22 ms·

Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

523 points by kraktoos 3y ago

sysadm1n 3y ago
Roll your own, like early and industrious folks in the 2000s did with PhpBB or Invision, or vBulletin if you had the money to fork out for VB.
- nvy 3y ago
  I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool. I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc. Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    I was going to ask how he handles account creation fatigue, but then saw you'd specified single user.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    I ran phpBB for a while just for myself, partly out of nostalgia for the online forum days. I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it. However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy. After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now. Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  phpBB all the way. It gets the job done, and just about every host supports PHP.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    How are shared hosts at all relevant these days? For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS that you can install anything on.
    - codingdave 3y ago
      Because if you go that route then you are saddled with a full linux VPS that you must install things on. For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      They're relevant for low-load stuff like a forum. I don't want that on my production server, nor do I want to maintain a second server just for it.
    - JuanPosadas 3y ago
      > For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS For a few dollars a year you get a shared host.
- cloudking 3y ago
  https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ is a nice modern alternative, also free.
  - NetOpWibby 3y ago
    I haven't seen Flarum in years, looks beautiful.
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  AsmBB[0] if you feel bold! -- [0]: https://board.asm32.info/ https://board.asm32.info/
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  Yeah, nothing like finding some old dusty phpBB that has been completely over run with bots spamming NSFW stuff. 5/5 much better than Discord. Very industrious.
glaucon 3y ago
I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects". [1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing https://www.discourse.org/pricing
- postpawl 3y ago
  Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
  - langsoul-com 3y ago
    Nobody wants to do that self hosting for a Q&A forum for a side project. Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition
    - xigoi 3y ago
      Discord is not free, just “free”.
    - MaKey 3y ago
      I'd rather self-host a forum.
    - herbst 3y ago
      Discord is slow, weird to setup and a walled garden with zero control about anything. Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of. At least in my POV
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        Sounds like your POV doesn't contain many people!
  - 3y ago
SubGenius 3y ago
I'm building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0] [0] - https://shpong.com/shpong https://shpong.com/shpong
- MitPitt 3y ago
  Looks very neat, how feature complete is it?
  - SubGenius 3y ago
    Not a whole lot, but getting there. For now, we have: - matrix spaces not hidden behind auth - indexed by search engines - chat channels - subreddit like posts with nested replies, voting etc - private invite-only spaces Hoping to get voice/audio working soon, along with encrypted DMs. Experimenting with activitypub integration too.
nonethewiser 3y ago
So long as we don’t lose sight of its utility as a chat app. I like that projects have that sort of communication channel.
- tilne 3y ago
  Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.
  - bredren 3y ago
    I suspect people are using it partly to deliver a more regular and visible heartbeat. Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues. GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison. Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message. Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion. As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  I'm in a few FOSS chats, and I tend to find there's a lot of people who a) need an answer right now and b) need relevant information pried out of them with a crowbar. And then they'll DM you if you look helpful. I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.
puffyblogger 3y ago
[flagged]
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity's sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.
jhatemyjob 3y ago
Terrible post. 1. This is what the "Ban" feature is for. 2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience. 3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved. 4. See 3.
- DarkmSparks 3y ago
  plus the main advantage of discord is you can easily knock up a free Q&A bot that answers all the questions people ask because they didnt rtfm or search the forums.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  > This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved. I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in. Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
  - MitPitt 3y ago
    What are you talking about? You can't write a custom client and the official one is closed source. Scraping chat history is also against the TOS and get get you blocked.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      That’s even better. Why would anyone post on a forum when learning the minutiae of the Discord API and its strict TOS conditions in order to implement functionality that’s broken in the client while avoiding getting banned is an option? It’s a dead simple solution!
  - herbst 3y ago
    That's kinda funny. I assume when discord wouldn't have banned all the wonderful lightweight alternative clients that existed they would only get a small portion of the hate today
Operyl 3y ago
I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there” In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings. For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
  - Operyl 3y ago
    So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.
    - eddythompson80 3y ago
      Sure, like IRC but with a better interface,
      - TylerE 3y ago
        And no netsplits/nickserv insanity.
        Operyl 3y ago
        Or people purchasing a holding company and proceeding to take over the entire volunteer ran network a few years later. :)
Redoubts 3y ago
Yeah, you should probably use ponder https://we.phorge.it/ponder/ https://we.phorge.it/ponder/
PaulHoule 3y ago
One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy)
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  It's like that on a FOSS project Slack I'm on. He's not the most... ...personable person, and tbh I think it's a control thing.
  - World177 3y ago
    I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it? At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business. I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      It's only a problem because he can be an asshole sometimes, and he very nearly always gets in first, (I swear he never sleeps), so yeah, sometimes not a great intro to a community that does exist, honest, not that you'd know from the Slack threads. To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
      - manfre 3y ago
        The discord should clearly state the community standards, including some variant of "don't be an asshole". Most importantly, the standards must be enforced. These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid. Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.
spankalee 3y ago
This article (and the comments here so far) don't mention Discord Forum Channels which solves the two actual usability/discoverability concerns listed Forum Channels FAQ: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better. * The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages * Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads * Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity * There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags * There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results * Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies. I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.
- sha-3 3y ago
  But is it indexed by search engines?
- croes 3y ago
  I can read forums without joining anything. That's not possible with Discord.
- tacocataco 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure this feature is in beta and only available to bigger communities at the moment.
mooreds 3y ago
I wrote about this a while ago for Slack/forums: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 but the points still hold. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ https://nodebb.org/ Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $). Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ https://nodebb.org/ TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked. Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
