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Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. Discord's logging is shitty because: 1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned

Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. Discord's logging is shitty because: 1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever. 2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord. 3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious. 4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc.. Discord's search is painful because: 1 - There's no regex search. 2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above). 3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once. I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable. My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them. No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved. But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.

imtringued 3y ago
I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months. Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.
- roenxi 3y ago
  This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are comfortable with that lack. But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.
  - op00to 3y ago
    I worked in a global team. When I got booted off VPN I would have my irc connection drop and I would miss critical conversations. IRC sucks for collaboration.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      You could just use an IRC bouncer. But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities of your typical user, and not something most users even know exists. This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a functional deficiency.
      - redserk 3y ago
        I couldn’t imagine joining a workplace only to be told that I had to maintain a service to participate in essential communication channels.
        j45 3y ago
        Exchange servers anyone?
        taejo 3y ago
        If my workplace made every employee run an Exchange server rather than IT running one for everyone, I'd leave
op00to 3y ago
IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return. Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.
- j45 3y ago
  It’s just a bot to run on IRC to log away
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    That's also true of Discord though to be fair
    - j45 3y ago
      Totally fair. The concept of bots though comes from somewhere. Irc I think.
- salawat 3y ago
  ...Don't do shit worth getting sued over?
  - Zetice 3y ago
    Anyone can sue for anything, asking to not do things that create lawsuits is asking not to operate a business in the US.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    I worked for a company who interviewed someone who turned out to be a habitual scammer. He somehow managed to know enough technical information to get past a phone screen, and in the in-person interview claimed to be the second coming of Christ. When he didn't get hired, he sued for religious discrimination. Fortunately, all communications with and about him were entirely professional and didn't include a reference to his claim, so (iirc) the case was tossed in short order. That being said, you don't need to do anything to get sued- you just need to have something worth suing for.
1337biz 3y ago
I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats. The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but overall I would value the benefit of everything getting deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually search for something older than that.
- op00to 3y ago
  My company uses chats as information stores. Not saying it’s the best idea, but you are an outlier with your preference.
  - j45 3y ago
    It’s just a bit to save a history then to your favourite search
  - Zetice 3y ago
    More like your company is in the minority; most orgs recognize the problem with that idea…
    - redserk 3y ago
      While this would be arguing an anecdote with an anecdote, I completely disagree "most orgs" have executed information management well. A number of places use email as their effective information store. Good luck finding content once everyone in the relevant chains have departed.
      - Zetice 3y ago
        I also agree most orgs don’t execute information management well. Knowing chat isn’t a good place for that doesn’t mean they know anything else!
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    Do employee’s store stuff in the “recycle bin”/“trash”? And get upset when IT empties it when the disc is full? Yes this is a real thing.
Renaud 3y ago
>But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die. I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface. Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be. That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open. History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach. And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring. I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc). Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc). But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?
- sjcobb 3y ago
  Does the Matrix ecosystem fit this use case?https://github.com/matrix-org https://github.com/matrix-org One project I’m working on uses it instead of Slack and the Element client specifically is pretty good and constantly adding new features
- mburns 3y ago
  Linen might be a good fit. https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Why not PHPBB? Not discourse, the UI is still endless scrolling based and obnoxious. Using chat as a forum is... Just not a great idea. It seems most remember a strong sense of community on forums. We talked about actual interests and learned things and it was great, and stuff didn't get buried or too disorganized , nor did it feel like any kind of time pressure thing where you had to be on at the right time... Why not just... Do that? It was amazing.
redserk 3y ago
Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with. Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow. For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Not to mention with netsplits a canonical history may not even exist.
- TkTech 3y ago
  I've just started adding logs to notifico (ex: https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28 https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28), which is very barebones. Don't get much time to work on it, but I'm working on implementing search in a cost-effective manner. If the ~3000 IRC channels that use Notifico opt-in to logging they'll get it for free permanently, and I'll be offering nightly dumps to an SFTP server of your choice to make sure there's no lock-in. You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku, Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC network discourage logging, and many communities are outright hostile to it. Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed. Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've already been making changes to make it more difficult to log or export your data.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    Is there a list of channels that notifico logs? Also your calendar widget links to dates with no logs.
password4321 3y ago
In case anyone is not aware, you can download Discord logs. https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But beware -- it can result in account termination! https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-Automated-user-accounts-self-bots- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-A...
- judge2020 3y ago
  If you have permission, nobody has been suspended for using a dedicated discord bot (one where you must be an admin to invite to a server) to run this Discord Chat Exporter, at least based on the GitHub issues/discussions of that repo.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    The problem isn’t no one has - it’s that the could be. I can not possibly understand why anyone considers discord to be anything but a company with absolute control of a product.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      I don't think anyone believe otherwise. People still choose it because the feature set it provides addresses their needs and makes online chat, voice, and live streaming to friends a wonderful experience. For 99.9% of users, they don't need to worry about Discord terminating their account or their friends' account. If Discord somehow fumbles this by randomly suspending peoples' accounts for no reason whatsoever, and on such a wide scale that everyone will know a friend affected by this, they'll quickly lose marketshare.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        People still use Google, despite numerous horror stories of unexplained account suspensions without any possibility to appeal.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
kmfrk 3y ago
The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work environment.
- eropple 3y ago
  I don't think any Discord server I'm in expects people to pay particular attention to the history of the server--the affordances are for chatting, not working. They've done some pivoting to add work-responsive features, but it's a WoW guild chat room at its heart.
- judge2020 3y ago
  They added threads recently (within the last 2 years), so your server can emphasise using threads when appropriate, but the channels are much more focused on IRC-style message chat, not thread-based siloed conversations.
nologic01 3y ago
> Discord's client is also visually pleasing Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
mylons 3y ago
"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever surfaced and your anonymity were compromised. people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
Zetice 3y ago
Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord. I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.
- eropple 3y ago
  You're right, this is a solved problem. On the other hand, mobile access on IRC not being unpleasant isn't and won't be, though, so the search for something better for users will continue. (To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-good. The search continues.)
  - Zetice 3y ago
    IRC isn’t an app, it’s a protocol. If you don’t like IRC clients as they exist, write or fund one of your own.
    - eropple 3y ago
      I am well aware it isn't "an app". I was using IRC in about 1997 and stopped in about 2017 because other options that were better suited to my needs, and had the people I wanted to talk to, arose. The second part of your response isn't helping you move towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I have things that work for me already? Like, this is the Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X. You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you like when the thing I use already works? Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something new in seeing https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it later! Contrast that to "do it yourself".
gonehome 3y ago
Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.
Dylan16807 3y ago
Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded. It's also very bad at URLs. And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.
jstummbillig 3y ago
> Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that will often work.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
I think everything discord does is still outright better. I was an IRC yser for a long time and I still have a znc server out there running, but: Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations between znc and and the chat client. All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for information.
Mouthfeel 3y ago
[dead]
eternityforest 3y ago
Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter.... As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter. People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat. If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI. Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect. If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.

