public group, while also covering multimedia like voice comms and file sharing, in a modern and arguably elegant package, well developed even 5+ years ago, it's clear why it gathered a following in it's own right. Successful business strategies played a large part in the extent, of course. The fact does remain however that textual communication is nothing new, and content in Discord is subject to the same old principles of merit and efficiency with respect to data format, usage, and availability.
• gochi 3y ago
  I see a lot of talk about Discord being the latest evil, but really nobody is actually tackling the underlying problems that causes people to use Discord for reasons it's not well suited for. Open source projects will rely on Discord for more than ephemeral discussions because they're too swamped to dedicate resources to proper documentation or a readme. It takes too long to keep information up to date, nobody wants to write it, and those that do want to write it tend to not be great at really understanding the project. "Edit on Github" links work for larger projects almost exclusively it seems as nobody uses it to help out smaller projects struggling with docs. Documentation is a hard problem! It requires all hands on deck, yet people treat it like one person can go off in isolation and come back with great docs like a novelist. So they pin a comment on Discord for FAQs, they section a channel off for admin-only docs in progress for stuff they eventually move to a Github wiki of sorts. Also interestingly enough, the project he links does have a lot of documentation, even has wikis full of links. They're adequate enough as docs. So I don't know what he would even have to go into Discord for. He can submit Github issues as well to the multiple repos they have linked. I don't believe businesses are exclusively moving support to Discord, but again the ones that do rely on Discord are already using it for ephemeral discussions so they just add in casual support to the mix because they are not going to opt into extremely costly support systems. It's easier, counterintuitively, to provide support through Discord than it is to run the likes of Intercom especially at a smaller scale. How else are they supposed to prove direct support for people who don't want to search through the Github? Now that two core problems are out of the way, we can talk about why Discord thrives. People are ok with Discord being ok at everything but not really excelling at those tasks because they want a hub. They want a place with one account they can get support for an open source project, and then talk to their game friends, and then look up job applications in another server. This is why they don't care about the official site or sending an email, Discord is good enough. All this to go against the grain and say: Discord is fine as documentation. Not enjoyable to use for that purpose, but fine. Do yourself a favor, and contribute to some docs.
  • vikmals 3y ago
    I've joined the project discord he's ranting about, seems like all the questions he asked could be answered by following through the docs or actually reading the code (or by using the search function on github). Discord is just a place for asking questions and having someone else to do the research because most people are lazy.
• simonw 3y ago
  There's a cultural/process hack that can really help here: be meticulous about turning questions in Discord into updates to your documentation. If you do that, Discord can be a powerful accelerant to the quality of your project documentation. But you have to be disciplined about it!
  • le-mark 3y ago
    This is the key. If I have to do my job and monitor slack discord mattermost all day, I’m not doing my job. Unless my job is support. It’s just one more instance of software development taking over yet another business area (support) because developers are by and large naive, opinionated, and eager to please. It happened with agile (we got project management) and devops (we got sysadmin). Ymmv.
  • hobo_mark 3y ago
    Surely an LLM could parse the chat and keep a public FAQ up to date? Somebody must already have implemented this, but last time I looked I still came empty handed...
    • Karunamon 3y ago
      From some experiments with a discord bot, the non-deterministic responses you get from an LLM are the big killer for that use case. Ask the model to summarize 100 lines of chat 10 times and you will get 10 different outputs, all worded subtly differently, with different headlines missing each time. (Even on state-of-the-art GPT-4)
    • raidisco 3y ago
      https://recurai.com/discord https://recurai.com/discord
    • xigoi 3y ago
      Yeah, if you want to have an inconsistent documentation with lots of subtle and non-subtle errors, using a non-deterministic black box to generate it is a great way to achieve that.