  - omgmajk 3y ago
    > Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one). I've never seen this forum before but this I never expected it to be This bad. Is this some kind of mobile only design paradigm?
TylerE 3y ago
Must we beat this dead horse, AGAIN!?
- tacocataco 3y ago
  The horse will be whipped until somebody invents the automobile.
phowat 3y ago
Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.
- sethammons 3y ago
  As someone who hardly ever attempted to use a mailing list, I preferred forums because I was worried of waisting everyone on the list's time. In fact, the couple times I did use it, people complained about my usage. It felt like shouting for help in a room that may or may not be crowded. A forum felt more like putting a sign up and interested folks could engage though often nobody would. Chat is nice because there is an immediate back and forth and feels more beginner friendly / welcoming. However, chat needs an FAQ section. I think LLMs trained on chat logs may be an interesting tool.
baleo 3y ago
Last time a gripe about discord being bad for documention was posted, someone linked Answer Overflow (https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/) as a possible solution. Still requires people to use discords threaded feature and doesn't capture chats, but helps with atleast having the questiond indexed in google and not sitting behind a walled garden
ggm 3y ago
I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts. You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once. I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays. When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Then read the title as "here some reasons why Discord is likely not ideal for use as a Q&A forum for you." Less punchy though.
david2ndaccount 3y ago
If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
- croes 3y ago
  Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze. TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
    - croes 3y ago
      >So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze. The same could happen with amy Discord. No users means no users, no matter if it's Discord or Reddit But I can find and read a subreddit via search engine without joining anything.
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        Oh, you are preaching to the choir, I am not arguing against Reddit. Discord is an information wasteland. But if users want to start and join one to shoot the breeze, I think they are mostly going to pick Dsicord.
  - koonsolo 3y ago
    Can you give a real life example of this? I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active. The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
javajosh 3y ago
I'm surprised he didn't mention wikis - especially easy since they come with git(hub|lab).
sircastor 3y ago
It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack… I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”
- aworks 3y ago
  I'm an old guy so I never made it past lists/usenet/forums/wikis (unless I was forced to use Teams or whatever at work). So FWIW: Threaded replies, in whatever form, have been the killer feature for me to grok more data that may or may not be relevant.
mushufasa 3y ago
I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired). hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host. self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
- uoaei 3y ago
  It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip. I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints". It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
  - mushufasa 3y ago
    Discord has a network effect that Zulip doesn't, meaning a lot of times audiences are there whether creators like it or not. Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community
    - uoaei 3y ago
      If the wrapper is an extremely ergonomic Discord bot (which is probably what the other commenters are imagining or would settle on if they tried to implement it) then it might work but it still seems like a worse solution with a lot of extra overhead compared to software that already does what it's meant to (and crucially, can't do what it isn't meant to).
andrewstuart 3y ago
The offered alternatives do not meet the need that discord provides for a community.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Which is? Being able to react with cringe gamer emojis on messages?
  - herbst 3y ago
    Pretty sure he means the free for all P2P spam they don't care about. I mean how would you even start a project without spamming these days? /s
rbreaves 3y ago
I think you should say the same about slack tbh.
m3kw9 3y ago
I can just see people spamming emojis
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ronnier 3y ago
If only discord had threaded conversations
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  It does. Though maybe you're being facetious - hard to tell through text sometimes.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Only on “servers” that enable it, which most of them don't.
  - ronnier 3y ago
    I didn’t know this. I saw the reply below that it’s not enabled by default. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen this
- terpimost 3y ago
  Zulip does a better job with threads
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Dlang did it right, a mailing list that act like a forum [1] with various instant messaging bots (IRC, Discord, Matrix) I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2] [1] - https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ [2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/ https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/
- gizzlon 3y ago
  Looks great, and fast too! How does the integration work? Can you post to the forum, and it's then mailed out.. ?
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    I'm not familiar with the codebase, but from my understanding it saves messages in a database [1], then periodically send out a formatted email to people who subscribed to the thread/group [2] Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it) [1] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/web/web/posting.d#L206 https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/w... [2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/sinks/subscriptions.d#L816 https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/s...
sebtron 3y ago
If you ever need to extract important information buried somewhere in a Discord server, I am having luck with Discord History Tracker [1] (browser-only version). It lets you download all messages in a json file, which then you can read with [2] (works offline too). [1] https://dht.chylex.com/ https://dht.chylex.com/ [2] https://dht.chylex.com/browser-only/build/viewer.htm https://dht.chylex.com/browser-only/build/viewer.htm
kobstrtr 3y ago
Agree on the downsides, although communities are a great way to exchange and discuss a project. Instead, why don‘t we just keep the benefits of discord and build tools around it to manage its knowledge? We can publish it, we can use it for AI assistant, basically anything is possible. Disclaimer: I‘m the founder of awesomeqa.xyz
- RadiozRadioz 3y ago
  "why make a good solution when we can bodge around a crappy solution using scraping and AI?"
aleksandrm 3y ago
New World, an MMORPG game by Amazon Game Studios, have recently shut down their forums and migrated completely to Discord. It has been a complete disaster, including all the forum posts that show up in Google search are now just 404. Reporting bugs is a crap shoot into the void.
- barrkel 3y ago
  Presumably this is a feature, not a bug. The forum posts will age out of the search corpus, and negative feedback - evidence of low quality - will gradually disappear.
_pdp_ 3y ago
Or use both? Why decide so early what works? Launch a discord server and create a dedicated forum and see which one gets most traction.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  That means double the work and half the engagement.
Roark66 3y ago
At least IRC is usually logged. However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc). I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up. So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  And then, those same companies, feign having no idea why everybody and their dog orders on Amazon. I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.
  - galkk 3y ago
    Amazon recently started doing the same. The "chat" button disappeared from the help & contact us, and to talk to real person you need to go through bunch of jumps.
    - fer 3y ago
