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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

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...

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

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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
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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...