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Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever

by anthk 3y ago

Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Period.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
Channels and servers are different things, and both terms are used for discord. A channel is just a single text or voice space where discussions can happen. Many projects will have multiple channels each specialized to a single topic. The whole collection of these is called a "server". The docs also use the term "guild" for the same concept, as the API docs explain [0]. [0] https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
- xigoi 3y ago
  Doesn't change the point that a Discord “server” is not a server.
  - trolan 3y ago
    > a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network. I think by definition you're wrong. By layman's terms you're wrong too. A server serves things, either content, chat text or your meal. Discord servers serve a collection of text channels located on a centralized resource. Now, for the real lesson: take yourself and everyone else less seriously.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      A Discord “server” is neither a computer nor a computer program. All “servers” are serviced by a single program distributed across many actual servers, presumably without any direct mapping.
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        From what Discord employees have previously said, a guild server is a single Erlang process that's usually fixed to a single host. Voice is handled separately, but again by a single process assigned to that guild server.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. Calling the process that handles communication between users a "server" was already common practice back when IRC was standardized in 1993 (where discord gets the term from). It even appears in the original jargon file, so that definition was common long before even that.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      Yes, I don't disagree with this definition. But a Discord “server” is not analogous to an IRC server.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        An IRC server has a collection of channels. A discord server has a collection of channels. It is simple as that. IRC servers don't refer to a single physical server either since IRC servers supported federation allowing multiple servers to act as a single server. There is no need to be so strict on the definition of server considering how loose its usage was already with IRC.
        saurik 3y ago
        No: an IRC network is a collection of channels. A network is then made up of numerous servers. In IRC parlance a server always in fact did explicitly mean a specific individual server and I would be shocked if you found anyone who hadn't used IRC for more than even a day or so that tried to call, say, EfNet a "server".
        akkartik 3y ago
        <moleman>I call EfNet a server.</moleman>
        akkartik 3y ago
        In fact I see this block in my .irssi/config: servers = ( ... { address = "irc.efnet.net"; chatnet = "EFNet"; port = "6667"; }, ... );
  - jhgg 3y ago
    They're called servers because we wanted to pick words that were familiar to what we were originally competing against, which was team-speak/ventrilo/mumble servers. Picking words people are familiar with in order to convey a concept is a generally smart thing to do. A discord server was meant to be analogous to a ventrilo server. Calling them servers made that idea clear to our users, which helped users understand our product and what purpose a server served. I would say that the term has served its purpose well. Internally we call them guilds, because having a "server server" is a bit ridiculous.
handwarmers 3y ago
The future is now, old man.
- anthk 3y ago
  That's not the future. That's old software using 20x more resources than usual.
  - philippejara 3y ago
    We may not like the "future", but old software using 20x more resources than usual has been the future for a while, just look at electron apps the growing trend of home computers becoming thin clients over webapps and cloud computing. I despise this trend as much as the anyone else, but I can't see how it isn't the future we are heading towards.
    - throwaway675309 3y ago
      It has always been this way. How many people who grew up on text terminals, and despised GUI-based utilities that are essentially just thin graphical wrappers on top of a CLI tool at 20x the size? This argument gets repeated by every generation ad nauseam, even though they're oblivious to the fact that it keeps reoccurring. Everyone loves drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.
      - anthk 3y ago
        GUIs are a step over CLI's. What does Discord improve over Kopete by using 20x more resources except for the video resolution? Also, it should run far snappier if the improvement was just a video resolution improvement and a new codec often accelerated by the GPU such as h264. But it doesn't.
- interjectionne 3y ago
  [flagged]
tredre3 3y ago
> it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.
yard2010 3y ago
Still better by 2 orders of magnitude than Slack. Slack is shit and it's evil.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Slack is indeed terrible but it doesn’t resolve Discord of it’s shortcomings as a forum
- rchaud 3y ago
  In a few years' time, Discord will start adding in Jira integrations, just you watch.
dotnet00 3y ago
I like that Millenials have finally gotten old enough to forget their own experience and repeat the age old tradition of blaming everything wrong in the world on the next generation.
wccrawford 3y ago
Discord themselves call them "servers". If you want to change public opinion, you'll need to start at the source. I just double checked to be sure, and yup, that button at the left says "Add a Server".
trolan 3y ago
Help me with my education. I'm just a lowly 4th year SWE major and we haven't covered definitions of servers yet. Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to provide services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is running in its own container for you to consider it a server? It serves things.
lucb1e 3y ago
I use 'community' because, as someone else mentioned, 'channel' is already in use as a word and an invite-only collection of chat rooms where you can often create a custom profile I think can be called a community. Server is indeed misleading and inaccurate, though I do fear we lost another war: hacker now means cracker, cloud now means foreign server, crypto now means cryptocurrency, ping used to mean Blackberry Messenger, you name it; these things come and either stay or go again... it might be more confusing to use another term for it (I try to introduce community where possible, but the opportunities are rare) because people have to (be able to) figure out from context what you're talking about.
0xFFOOFF 3y ago
[dead]
interjectionne 3y ago
[flagged]

by anthk 3y ago

Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Period.