      I think that's been the case for a while other countries' marketplaces.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      I still find it easier to get someone real, and returns rarely require someone real, then most other companies.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Last time I needed them was a year or so ago to deal with a broken mouse for which Logitech didn't want to handle the warranty. Logitech stringed me around for 30 minutes with random questions from a dude via chat who was obviously doing something else. This was after their "AI" asked me the same exact questions. They apparently don't deal with claims from product bought on Amazon (regular Amazon, not marketplace). But this was the guy's last question. In contrast, the limiting factor to getting on the phone with an Amazon support person was the distance between my desk and my phone. Two minutes later, the fully-paid return label was sitting in my inbox.
koonsolo 3y ago
Fully agree with this reasoning. The problem though is that my community chose Discord, not me. I tried to move them away, didn't work.
nologic01 3y ago
People forget that there is a fashion and demographic element in these choices that can overwhelm rational argumemts about functionality et al. Discord had certain features that struck a chord with a generation of gaming communities, thats more or less all there is to it. Now people will pick it just to be trendy and in tune with the times. Personally I find its manipulative, over-emojed UI distasteful and it is hopeless for knowledge management.
- skelpmargyar 3y ago
  [dead]
tanepiper 3y ago
Sorry but if you think large-scale companies are going to use a platform designed for gaming as their main support channel - no. We've had one "Enterprise" supplier move from Slack to Discord. Their community manager in this case did not understand my argument of why this is a bad thing and kept pushing it. For example when I said there is no SSO, they said there is (of course not realising WE have to pick up the bill to set that up - also puts the work on CISOs to investigate the tool for larger use). Now they are on Discord and I will not share any NDA-related material there - nor would our Security and Data Privacy team like us to. At least they agreed to keep the Slack Connect in this case.
- lsaferite 3y ago
  Last I checked there was zero security on embedded images/docs. If you had the URL, you could view the content. That was a big no-no for our team and why discord lasted all of one month for us.
wodenokoto 3y ago
I think there is a culture shift. When I was young all events would be on Facebook. For better or worse that created a source of truth (worse being that obviously we were forcing guests onto a platform that we shouldn't be forcing them on) and a whole structure that kept track of things for you. Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often left out!) I have an impression that there is a whole new generation of people who _don't_ want to post on or interact with a forum/bulletin board style of interface, but want to be part of a "living" and instant group. I'm not part of any chat group where this is really working, but every meetup I go to, people are asking "which chat group should I join?" or "why don't I create a whatsapp/discord for this meetup?"
- _AzMoo 3y ago
  This isn't new though. Before Slack and Discord we were using IRC for this. Facebook serves a different need, and for me, was never the default place for event information. Up until the last 5-10 years we were always using email mailing lists, web forums, usenet, or IRC.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    Nobody ever used IRC as a project's primary communication channel. Well nobody sane at least. Seriously, IRC was always an informal sideshow to the asynchronous mechanisms.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  I've noticed this too. Attention spans have shrunk all across society. But it seems worse with the younger folks because they don't remember that it wasn't always like this. I don't think they are affected to a greater degree. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that resisting it might be a worthwhile effort.
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    I don’t think it’s an attention span issue. If it was, you’d want the events to be tracked by an app for all invitees. In my mind we’ve regressed and returned to asking the invited to keep track of where and when, when there was a brief decade where an app did it for you.
personjerry 3y ago
This article looks like it was written by ChatGPT tbh. The arguments are kinda weak, borderline nonsensical. > Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages. Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is "Chaos Discord"? Pretty sure it should says "Chaos - Discord..." It also concedes that they made threads a thing, so the point is moot. This is followed up with > TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk. Again there is no separation between the title and the content. And actually Discord search in my experience is really good. They can filter by media, link, text, user, and more. And this INCLUDES in threads. In comparison, have you tried searching through FAQs using Algolia or BBPost forum search in general? Those are truly awful. > The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions. Notice the continued formatting failure, a failure of copy-pasting from ChatGPT and not separating the title from the content! This point is about all the restrictions and actions needed, but fails to address that users are already logged in and often have Discord open, and instead comes with some ? nonsensical example of installing a js library? And finally > Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug? This is interesting but, how you can really tell it's ChatGPT is that the examples it provides as solutions below ALSO suffer this problem. Here are the options provided in the article. > Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse. Again I'm pretty sure the search is worse, and it literally doesn't solve any of the other problems. > Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product. And again, WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG? > Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system Actually not a bad idea if your audience is technical, but again WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG? Finally, nothing is more obvious than when ChatGPT says its signature "REMEMBER, BLAHBLAHBLAH", and lo and behold: > Remember, Discord is great & all but as a Q&A forum ... Personally, I'm 90% sure this is a ChatGPT generated low quality article. Even though it sparked some discussion here, I'm flagging this article, and I did not enjoy the article for the content.
- 3y ago
galkk 3y ago
This is just wishful thinking. All the alternatives have proven that they barely work too. 1. Dedicated forums - have you seen cesspools that are community.microsoft.com or apple support forums? Or few surviving audio forums, with those long taglines? Also searchability of those forums leaves to be desired too, as they rarely get to first page of google. 2. Stackoverflow quality has degraded severely in recent years. Both from perspectives of someone who wants to ask a question and someone who wants to answer it. Niche stackoverflows are still fine, but general programming ones are just shit, full of obsolete/old accepted answers that nobody cares to update to current year status 3. Get it done. It is obviously to be better healthy and rich than sick and poor I grown into contrary view. Discords are fine. Based on my personal experience, at least the ones where I tried to find some help (QMK, Bambulab, bunch of gaming ones). The fact that same question is being asked again and again is fine. Somebody will answer it. Or not, and then the search for an answer will continue. They significantly reduce friction to answer for somebody who is open to help. See example about stackoverflow above. I just left it, as I don't want to deal with mods there.
heisenbit 3y ago
MS Teams compared to Discord has imho a far superior implementation of the write once search forever paradigm.
joy_void_joy 3y ago
I agree that the discord centralization for Q&A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte). That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.
Phelinofist 3y ago
A bit unrelated, but does someone use a forum at work? I think in times of remote work that could a better alternative to Teams discussions about features or bugs (especially from other teams/departments) + the better search.
- sethammons 3y ago
  I have never seen a company forum be well adopted. SO and/or reddit clone. 6 engineers out of 100 in the org push for it and have to remind people it exists and people just keep asking questions in slack. People want to talk with people, esp. coworkers.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    "Look busy"
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TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.
- apatheticonion 3y ago
  100% this. IMO for projects that need a place for support questions but don't want to use issues, they could use the Github "discussions" board feature.