imtringued 3y ago

I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months. Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.

roenxi 3y ago
This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are comfortable with that lack. But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.
- op00to 3y ago
  I worked in a global team. When I got booted off VPN I would have my irc connection drop and I would miss critical conversations. IRC sucks for collaboration.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    You could just use an IRC bouncer. But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities of your typical user, and not something most users even know exists. This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a functional deficiency.
    - redserk 3y ago
      I couldn’t imagine joining a workplace only to be told that I had to maintain a service to participate in essential communication channels.
      - j45 3y ago
        Exchange servers anyone?
        taejo 3y ago
        If my workplace made every employee run an Exchange server rather than IT running one for everyone, I'd leave

op00to 3y ago

IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return. Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.

j45 3y ago
It’s just a bot to run on IRC to log away
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  That's also true of Discord though to be fair
  - j45 3y ago
    Totally fair. The concept of bots though comes from somewhere. Irc I think.
salawat 3y ago
...Don't do shit worth getting sued over?
- Zetice 3y ago
  Anyone can sue for anything, asking to not do things that create lawsuits is asking not to operate a business in the US.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  I worked for a company who interviewed someone who turned out to be a habitual scammer. He somehow managed to know enough technical information to get past a phone screen, and in the in-person interview claimed to be the second coming of Christ. When he didn't get hired, he sued for religious discrimination. Fortunately, all communications with and about him were entirely professional and didn't include a reference to his claim, so (iirc) the case was tossed in short order. That being said, you don't need to do anything to get sued- you just need to have something worth suing for.

1337biz 3y ago

I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats. The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but overall I would value the benefit of everything getting deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually search for something older than that.

op00to 3y ago
My company uses chats as information stores. Not saying it’s the best idea, but you are an outlier with your preference.
- j45 3y ago
  It’s just a bit to save a history then to your favourite search
- Zetice 3y ago
  More like your company is in the minority; most orgs recognize the problem with that idea…
  - redserk 3y ago
    While this would be arguing an anecdote with an anecdote, I completely disagree "most orgs" have executed information management well. A number of places use email as their effective information store. Good luck finding content once everyone in the relevant chains have departed.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      I also agree most orgs don’t execute information management well. Knowing chat isn’t a good place for that doesn’t mean they know anything else!
- ehutch79 3y ago
  Do employee’s store stuff in the “recycle bin”/“trash”? And get upset when IT empties it when the disc is full? Yes this is a real thing.