• bbno4 3y ago
  Everytime I read something like this it's almost always because the author does not actually know how to use Discord. There's some nice search features: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-Using-Search https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-U... And on top of this I'd push the Discord to use forum channels if they do not already https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
  • Zak 3y ago
    I know how to use Discord. I admin a couple of servers. I know how to use its search and agree it's a pretty good search. I know how forum channels work. I still think it's a bad substitute for both documentation or a web-searchable forum. I can't use a web search to find results on Discord. I have to log in to a Discord server and use Discord's search so it's a separate set of steps from the web search I initially did when I started trying to solve my problem. Once I grudgingly jump through those hoops, if the server admins and users are actually using forum channels, I might find reasonably structured results, but they often aren't. When I have a technical issue with a software project, I would like proper docs, then a proper forum (Lemmy might be a good option as of summer 2023), in that order. Real-time chat, whether it's Discord, IRC, or Matrix is a distant third.
• zokier 3y ago
  > But if you can't even be bothered to do that, perhaps you shouldn't be releasing a product in the first place? That is simply unreasonable gatekeeping; Discord might not be documentation, but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.
  • kaycebasques 3y ago
    There was a thoughtful comment [1] along your lines in the discussion about Diataxis a couple weeks back. The author basically argued that in early stages of a project, certain types of docs aren't necessary or even that helpful and are therefore not a great use of project collaborator time & energy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611205
    • kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Im sure airbags are similar for prototype cars re: costs. We sill do it though because its common sense.
  • nobody9999 3y ago
    >but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild. No. It's not mandatory to have documentation (or even, gasp, good documentation), but easy access to quality information about functionality and usage significantly enhances the UX. If you're actually charging money for your product, especially if it's a product that isn't strictly for tech folks (e.g., IOT devices, end-user applications, LOB application frameworks, etc.) you better have some decent documentation or you're asking for a world of hurt. With Discord (bots notwithstanding), you need actual, meat-based agents to handle the support channel(s). Providing quality documentation reduces the support load, and over the long term, likely reduces support costs significantly. What's more, making folks jump through hoops to get answers to questions, most of which are about ordinary usage/configuration/dependency/etc. options is not a good look. I'm not rejecting Discord and similar environments as support channels, but we should use the right tool for the right job. As an old guy, I remember the DEC days, and as Ken Olsen put it[0]: One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain. Ed.] Now, Olsen was wrong about Unix/unix-like platforms. But he was right about documentation, especially in a business context. These days, of course, you don't need physical, paper documentation and that's a good thing. Would you rather have to connect to a Discord channel (assuming you know the right one to use), have searches for similar issues return copious useless results, watch your question/issue slide off the page (potentially) with multiple other conversations going on, and wait for someone (who may or may not have a clue) to attempt to answer your question or, open a browser tab, search the indexed documentation and quickly see all the relevant options, capabilities and/or specifications? Now get off my lawn! :) :) [0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/toc_id/1-0-3/s/247 https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/...
• Eumenes 3y ago
  Discord attracts a weirdo community of young people into anime and furry stuff .. Slack, whilst not my favorite, is way more professional and enterprise. Don't understand the developer evangelist stuff moving to Discord. Maybe if you were a gaming company or made some gaming mod, but for a web product/tool, big fail.
  • lightedman 3y ago
    Discord is far, far superior to slack (except in actual product parity between mobile and desktop.)
    • Eumenes 3y ago
      It may be a superior program/app, but its use case was not built with business/enterprise in mind.
      • lightedman 3y ago
        Pretty much if you pay for it you get just about everything Slack could offer.
  • qwytw 3y ago
    Slack requires you pay per account and the free tier is even worse than Discord since every message is deleted after 90 days...
    • Eumenes 3y ago
      You can join Slack channels as a free user ... Devrel teams usually have a budget to manage their communities.
      • qwytw 3y ago
        For paid products/support sure.. obviously not for open source and/or free projects.