- jhanschoo 3y ago
  > On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Not GP, but it's miserable. Discord, and to only a slightly lesser extent Reddit, is not built for that use, it doesn't drive engagement.
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      "It doesn't drive engagement" is overly cynical. Discord was designed for chat, not as a support forum, and the search is surprisingly functional for a chat client.
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poulpy123 3y ago
another "dark web" I discovered few month ago is facebook. until then I was thinking that FB was just a social network for connecting people or companies but there are a crazy amount of forum-like groups with a lot of subscribers, and it's almost as invisible and unarchivable than discord
mekoka 3y ago
Discord is a trade-off. Don't apply on the wrong problem. Some pros, I'll pick three. (1) I think the appeal for something like Discord becomes more obvious when documentation feels like a moving target. For example, as a long time back-end developer, I have never disliked StackOveflow more than when I decided to learn front-end JavaScript. Every answer seemed attached to an expiration date. Anything older than 2 years and I'd wonder is this still in effect? I actually wished that JS would have its own special SO where answers can be sorted by "number of votes this year" or a "deprecated" flag. (2) The immediacy of chat, you ask and don't have to wait half a day for someone to notice. (3) No search. It could just be an impression, but my search experience seems to just increasingly suck. Engines seem to struggle to find relevant bits, particularly if the tech is fairly recent and results are flooded with meaningless articles, that just echo the same "Hello, world" from the official documentation. With Discord, I don't have to sort through the junk. Now the cons. The chat format for support certainly has its highlights, but you don't have to wear blinders about its downsides. If you allow for time to improve information, information accrues interest. Chat doesn't allow for time. And Discord doesn't particularly care about the quality of information. Discord cares about (authenticated) users showing up on the platform now, now, now. The problems highlighted with the chat format (as it's implemented on Discord), are very focused (though they have ramifications): archiving and searching capabilities are subpar. You show up on some chat channel and ask a question. You get the benefit of immediate advice, by the most authoritative voice that happens to be present. It may be good advice or it may be moot. You just have to take it at face value. On StackOverflow that advice would go unchallenged for a few months, but allow for time and you allow for scrutiny. Eventually, if there's contention, there will be a discussion. Answers are commented upon, improved, deprecated. You can simply show up years later and benefit from the maturation of the different perspectives that contributed to crystallize our current best understanding of the issue. Obviously, YMMV. Still, don't apply on the wrong problem.
- jansan 3y ago
  > my search experience seems to just increasingly suck SO's search engine always sucked. Whenever I cannot find the answer that I was looking for immediately, I use google with the site:staoverflow.com parameter. This always gave me much better results than the SO search itself.
tamimio 3y ago
Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing. So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?
- herbst 3y ago
  This. I wouldn't want to risk to depend on software where it's literally impossible to Google issues. That would be self-destructive on a level I don't want.
cultureswitch 3y ago
It's kind of incredible that this even needs to be said. Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information. Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.
- herbst 3y ago
  I wouldn't even go that far. There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
  - merdaverse 3y ago
    Interesting thing is this is a React bug that seems to be trapped in limbo: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/16087 https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/16087 More details here: https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory-leak https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory...
dabeeeenster 3y ago
This depends entirely on volume IMO. We [1] use Discord for this, and its great, but we don't have a large message volume. Discord seems way better than Slack for this use case as there's a single login which is built around connecting to multiple servers, unlike Slack. [1]. https://www.flagsmith.com/ https://www.flagsmith.com/
hnben 3y ago
there is a neat tool that makes it easier to find stuff on discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773
wkat4242 3y ago
The most important reason: Forcing your customers to use a significantly privacy-invading service just to get support is a total dick move.
chaosprint 3y ago
For years, it still has this issue: Discord notifies with sound, but when I open the app, I don't know where the notification is from. What a product management...
AeroNotix 3y ago
I've noticed this trend with younger developers. I can't help but feel it's related to hustle culture and attempting to foster a community that they can then monetize.
- dazzawazza 3y ago
  I too have noticed this. I put it down to a generation that has grown up where their entire existence is recorded and critiqued 24x7. Discord offers them a sandbox to express themselves and if they need to, they can delete their account. Effectively anonymizing their indiscretions, mistakes or honest opinions they no longer hold. The younger generations live a hellish existence where they are locked in time unable to grow as humans, perpetually judged by the mistakes of their younger selves. Doesn't change the fact that discord support sucks though for all the reasons mentioned this these threads.
alecmev 3y ago
How come nobody is talking about Linen? [1] > Linen is a search-engine friendly community platform. We offer two way integrations with existing Slack/Discord communities and make those conversations Google-searchable. [1] https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/
stavros 3y ago
I went to Discord for a project one day, and they had started using some sort of forum thing in Discord itself, which is atrocious. I can tolerate Discord when it's real-time help, but this new forum-like feature is the worst of both worlds: You don't get real-time, and you don't get searchability/Googleability/the ability for people to get help without a login. Just terrible. I really hope this doesn't catch on.
cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
Discord is best suited for out-of-band, ephemeral, semi-synchronous discussions. It's more useful to have permanent, searchable forums so that answers can benefit more people. (1:N instead of 1:1.) Discourse is one possible solution.
deleted 3y ago
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nipperkinfeet 3y ago
Use Discord for nothing... Whenever I try Discord, I never return to any of the channels I'm in. It doesn't feel like a community or anything I can refer back to. Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting. The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated. I would take a forum message board any day.
- paintman252 3y ago
  Hard disagree. Discord is great place for non-tehnical-project communities "Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting" Yeah, cause you went to unactive servers. It would be like coming to Hackernews, opening first link in newly submitted, and complaining that no one is here. Just go to active servers. Servers I frequent are very active. "The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated" Another hard disagree. UI is one of my favourite things about Discord. It feels very well designed and it even works very well on mobile. I'm quite impressed by this aspect
pbjtime 3y ago
DISCORD IS A PLAYSKOOL PLATFORM FOR CHILDREN.
lost_tourist 3y ago
I don't have much of a choice, it's what users want and it gives me the biggest footprint. It's about being pragmatic rather than being religious for me.
mafiaboi 3y ago
Late to discussion but we are building around this due to same pain points: https://www.den-hq.com/ https://www.den-hq.com/ It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far: - Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears - Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community - Developer communities are an outlier here - People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.
willywanker 3y ago
This should be obvious - a chatroom is no substitute for a forum. It doesn't help that IM services like Whatsapp/Telegram are also trying to muscle into what should be a forum with their groups and communities features.