AlotOfReading 3y ago

Channels and servers are different things, and both terms are used for discord. A channel is just a single text or voice space where discussions can happen. Many projects will have multiple channels each specialized to a single topic. The whole collection of these is called a "server". The docs also use the term "guild" for the same concept, as the API docs explain [0]. [0] https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

xigoi 3y ago
Doesn't change the point that a Discord “server” is not a server.
- trolan 3y ago
  > a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network. I think by definition you're wrong. By layman's terms you're wrong too. A server serves things, either content, chat text or your meal. Discord servers serve a collection of text channels located on a centralized resource. Now, for the real lesson: take yourself and everyone else less seriously.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    A Discord “server” is neither a computer nor a computer program. All “servers” are serviced by a single program distributed across many actual servers, presumably without any direct mapping.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      From what Discord employees have previously said, a guild server is a single Erlang process that's usually fixed to a single host. Voice is handled separately, but again by a single process assigned to that guild server.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. Calling the process that handles communication between users a "server" was already common practice back when IRC was standardized in 1993 (where discord gets the term from). It even appears in the original jargon file, so that definition was common long before even that.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Yes, I don't disagree with this definition. But a Discord “server” is not analogous to an IRC server.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      An IRC server has a collection of channels. A discord server has a collection of channels. It is simple as that. IRC servers don't refer to a single physical server either since IRC servers supported federation allowing multiple servers to act as a single server. There is no need to be so strict on the definition of server considering how loose its usage was already with IRC.
      - saurik 3y ago
        No: an IRC network is a collection of channels. A network is then made up of numerous servers. In IRC parlance a server always in fact did explicitly mean a specific individual server and I would be shocked if you found anyone who hadn't used IRC for more than even a day or so that tried to call, say, EfNet a "server".
        akkartik 3y ago
        <moleman>I call EfNet a server.</moleman>
        akkartik 3y ago
        In fact I see this block in my .irssi/config: servers = ( ... { address = "irc.efnet.net"; chatnet = "EFNet"; port = "6667"; }, ... );
- jhgg 3y ago
  They're called servers because we wanted to pick words that were familiar to what we were originally competing against, which was team-speak/ventrilo/mumble servers. Picking words people are familiar with in order to convey a concept is a generally smart thing to do. A discord server was meant to be analogous to a ventrilo server. Calling them servers made that idea clear to our users, which helped users understand our product and what purpose a server served. I would say that the term has served its purpose well. Internally we call them guilds, because having a "server server" is a bit ridiculous.

handwarmers 3y ago

The future is now, old man.

anthk 3y ago
That's not the future. That's old software using 20x more resources than usual.
- philippejara 3y ago
  We may not like the "future", but old software using 20x more resources than usual has been the future for a while, just look at electron apps the growing trend of home computers becoming thin clients over webapps and cloud computing. I despise this trend as much as the anyone else, but I can't see how it isn't the future we are heading towards.
  - throwaway675309 3y ago
    It has always been this way. How many people who grew up on text terminals, and despised GUI-based utilities that are essentially just thin graphical wrappers on top of a CLI tool at 20x the size? This argument gets repeated by every generation ad nauseam, even though they're oblivious to the fact that it keeps reoccurring. Everyone loves drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.
    - anthk 3y ago
      GUIs are a step over CLI's. What does Discord improve over Kopete by using 20x more resources except for the video resolution? Also, it should run far snappier if the improvement was just a video resolution improvement and a new codec often accelerated by the GPU such as h264. But it doesn't.
interjectionne 3y ago
[flagged]

tredre3 3y ago

> it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.

yard2010 3y ago

Still better by 2 orders of magnitude than Slack. Slack is shit and it's evil.

asynchronous 3y ago
Slack is indeed terrible but it doesn’t resolve Discord of it’s shortcomings as a forum
rchaud 3y ago
In a few years' time, Discord will start adding in Jira integrations, just you watch.

dotnet00 3y ago

I like that Millenials have finally gotten old enough to forget their own experience and repeat the age old tradition of blaming everything wrong in the world on the next generation.

wccrawford 3y ago

Discord themselves call them "servers". If you want to change public opinion, you'll need to start at the source. I just double checked to be sure, and yup, that button at the left says "Add a Server".

trolan 3y ago

Help me with my education. I'm just a lowly 4th year SWE major and we haven't covered definitions of servers yet. Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to provide services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is running in its own container for you to consider it a server? It serves things.

lucb1e 3y ago

I use 'community' because, as someone else mentioned, 'channel' is already in use as a word and an invite-only collection of chat rooms where you can often create a custom profile I think can be called a community. Server is indeed misleading and inaccurate, though I do fear we lost another war: hacker now means cracker, cloud now means foreign server, crypto now means cryptocurrency, ping used to mean Blackberry Messenger, you name it; these things come and either stay or go again... it might be more confusing to use another term for it (I try to introduce community where possible, but the opportunities are rare) because people have to (be able to) figure out from context what you're talking about.

0xFFOOFF 3y ago

[dead]

interjectionne 3y ago

[flagged]