• rcme 3y ago
  I used Discord for support at my last company. It was amazing. It takes a while to bootstrap the community, but once you do, it becomes a huge asset. Here are the biggest benefits: 1. Real-time user feedback. Discord is conversational. If someone gives feedback on your product, you can quickly have a conversation about the exact issue they're facing and you can propose solutions to see how they feel. 2. User retention. When users have such immediate access to the product's developers, it makes their opinions feel helpful and useful and drives user retention. 3. User collaboration. Once your community gets big enough, users start to collaborate together. This might be directly in the product (if it's a collaborative product), but can also take the shape of brainstorming improvements and feedback. 4. Community help. Over time, members of your community becomes experts in your product and they help newer users onboard. This frees up a lot of dev time that would have been spent providing support. Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly. How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an efficient means of documentation. We use our community feedback to get a lot of signal about what's missing from our documentation and then update it accordingly. 10 users came in this week asking about feature X? That means we need to update our documentation, etc.
  • isoprophlex 3y ago
    The "its not indexable" used to be a lot less silly but I'm afraid you're entirely right. We have a web that has itself become almost unsearchable (due to SEO spam, google shitting the bed with their search quality in general, everything becoming a walled garden, everyone jacking up API prices/hoarding their data against LLMs) I think that the death of the searchable web in general is to blame, and is driving this shift to Discord. Not so much the individual developers, for them its a net win as you say. We need the "ozempic web": 2023 scale but lighter, indexable, un-walled, with less bullshit filler and attention grabbing monetization. Until that happens, we can hate the players all we want but it's the game itself that is crooked.
  • kaycebasques 3y ago
    There are two key differences between what you're describing and what Terence Eden is describing: 1. You have succeeded at integrating Discord into documentation processes. You get feedback on X and then make sure to update the docs to discuss X. Eden is saying that a lot of projects just answer about X in Discord and then never get around to updating the docs to discuss X. 2. Your team responds to Discord messages promptly. A lot of teams drag their feet or don't respond whatsoever.
• bartwr 3y ago
  As a user of a product, I do not want to be a community of random people and flooded with unproductive discussions. I do not want to be refreshing mostly-synchronous chats and if missing a day, missing important information. I want companies to respect my time and attention.
  • that_guy_iain 3y ago
    Then don't use the chat support. You don't need to use the chat support to be a user of a product.
• ofslidingfeet 3y ago
  Discord overall is antithetical to the web's foundational values and yet another thing where a "moderator" culture has emerged that cannibalizes user interaction
  • davely 3y ago
    I feel like it harkens back to the days of lurking around IRC, chatting with randos about all sorts of stuff. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from it. The main difference is that conversations are persistent and you can (sort of) search them. That said, pretty much every popular modern website is antithetical to the web’s foundational values, with persistent user tracking, monetizing everything, walled gardens, etc. It’s not a Discord exclusive problem.
    • ofslidingfeet 3y ago
      Funny story: I recently received an email from discord threatening my account with suspension because I had simply lurked a server they found to be rule-breaking. I had forgotten about even joining it until I saw the email.
• mepian 3y ago
  Discord's search is astonishingly horrible. Users have been complaining for years about it, and it's not improving. This alone disqualifies it from being useful as documentation.
  • esafak 3y ago
    Because they expect you to lurk all day and chat, not search and get back to work. Engagement (wasting time) tends to be a desirable quality at these kinds of companies.
    • filleduchaos 3y ago
      Why would Discord, a product created for gamers to chat/talk to each other while playing games, prioritize anyone's need to search and get back to work?
      • esafak 3y ago
        Exactly. People need to stop using this thing outside of gaming; it was never made for work.
  • atribecalledqst 3y ago
    I came here to say this. There's so many things wrong with it: 1. If a user left the server, you can no longer specifically search for stuff they posted. 2. Even if a user is still in the server, it can still be hard to search for stuff they posted because Discord search seems to only sometimes know about all the current users. 3. It breaks if you search for something with a lot of hits, and try to go back to the first page (i.e. the earliest hits). For example it's not possible for me to jump to my first message in some servers. 4. Can't search within specific threads 5. Something about how the text search works itself has bothered me in the past, but I can't find a good example of what's wrong with it at the moment.
    • drabiega 3y ago
      Discord's text search isn't exact, which can be a big problem sometimes. For instance, I was in a discord for a game mod recently which had questions asked about the terms 'element' and 'elemental', which were two very different topics. You simply can't narrow your search down to just one of those. Even searching for "elemental" brought up every usage of "element".