523 points by kraktoos 3y ago

Roll your own, like early and industrious folks in the 2000s did with PhpBB or Invision, or vBulletin if you had the money to fork out for VB.

nvy 3y ago
I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool. I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc. Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  I was going to ask how he handles account creation fatigue, but then saw you'd specified single user.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  I ran phpBB for a while just for myself, partly out of nostalgia for the online forum days. I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it. However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy. After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now. Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
phpBB all the way. It gets the job done, and just about every host supports PHP.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  How are shared hosts at all relevant these days? For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS that you can install anything on.
  - codingdave 3y ago
    Because if you go that route then you are saddled with a full linux VPS that you must install things on. For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    They're relevant for low-load stuff like a forum. I don't want that on my production server, nor do I want to maintain a second server just for it.
  - JuanPosadas 3y ago
    > For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS For a few dollars a year you get a shared host.
cloudking 3y ago
https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ is a nice modern alternative, also free.
- NetOpWibby 3y ago
  I haven't seen Flarum in years, looks beautiful.
ivanmontillam 3y ago
AsmBB[0] if you feel bold! -- [0]: https://board.asm32.info/ https://board.asm32.info/
nextlevelwizard 3y ago
Yeah, nothing like finding some old dusty phpBB that has been completely over run with bots spamming NSFW stuff. 5/5 much better than Discord. Very industrious.

glaucon 3y ago

I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects". [1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing https://www.discourse.org/pricing

postpawl 3y ago
Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
- langsoul-com 3y ago
  Nobody wants to do that self hosting for a Q&A forum for a side project. Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Discord is not free, just “free”.
  - MaKey 3y ago
    I'd rather self-host a forum.
  - herbst 3y ago
    Discord is slow, weird to setup and a walled garden with zero control about anything. Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of. At least in my POV
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      Sounds like your POV doesn't contain many people!
- 3y ago

SubGenius 3y ago

I'm building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0] [0] - https://shpong.com/shpong https://shpong.com/shpong

MitPitt 3y ago
Looks very neat, how feature complete is it?
- SubGenius 3y ago
  Not a whole lot, but getting there. For now, we have: - matrix spaces not hidden behind auth - indexed by search engines - chat channels - subreddit like posts with nested replies, voting etc - private invite-only spaces Hoping to get voice/audio working soon, along with encrypted DMs. Experimenting with activitypub integration too.

nonethewiser 3y ago

So long as we don’t lose sight of its utility as a chat app. I like that projects have that sort of communication channel.

tilne 3y ago
Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.
- bredren 3y ago
  I suspect people are using it partly to deliver a more regular and visible heartbeat. Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues. GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison. Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message. Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion. As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
I'm in a few FOSS chats, and I tend to find there's a lot of people who a) need an answer right now and b) need relevant information pried out of them with a crowbar. And then they'll DM you if you look helpful. I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.

puffyblogger 3y ago

[flagged]

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity's sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.

jhatemyjob 3y ago

Terrible post. 1. This is what the "Ban" feature is for. 2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience. 3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved. 4. See 3.

DarkmSparks 3y ago
plus the main advantage of discord is you can easily knock up a free Q&A bot that answers all the questions people ask because they didnt rtfm or search the forums.
jrflowers 3y ago
> This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved. I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in. Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
- MitPitt 3y ago
  What are you talking about? You can't write a custom client and the official one is closed source. Scraping chat history is also against the TOS and get get you blocked.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    That’s even better. Why would anyone post on a forum when learning the minutiae of the Discord API and its strict TOS conditions in order to implement functionality that’s broken in the client while avoiding getting banned is an option? It’s a dead simple solution!
- herbst 3y ago
  That's kinda funny. I assume when discord wouldn't have banned all the wonderful lightweight alternative clients that existed they would only get a small portion of the hate today

Operyl 3y ago

I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.

eddythompson80 3y ago
I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there” In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings. For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
- Operyl 3y ago
  So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    Sure, like IRC but with a better interface,
    - TylerE 3y ago
      And no netsplits/nickserv insanity.
      - Operyl 3y ago
        Or people purchasing a holding company and proceeding to take over the entire volunteer ran network a few years later. :)

Redoubts 3y ago

Yeah, you should probably use ponder https://we.phorge.it/ponder/ https://we.phorge.it/ponder/

PaulHoule 3y ago

One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy)

EdwardDiego 3y ago
It's like that on a FOSS project Slack I'm on. He's not the most... ...personable person, and tbh I think it's a control thing.
- World177 3y ago
  I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it? At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business. I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    It's only a problem because he can be an asshole sometimes, and he very nearly always gets in first, (I swear he never sleeps), so yeah, sometimes not a great intro to a community that does exist, honest, not that you'd know from the Slack threads. To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
    - manfre 3y ago
      The discord should clearly state the community standards, including some variant of "don't be an asshole". Most importantly, the standards must be enforced. These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid. Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.

spankalee 3y ago

This article (and the comments here so far) don't mention Discord Forum Channels which solves the two actual usability/discoverability concerns listed Forum Channels FAQ: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better. * The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages * Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads * Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity * There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags * There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results * Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies. I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.

sha-3 3y ago
But is it indexed by search engines?
croes 3y ago
I can read forums without joining anything. That's not possible with Discord.
tacocataco 3y ago
I'm pretty sure this feature is in beta and only available to bigger communities at the moment.

mooreds 3y ago

I wrote about this a while ago for Slack/forums: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 but the points still hold. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ https://nodebb.org/ Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $). Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ https://nodebb.org/ TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked. Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
- omgmajk 3y ago
  > Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one). I've never seen this forum before but this I never expected it to be This bad. Is this some kind of mobile only design paradigm?