Renaud 3y ago

>But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die. I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface. Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be. That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open. History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach. And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring. I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc). Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc). But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?

sjcobb 3y ago
Does the Matrix ecosystem fit this use case?https://github.com/matrix-org https://github.com/matrix-org One project I’m working on uses it instead of Slack and the Element client specifically is pretty good and constantly adding new features
mburns 3y ago
Linen might be a good fit. https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908
eternityforest 3y ago
Why not PHPBB? Not discourse, the UI is still endless scrolling based and obnoxious. Using chat as a forum is... Just not a great idea. It seems most remember a strong sense of community on forums. We talked about actual interests and learned things and it was great, and stuff didn't get buried or too disorganized , nor did it feel like any kind of time pressure thing where you had to be on at the right time... Why not just... Do that? It was amazing.

redserk 3y ago

Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with. Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow. For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.

TylerE 3y ago
Not to mention with netsplits a canonical history may not even exist.
TkTech 3y ago
I've just started adding logs to notifico (ex: https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28 https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28), which is very barebones. Don't get much time to work on it, but I'm working on implementing search in a cost-effective manner. If the ~3000 IRC channels that use Notifico opt-in to logging they'll get it for free permanently, and I'll be offering nightly dumps to an SFTP server of your choice to make sure there's no lock-in. You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku, Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC network discourage logging, and many communities are outright hostile to it. Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed. Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've already been making changes to make it more difficult to log or export your data.
- pabs3 3y ago
  Is there a list of channels that notifico logs? Also your calendar widget links to dates with no logs.

password4321 3y ago

In case anyone is not aware, you can download Discord logs. https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But beware -- it can result in account termination! https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-Automated-user-accounts-self-bots- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-A...

judge2020 3y ago
If you have permission, nobody has been suspended for using a dedicated discord bot (one where you must be an admin to invite to a server) to run this Discord Chat Exporter, at least based on the GitHub issues/discussions of that repo.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  The problem isn’t no one has - it’s that the could be. I can not possibly understand why anyone considers discord to be anything but a company with absolute control of a product.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    I don't think anyone believe otherwise. People still choose it because the feature set it provides addresses their needs and makes online chat, voice, and live streaming to friends a wonderful experience. For 99.9% of users, they don't need to worry about Discord terminating their account or their friends' account. If Discord somehow fumbles this by randomly suspending peoples' accounts for no reason whatsoever, and on such a wide scale that everyone will know a friend affected by this, they'll quickly lose marketshare.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      People still use Google, despite numerous horror stories of unexplained account suspensions without any possibility to appeal.
  - Karunamon 3y ago

kmfrk 3y ago

The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work environment.

eropple 3y ago
I don't think any Discord server I'm in expects people to pay particular attention to the history of the server--the affordances are for chatting, not working. They've done some pivoting to add work-responsive features, but it's a WoW guild chat room at its heart.
judge2020 3y ago
They added threads recently (within the last 2 years), so your server can emphasise using threads when appropriate, but the channels are much more focused on IRC-style message chat, not thread-based siloed conversations.

nologic01 3y ago

> Discord's client is also visually pleasing Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.

mylons 3y ago

"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever surfaced and your anonymity were compromised. people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?

Zetice 3y ago

Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord. I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.

eropple 3y ago
You're right, this is a solved problem. On the other hand, mobile access on IRC not being unpleasant isn't and won't be, though, so the search for something better for users will continue. (To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-good. The search continues.)
- Zetice 3y ago
  IRC isn’t an app, it’s a protocol. If you don’t like IRC clients as they exist, write or fund one of your own.
  - eropple 3y ago
    I am well aware it isn't "an app". I was using IRC in about 1997 and stopped in about 2017 because other options that were better suited to my needs, and had the people I wanted to talk to, arose. The second part of your response isn't helping you move towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I have things that work for me already? Like, this is the Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X. You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you like when the thing I use already works? Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something new in seeing https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it later! Contrast that to "do it yourself".

gonehome 3y ago

Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.

Dylan16807 3y ago

Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded. It's also very bad at URLs. And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.

jstummbillig 3y ago

> Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that will often work.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

I think everything discord does is still outright better. I was an IRC yser for a long time and I still have a znc server out there running, but: Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations between znc and and the chat client. All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for information.

Mouthfeel 3y ago

[dead]

eternityforest 3y ago

Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter.... As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter. People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat. If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI. Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect. If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.