• dagmx 3y ago
  There’s four tiers of support channels imho and I think the issue is that people try and push discord as a solution for all four. - documentation is meant to be official and the best effort representation of what a user should know from the perspective of the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine. - forums where support questions come up that may or may not be answered by the documentation. This is still externally searchable which makes it a great secondary form of documentation. - community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it’s more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing issues that have been brought up before. - 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but allows for more sensitive discussion. The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But the lack of search engine integration and low history limits means that it’s really inscrutable to people who are trying to solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community and waste everyone’s time with repeating the same thing again. there’s a place for each of them, and I think too many projects try and treat one as a silver bullet
• mnd999 3y ago
  > In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever Not true, they demand phone numbers, make you fill out captchas and generally try to grab as much identifying data as they can get their hands on. It’s a pretty scummy app all round.
  • RulerOf 3y ago
    > they demand phone numbers It annoys the absolute shit out of me that this has largely become "acceptable" for SaaS products. I don't want to be identified by a phone number, and I don't want to perform a login by proving I can receive a text message. I want a login form that can be completed by a password manager.
    • toaster_fcker 3y ago
      what about the verification proccess then?? some servers are bullshit wanting to be verified by phone number
• n_ary 3y ago
  The irony of this behavior is that, Discord’s own support channel for non-paying users are only e-mails and there are no actual discord channel to report discord issues. Disclaimer: To best of my knowledge. I tried reporting bugs but it was always e-mail with scripted responses(reboot device, reset router, reinstall client, factory reset device).
  • gbear605 3y ago
    They have a Discord server for creating integrations with their API, which is probably the most similar usage.
• spywaregorilla 3y ago
  I've needed discord documentation for unreal engine, several niche plugins, and a few video game mod communities. The experience is way better in my opinion. The hard part of finding information in a new field is formulating the question, not finding the answer. Talking to people who can help you formulate the question is great. Most documentation for things is pretty bad for hard problems. You want some barebones stuff, sure, but most projects have this. The watchy example looks fine to me: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started I'd rather post a question and wait for a reply than waste time trying to find answers on dead forums and bad docs.
• WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  The other part is that many companies consider Discord as being a malware source and thus block it. Great, I have an issue which may be a bug, but you're only supposed to post confirmed bugs. Guess I'll disable VPN. Need to do that anyway to read documentation on SourceForge. 0 accountability in security.
• nativeit 3y ago
  I remember when I was given CorelDraw in the mid/late 1990s and it came with 3 volumes of manuals, several hundred pages of documentation, in rather nice paperback with glossy color pages.
• nazgulsenpai 3y ago
  Somewhat related tangent -- while I have issues with Discord as a platform, I do find it to be a very friction-less way to get a community together easily. But since it has consumed so much of the conversation on the internet, it is quite concerning that centralizing all of this knowledge and culture in one, closed, proprietary space will inevitable lead to that Reddit moment when unpopular moves are made from the underlying business and everyone suddenly realizes they fucked up. It was especially strange seeing Reddit subs during/after the blackout funneling users into Discord communities.
• brianjking 3y ago
  I'm just into this epaper watch this blogger writes about. Anyone have any experience with them?
• willsmith72 3y ago
  I feel this. Lately I'm using Remix as my web framework, but most of the discussions and issues are had on discord. This means they're not searchable via Google, and even in discord, the search completely sucks. There's so much good info which is really hard to access.
• 034jtoa3j94r5 3y ago
  Also, Slack is not documentation, for all of the same reasons. I'm working with my company now to improve documentation across the organization. We're an old startup (takes a very long time to get to market) and in the past quarter I've led two projects where I've spent weeks trying to answer questions about old code, sometimes finding that the original author is no longer at the company and no documentation exists or the original is still at the company but literally doesn't remember writing the code and no documentation exists. And each time people tell me there are Slack conversations explaining everything ... somewhere. No. Every project, every application needs a design doc before and a user's manual after and they actually need to get maintained.