TylerE 3y ago

Must we beat this dead horse, AGAIN!?

tacocataco 3y ago
The horse will be whipped until somebody invents the automobile.

phowat 3y ago

Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.

sethammons 3y ago
As someone who hardly ever attempted to use a mailing list, I preferred forums because I was worried of waisting everyone on the list's time. In fact, the couple times I did use it, people complained about my usage. It felt like shouting for help in a room that may or may not be crowded. A forum felt more like putting a sign up and interested folks could engage though often nobody would. Chat is nice because there is an immediate back and forth and feels more beginner friendly / welcoming. However, chat needs an FAQ section. I think LLMs trained on chat logs may be an interesting tool.

baleo 3y ago

Last time a gripe about discord being bad for documention was posted, someone linked Answer Overflow (https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/) as a possible solution. Still requires people to use discords threaded feature and doesn't capture chats, but helps with atleast having the questiond indexed in google and not sitting behind a walled garden

ggm 3y ago

I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts. You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once. I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays. When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.

emodendroket 3y ago
Then read the title as "here some reasons why Discord is likely not ideal for use as a Q&A forum for you." Less punchy though.

david2ndaccount 3y ago

If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.

croes 3y ago
Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze. TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
  - croes 3y ago
    >So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze. The same could happen with amy Discord. No users means no users, no matter if it's Discord or Reddit But I can find and read a subreddit via search engine without joining anything.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      Oh, you are preaching to the choir, I am not arguing against Reddit. Discord is an information wasteland. But if users want to start and join one to shoot the breeze, I think they are mostly going to pick Dsicord.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  Can you give a real life example of this? I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active. The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.

javajosh 3y ago

I'm surprised he didn't mention wikis - especially easy since they come with git(hub|lab).

sircastor 3y ago

It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack… I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”

aworks 3y ago
I'm an old guy so I never made it past lists/usenet/forums/wikis (unless I was forced to use Teams or whatever at work). So FWIW: Threaded replies, in whatever form, have been the killer feature for me to grok more data that may or may not be relevant.

mushufasa 3y ago

I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired). hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host. self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure

uoaei 3y ago
It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip. I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints". It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
- mushufasa 3y ago
  Discord has a network effect that Zulip doesn't, meaning a lot of times audiences are there whether creators like it or not. Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community
  - uoaei 3y ago
    If the wrapper is an extremely ergonomic Discord bot (which is probably what the other commenters are imagining or would settle on if they tried to implement it) then it might work but it still seems like a worse solution with a lot of extra overhead compared to software that already does what it's meant to (and crucially, can't do what it isn't meant to).

andrewstuart 3y ago

The offered alternatives do not meet the need that discord provides for a community.

xigoi 3y ago
Which is? Being able to react with cringe gamer emojis on messages?
- herbst 3y ago
  Pretty sure he means the free for all P2P spam they don't care about. I mean how would you even start a project without spamming these days? /s

rbreaves 3y ago

I think you should say the same about slack tbh.

m3kw9 3y ago

I can just see people spamming emojis

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ronnier 3y ago

If only discord had threaded conversations

bigstrat2003 3y ago
It does. Though maybe you're being facetious - hard to tell through text sometimes.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Only on “servers” that enable it, which most of them don't.
- ronnier 3y ago
  I didn’t know this. I saw the reply below that it’s not enabled by default. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen this
terpimost 3y ago
Zulip does a better job with threads

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Dlang did it right, a mailing list that act like a forum [1] with various instant messaging bots (IRC, Discord, Matrix) I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2] [1] - https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ [2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/ https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/

gizzlon 3y ago
Looks great, and fast too! How does the integration work? Can you post to the forum, and it's then mailed out.. ?
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with the codebase, but from my understanding it saves messages in a database [1], then periodically send out a formatted email to people who subscribed to the thread/group [2] Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it) [1] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/web/web/posting.d#L206 https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/w... [2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/sinks/subscriptions.d#L816 https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/s...

sebtron 3y ago

If you ever need to extract important information buried somewhere in a Discord server, I am having luck with Discord History Tracker [1] (browser-only version). It lets you download all messages in a json file, which then you can read with [2] (works offline too). [1] https://dht.chylex.com/ https://dht.chylex.com/ [2] https://dht.chylex.com/browser-only/build/viewer.htm https://dht.chylex.com/browser-only/build/viewer.htm

kobstrtr 3y ago

Agree on the downsides, although communities are a great way to exchange and discuss a project. Instead, why don‘t we just keep the benefits of discord and build tools around it to manage its knowledge? We can publish it, we can use it for AI assistant, basically anything is possible. Disclaimer: I‘m the founder of awesomeqa.xyz

RadiozRadioz 3y ago
"why make a good solution when we can bodge around a crappy solution using scraping and AI?"

aleksandrm 3y ago

New World, an MMORPG game by Amazon Game Studios, have recently shut down their forums and migrated completely to Discord. It has been a complete disaster, including all the forum posts that show up in Google search are now just 404. Reporting bugs is a crap shoot into the void.

barrkel 3y ago
Presumably this is a feature, not a bug. The forum posts will age out of the search corpus, and negative feedback - evidence of low quality - will gradually disappear.

_pdp_ 3y ago

Or use both? Why decide so early what works? Launch a discord server and create a dedicated forum and see which one gets most traction.

hutzlibu 3y ago
That means double the work and half the engagement.

Roark66 3y ago

At least IRC is usually logged. However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc). I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up. So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
And then, those same companies, feign having no idea why everybody and their dog orders on Amazon. I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.
- galkk 3y ago
  Amazon recently started doing the same. The "chat" button disappeared from the help & contact us, and to talk to real person you need to go through bunch of jumps.
  - fer 3y ago
    I think that's been the case for a while other countries' marketplaces.
  - katbyte 3y ago
    I still find it easier to get someone real, and returns rarely require someone real, then most other companies.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Last time I needed them was a year or so ago to deal with a broken mouse for which Logitech didn't want to handle the warranty. Logitech stringed me around for 30 minutes with random questions from a dude via chat who was obviously doing something else. This was after their "AI" asked me the same exact questions. They apparently don't deal with claims from product bought on Amazon (regular Amazon, not marketplace). But this was the guy's last question. In contrast, the limiting factor to getting on the phone with an Amazon support person was the distance between my desk and my phone. Two minutes later, the fully-paid return label was sitting in my inbox.

koonsolo 3y ago

Fully agree with this reasoning. The problem though is that my community chose Discord, not me. I tried to move them away, didn't work.