• danpalmer 3y ago
  Chat is not documentation. So I hit a blocker, how can I solve this problem? I do a cursory look over the implementation to see if I can figure it out, but it's an unfamiliar codebase. So I check the docs and there's nothing except a "join the Discord community" link. So I open Discord, install updates, do the custom email-based 2FA dance, agree to the changed T&Cs, dismiss a Nitro banner, agree to the server rules, and join #general. I write up my question with all the context I can and post it. No reply. So I crack out the debugger and step through the library/framework/etc one line at a time figuring out what's going on. I set up my own editable copy so I can add logging and try some fixes, eventually after a few hours I find that X just doesn't support Y, or that I have to pass in the value encoded in Base 47 or Latin 1. Three days later at 1am I get a dismissive response on Discord telling me to refer to a conversation that happened 2 weeks previous to me signing up. Chat massively shifts the burden on to users both in terms of figuring stuff out themselves, and in terms of providing support to each other. It's no substitute for documentation, particularly in the world of asynchronous working. We think it's good for async working because you can reply asynchronously, but it's not because you can't unblock asynchronously. In ~8 years of working with Django (split over the last 12 years), I think the only time I used a debugger on Django code was when I found a security vulnerability and needed to be certain of some very low level details. In ~5 days (over a month) of a hobby project with a project that encourages Discord for documentation I've had to use the debugger 3 times to figure out what's going on.
• thealienthing 3y ago
  This post says everything I’ve been feeling. Ive been doing a lot of work with the Dronecan/UAVCAN protocol and nearly all their documentation is relegated to a Discord channel with no discussions about problems I’ve been trying to solve. A LOT of people have asked the same questions I’ve been asking and not one person has responded. Probably because their questions are ignore for a short time by busy people and then the questions are buried in a deluge of other questions from users. No doubt people have solved the same problems I’ve been coping with but have neglected to post what they’ve learned because discord does not allow you to make focused threads on a very specific topic without the content being buried. I’m getting more frustrated that projects are ditching the tried and true old school forums of yore where conversation can be focused and easily found.
• fsniper 3y ago
  Discord, or any IRC analogue for that matter used as documentation is same as saying, "hey look we have a cantine in our head quarters, if you have any questions pop and ask on a table thats designated for that purpose. And this way you will reach all our users that have similar issues!" A modern day direct democracy assembly.
• d-cc 3y ago
  With chatgpt you can have the documentation write itself. Far superior to nothing for sure.
  • interjectionne 3y ago
    [flagged]
• dbg31415 3y ago
  Discord is good for real-time chatting -- both text and voice. It's pretty horrible for finding old conversations, unless you know exactly what you're looking for (and even then there's a lot of manual sifting). I mostly love Discord. It's better than Teams, better than Slack... but it's not a replacement for a well-curated Wiki, or even a Reddit thread that I can find via Google search.
• juliangmp 3y ago
  Discord and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race. Or the internet at least.
• cabalamat 3y ago
  In terms of the 4-document model, I find a lot of software systems (libraries and frameworks), while they are good at providing tutorials and an API reference, they are a lot poorer at providing an Explanation. What I want to know when learning a new software system are what are the main classes/concepts in it and how they relate to each other.
• okwubodu 3y ago
  Discord is the most prevalent and lowest friction communication app for the highest portion of the relevant audience, and will only become more so with every new (younger) developer cohort. The average 16-34ish year-old probably-male developer that owns a PC with a discrete GPU almost certainly already has Discord installed, and does not perceive any undue burden from being "forced" to use an app they already use regularly, for better or worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327674/discord-user-age-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327674/discord-user-age... In my opinion, the best solution is Discord getting ahead of this and letting admins make in-server threads visible to the clearnet.
• dontupvoteme 3y ago
  A ~50 german colleague of mine asked me recently what the hell Discord was and I couldn't come up with a good explanation for him that wasn't >"uhh It's IRC but with pictures and far worse." Next time I am simply going to answer that it's an NSA longrun project. Because that even if it isn't, it probably will be.