nologic01 3y ago

People forget that there is a fashion and demographic element in these choices that can overwhelm rational argumemts about functionality et al. Discord had certain features that struck a chord with a generation of gaming communities, thats more or less all there is to it. Now people will pick it just to be trendy and in tune with the times. Personally I find its manipulative, over-emojed UI distasteful and it is hopeless for knowledge management.

skelpmargyar 3y ago
[dead]

tanepiper 3y ago

Sorry but if you think large-scale companies are going to use a platform designed for gaming as their main support channel - no. We've had one "Enterprise" supplier move from Slack to Discord. Their community manager in this case did not understand my argument of why this is a bad thing and kept pushing it. For example when I said there is no SSO, they said there is (of course not realising WE have to pick up the bill to set that up - also puts the work on CISOs to investigate the tool for larger use). Now they are on Discord and I will not share any NDA-related material there - nor would our Security and Data Privacy team like us to. At least they agreed to keep the Slack Connect in this case.

lsaferite 3y ago
Last I checked there was zero security on embedded images/docs. If you had the URL, you could view the content. That was a big no-no for our team and why discord lasted all of one month for us.

wodenokoto 3y ago

I think there is a culture shift. When I was young all events would be on Facebook. For better or worse that created a source of truth (worse being that obviously we were forcing guests onto a platform that we shouldn't be forcing them on) and a whole structure that kept track of things for you. Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often left out!) I have an impression that there is a whole new generation of people who _don't_ want to post on or interact with a forum/bulletin board style of interface, but want to be part of a "living" and instant group. I'm not part of any chat group where this is really working, but every meetup I go to, people are asking "which chat group should I join?" or "why don't I create a whatsapp/discord for this meetup?"

_AzMoo 3y ago
This isn't new though. Before Slack and Discord we were using IRC for this. Facebook serves a different need, and for me, was never the default place for event information. Up until the last 5-10 years we were always using email mailing lists, web forums, usenet, or IRC.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  Nobody ever used IRC as a project's primary communication channel. Well nobody sane at least. Seriously, IRC was always an informal sideshow to the asynchronous mechanisms.
KirillPanov 3y ago
I've noticed this too. Attention spans have shrunk all across society. But it seems worse with the younger folks because they don't remember that it wasn't always like this. I don't think they are affected to a greater degree. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that resisting it might be a worthwhile effort.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s an attention span issue. If it was, you’d want the events to be tracked by an app for all invitees. In my mind we’ve regressed and returned to asking the invited to keep track of where and when, when there was a brief decade where an app did it for you.

personjerry 3y ago

This article looks like it was written by ChatGPT tbh. The arguments are kinda weak, borderline nonsensical. > Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages. Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is "Chaos Discord"? Pretty sure it should says "Chaos - Discord..." It also concedes that they made threads a thing, so the point is moot. This is followed up with > TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk. Again there is no separation between the title and the content. And actually Discord search in my experience is really good. They can filter by media, link, text, user, and more. And this INCLUDES in threads. In comparison, have you tried searching through FAQs using Algolia or BBPost forum search in general? Those are truly awful. > The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions. Notice the continued formatting failure, a failure of copy-pasting from ChatGPT and not separating the title from the content! This point is about all the restrictions and actions needed, but fails to address that users are already logged in and often have Discord open, and instead comes with some ? nonsensical example of installing a js library? And finally > Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug? This is interesting but, how you can really tell it's ChatGPT is that the examples it provides as solutions below ALSO suffer this problem. Here are the options provided in the article. > Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse. Again I'm pretty sure the search is worse, and it literally doesn't solve any of the other problems. > Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product. And again, WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG? > Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system Actually not a bad idea if your audience is technical, but again WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG? Finally, nothing is more obvious than when ChatGPT says its signature "REMEMBER, BLAHBLAHBLAH", and lo and behold: > Remember, Discord is great & all but as a Q&A forum ... Personally, I'm 90% sure this is a ChatGPT generated low quality article. Even though it sparked some discussion here, I'm flagging this article, and I did not enjoy the article for the content.

3y ago

galkk 3y ago

This is just wishful thinking. All the alternatives have proven that they barely work too. 1. Dedicated forums - have you seen cesspools that are community.microsoft.com or apple support forums? Or few surviving audio forums, with those long taglines? Also searchability of those forums leaves to be desired too, as they rarely get to first page of google. 2. Stackoverflow quality has degraded severely in recent years. Both from perspectives of someone who wants to ask a question and someone who wants to answer it. Niche stackoverflows are still fine, but general programming ones are just shit, full of obsolete/old accepted answers that nobody cares to update to current year status 3. Get it done. It is obviously to be better healthy and rich than sick and poor I grown into contrary view. Discords are fine. Based on my personal experience, at least the ones where I tried to find some help (QMK, Bambulab, bunch of gaming ones). The fact that same question is being asked again and again is fine. Somebody will answer it. Or not, and then the search for an answer will continue. They significantly reduce friction to answer for somebody who is open to help. See example about stackoverflow above. I just left it, as I don't want to deal with mods there.

heisenbit 3y ago

MS Teams compared to Discord has imho a far superior implementation of the write once search forever paradigm.

joy_void_joy 3y ago

I agree that the discord centralization for Q&A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte). That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.