• ouraf 3y ago
  Isn't discord attachment security really lax? In a "anyone with an image or file link can download it regardless of connection to the server or role" level of lax? You'd need to be really bold or poorly advised to consider that role
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Counterpoint: Discord has awesome search features, and joining is painless. Everyone already knows that Discord is the new way to communicate with a business, so everyone knows that the best way to get answers is to (1) Join the official discord (2) Use the search to see if someone has asked a similar thing before (3) If not, ask and people will answer helpfully.
• hammeringnails 3y ago
  I'm perplexed about the wider community's strange enthusiasm for Discord. As another user noted, fundamentally it's IRC with multimedia. Why are people promoting it so enthusiastically? Even if we accept the very controversial idea of 'Get Support On Discord!', the actual product itself is nothing special. It's only a marginal improvement over other similar products we already had. All of this is leaving aside very real concerns about how user data may be used in the future.
  • bloopernova 3y ago
    It's IRC with multimedia that someone else manages but you control who can use it. And a lot of people who use it have never used IRC. And it has an app that has the same name as the service. That makes it a whole thing, like Instagram or TikTok. It's really eye opening to see the number of people who never considered that reddit the app is a separate thing to reddit the service/site. The wider IT community is still very much a small niche. We often forget that.
  • holler 3y ago
    > the actual product itself is nothing special. I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).
    • tiffanyh 3y ago
      Chat is about the only thing Slack does ok. Video & voice on slack is pretty bad.
      • holler 3y ago
        Yeah, that was the essence of how it became popular to begin with. It was the first time I'd ever seen an irc experience for the masses, thanks to browser tech improving. I've always thought their video conferencing was better than Google, but eventually zoom just took over. Never tried voice and felt like that was just tacked on because it became trendy due to Clubhouse etc.
• LrnByTeach 3y ago
  In my opinion LLM based document search tools such as OSS Quivr may be better suited for documentation search for startups. A highly customed Quivr with one of the 'Open Source LLMs' may provides great 'semantic search' for product documentation. https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr Dump all your files and chat with it using your Generative AI Second Brain using LLMs ( GPT 3.5/4, Private, Anthropic, VertexAI ) & Embeddings
• black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
• matt_j 3y ago
  Gen-Z grew up in a world where the old, searchable internet was already dysfunctional and overrun with siloed apps. I think most of them don't know what they're missing. It's no big deal to do documentation in Discord for them, and I can even see a few pros (comments, chat, pins, multimedia, likes/emojis). At the very least, the format aligns with things that are already ingrained in their minds. Personally, all of that can go to hell, just give me documentation generated from source on a static site and get out of my way.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  Discord should be a last resort when documentation fails. People should be able to RTFM, and if they’ve come to Discord that means that either 1) they didn’t RTFM or 2) the answer isn’t in TFM or 3) the answer isn’t clear from TFM in which case your writing needs to be clearer. So when people are asking questions in your Discord, you should loop that answer back into your documentation.
• cainxinth 3y ago
  I signed up for Midjourney recently. Not for work, just to test it out. It is indeed amazing and clearly the best image transformer right now. But I find it terribly annoying that it’s only accessible on Discord. So much unnecessary scrolling and interface visual overload.
• nickgo 3y ago
  (Plug) This is one of the core issues we look to solve at Inkeep (inkeep.com). Especially for technical products, knowledge is not just in Discord or docs, it's also GitHub issues, StackOverflow, forums and more. At Inkeep, we ingest all of that content from all these different sources and use LLMs to power both search and chat. The goal is that you as a user can quickly find answers to your questions regardless of where that answer may happen to live. By focusing on one product at a time, we can create higher quality search and chat than a generic search engine like Google or ChatGPT with Bing. We're now powering AI search and chat for over 100+ companies. If you're a product owner and want to see it live for your content, give us a ping at hi@inkeep.com. If you're a developer and would like this for a product you use often, let us know here: https://inkeep.typeform.com/pleaseIndex https://inkeep.typeform.com/pleaseIndex. We'll create a chatbot you can use for free.
• stefek99 3y ago
  Search function? I always use search... Much faster than trying to put stuff in docs.