Phelinofist 3y ago

A bit unrelated, but does someone use a forum at work? I think in times of remote work that could a better alternative to Teams discussions about features or bugs (especially from other teams/departments) + the better search.

sethammons 3y ago
I have never seen a company forum be well adopted. SO and/or reddit clone. 6 engineers out of 100 in the org push for it and have to remind people it exists and people just keep asking questions in slack. People want to talk with people, esp. coworkers.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  "Look busy"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.

apatheticonion 3y ago
100% this. IMO for projects that need a place for support questions but don't want to use issues, they could use the Github "discussions" board feature.
jhanschoo 3y ago
> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
- OJFord 3y ago
  Not GP, but it's miserable. Discord, and to only a slightly lesser extent Reddit, is not built for that use, it doesn't drive engagement.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    "It doesn't drive engagement" is overly cynical. Discord was designed for chat, not as a support forum, and the search is surprisingly functional for a chat client.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

poulpy123 3y ago

another "dark web" I discovered few month ago is facebook. until then I was thinking that FB was just a social network for connecting people or companies but there are a crazy amount of forum-like groups with a lot of subscribers, and it's almost as invisible and unarchivable than discord

mekoka 3y ago

Discord is a trade-off. Don't apply on the wrong problem. Some pros, I'll pick three. (1) I think the appeal for something like Discord becomes more obvious when documentation feels like a moving target. For example, as a long time back-end developer, I have never disliked StackOveflow more than when I decided to learn front-end JavaScript. Every answer seemed attached to an expiration date. Anything older than 2 years and I'd wonder is this still in effect? I actually wished that JS would have its own special SO where answers can be sorted by "number of votes this year" or a "deprecated" flag. (2) The immediacy of chat, you ask and don't have to wait half a day for someone to notice. (3) No search. It could just be an impression, but my search experience seems to just increasingly suck. Engines seem to struggle to find relevant bits, particularly if the tech is fairly recent and results are flooded with meaningless articles, that just echo the same "Hello, world" from the official documentation. With Discord, I don't have to sort through the junk. Now the cons. The chat format for support certainly has its highlights, but you don't have to wear blinders about its downsides. If you allow for time to improve information, information accrues interest. Chat doesn't allow for time. And Discord doesn't particularly care about the quality of information. Discord cares about (authenticated) users showing up on the platform now, now, now. The problems highlighted with the chat format (as it's implemented on Discord), are very focused (though they have ramifications): archiving and searching capabilities are subpar. You show up on some chat channel and ask a question. You get the benefit of immediate advice, by the most authoritative voice that happens to be present. It may be good advice or it may be moot. You just have to take it at face value. On StackOverflow that advice would go unchallenged for a few months, but allow for time and you allow for scrutiny. Eventually, if there's contention, there will be a discussion. Answers are commented upon, improved, deprecated. You can simply show up years later and benefit from the maturation of the different perspectives that contributed to crystallize our current best understanding of the issue. Obviously, YMMV. Still, don't apply on the wrong problem.

jansan 3y ago
> my search experience seems to just increasingly suck SO's search engine always sucked. Whenever I cannot find the answer that I was looking for immediately, I use google with the site:staoverflow.com parameter. This always gave me much better results than the SO search itself.

tamimio 3y ago

Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing. So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?

herbst 3y ago
This. I wouldn't want to risk to depend on software where it's literally impossible to Google issues. That would be self-destructive on a level I don't want.

cultureswitch 3y ago

It's kind of incredible that this even needs to be said. Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information. Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.

herbst 3y ago
I wouldn't even go that far. There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
- merdaverse 3y ago
  Interesting thing is this is a React bug that seems to be trapped in limbo: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/16087 https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/16087 More details here: https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory-leak https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory...

dabeeeenster 3y ago

This depends entirely on volume IMO. We [1] use Discord for this, and its great, but we don't have a large message volume. Discord seems way better than Slack for this use case as there's a single login which is built around connecting to multiple servers, unlike Slack. [1]. https://www.flagsmith.com/ https://www.flagsmith.com/

hnben 3y ago

there is a neat tool that makes it easier to find stuff on discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773

wkat4242 3y ago

The most important reason: Forcing your customers to use a significantly privacy-invading service just to get support is a total dick move.

chaosprint 3y ago

For years, it still has this issue: Discord notifies with sound, but when I open the app, I don't know where the notification is from. What a product management...

AeroNotix 3y ago

I've noticed this trend with younger developers. I can't help but feel it's related to hustle culture and attempting to foster a community that they can then monetize.

dazzawazza 3y ago
I too have noticed this. I put it down to a generation that has grown up where their entire existence is recorded and critiqued 24x7. Discord offers them a sandbox to express themselves and if they need to, they can delete their account. Effectively anonymizing their indiscretions, mistakes or honest opinions they no longer hold. The younger generations live a hellish existence where they are locked in time unable to grow as humans, perpetually judged by the mistakes of their younger selves. Doesn't change the fact that discord support sucks though for all the reasons mentioned this these threads.

alecmev 3y ago

How come nobody is talking about Linen? [1] > Linen is a search-engine friendly community platform. We offer two way integrations with existing Slack/Discord communities and make those conversations Google-searchable. [1] https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/

stavros 3y ago

I went to Discord for a project one day, and they had started using some sort of forum thing in Discord itself, which is atrocious. I can tolerate Discord when it's real-time help, but this new forum-like feature is the worst of both worlds: You don't get real-time, and you don't get searchability/Googleability/the ability for people to get help without a login. Just terrible. I really hope this doesn't catch on.

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago

Discord is best suited for out-of-band, ephemeral, semi-synchronous discussions. It's more useful to have permanent, searchable forums so that answers can benefit more people. (1:N instead of 1:1.) Discourse is one possible solution.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

Use Discord for nothing... Whenever I try Discord, I never return to any of the channels I'm in. It doesn't feel like a community or anything I can refer back to. Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting. The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated. I would take a forum message board any day.

paintman252 3y ago
Hard disagree. Discord is great place for non-tehnical-project communities "Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting" Yeah, cause you went to unactive servers. It would be like coming to Hackernews, opening first link in newly submitted, and complaining that no one is here. Just go to active servers. Servers I frequent are very active. "The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated" Another hard disagree. UI is one of my favourite things about Discord. It feels very well designed and it even works very well on mobile. I'm quite impressed by this aspect

pbjtime 3y ago

DISCORD IS A PLAYSKOOL PLATFORM FOR CHILDREN.

lost_tourist 3y ago

I don't have much of a choice, it's what users want and it gives me the biggest footprint. It's about being pragmatic rather than being religious for me.

mafiaboi 3y ago

Late to discussion but we are building around this due to same pain points: https://www.den-hq.com/ https://www.den-hq.com/ It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far: - Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears - Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community - Developer communities are an outlier here - People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.

willywanker 3y ago

This should be obvious - a chatroom is no substitute for a forum. It doesn't help that IM services like Whatsapp/Telegram are also trying to muscle into what should be a forum with their groups and communities features.