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I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

jmspring 3y ago
I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Discord represents the same problem
- ironmagma 3y ago
  Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.
  - hannofcart 3y ago
    Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      I much prefer being a lurker.
    - andersa 3y ago
      This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      I really don’t trust this behavior. The difference between an account and an identity was so unclear when I signed up for Discord that I actually just closed the app and gave up on whatever led me there. The identity and “server” concepts are complete non-starters for me. Discord is in complete control of what information is shared with other users. There’s no mechanical prevention on them changing this behavior by accident or on purpose.
    - david_allison 3y ago
      Only the username, the avatar is a paid feature.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > publicizing my joined servers to other users You're making this sound a little more dramatic than it is. Discord only makes your membership in a server public to users who are also members of that server (and who could thus see you in its member list).
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      "Only". I'm not into Discord in a big way, but this is propping up my reasoning as to why I don't like it. Being forced to join a server to browse it and having that shared with others is as bad as being forced to login to Twitter/X. Not to mention that conversations on Discord don't get indexed on Google, so finding solutions for some problems is an exercise in frustration.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        reminds me of that site 'experts-exchange.com' which was a pre-StackOverflow login-only forum that nonetheless used to top Google search results. HN would have hated it. I'm surprised Discord gets a pass here.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      The client also now sort of supports multiple accounts, but one issue is that the whole point of the discord client is to spy on your activity. If anyone thinks they're just collecting data about game application use, I have a bridge to sell you. There's also a Chinese firm that owns a decent stake - tencent, I think.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      For now. But you of course have no way to know that. And there’s no architectural reason for this to remain true, if it even is.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I signed up for discord once, was horrified by what I saw, gave up, and never looked back. Everything about identity and “servers” seemed to be the opposite of what I would want. On the plus side when it inevitably shuts down I will be unaffected.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    My favorite "wtf" moment is how Discord reveals to users when I have blocked them, because they can no longer apply emoji reactions to my messages. Good times.
    - asia92 3y ago
      I mean, they're going to find out anyways when you don't reply
  - sph 3y ago
    What about the constant, flashy popups of GET DISCORD NITRO MEGA PLUS FOR 10% OFF, FOR 5 ANIMATED GIFS AND COLORED BACKGROUNDS? It does really not help that the target audience for Discord is 14 year old gamers.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      Psst, there's a free gift! Surprise, another feature you don't care about! I paid for decent audio quality, got advertisements too
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model. I would never use it for something professional/business related.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - iknowstuff 3y ago
      This is correct. Why is this comment gray?
      - dang 3y ago
        No doubt because it crossed into personal attack, an obvious violation of HN's rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
    - viraptor 3y ago
      You're right that Discord as a platform provides a thousand ways to make the server more pleasant. But it's not happening by default. The spam/bot control could be extremely improved on their side so that people don't have to use third party solutions by default.
    - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
      Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it. But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen. Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since. The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly. Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on. Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case. I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free? I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.
- encom 3y ago
  I tried to use Discord once, but they demanded my phone number to use it, so I deleted it and never looked back. Absolute cancer of a platform.
- ljm 3y ago
  In a professional context I would avoid both. I don’t want to join chat servers for various SaaS I pay for where I just want a simple support question answered. At least with a forum, the questions and answers are indexed so I might find exactly what I want without having to reach out to support. I’m not a community member, I’m a paying customer.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    'Community' members tend to evangelize the product on social media, so you can understand why a lot of apps beg you to join the Discord.
sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack. Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them. Zulip is also available as a container.
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    Not in my experience. We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course. That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      [flagged]
- ssivark 3y ago
  1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work? 2. What is the way around the free plan message limit? 3. What do you use Slack for?
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    1. Discourse. Might be different for others but I had 0 time to manage the deployment, and upgrades took a lot of time. 2. I used https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ but I think there are others. It turn Slack conversations in a searchable static site. 3. Developer community for an open source software product.
twelvechairs 3y ago
Matrix is the obvious option for chat style communication without being beholden to a for profit company
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  IRC
  - jimnotgym 3y ago
    Are old IRC chats discoverable over Google? I don't see any in my results. This was a stated aim of the forum
    - fleg 3y ago
      It's usually done by publishing IRC logs on a webpage. Examples: - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html - http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html How discoverable it is on Google depends only on Google and on how those logs are stored.
      - ironmagma 3y ago
        Not true; it’s usually simply not done at all.
      - thayne 3y ago
        Forum threads inherently have better searchability, because conversations are split into separate pages, with a clear subject/title, and usually a description of what the thread is about at the beginning of the page. In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.
    - herbst 3y ago
      With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.
shafyy 3y ago
100%. At least use GitHub Discussions.
- watwut 3y ago
  Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.
  - spion 3y ago
    Do they force 2FA only or phones as well? If its just 2FA there is an option to use a TOTP application (e.g. andOTP for Android)
    - popinman322 3y ago
      I don't have my phone number attached to my GitHub account, if that's any indication
  - LorenDB 3y ago
    You don't need a phone to do 2FA. You can use a TOTP desktop app or a Yubikey.
    - watwut 3y ago
      I do not want desktop app nor Yubikey either. I do not want to risk loosing account when I loose the stupid key or whatever secret. My use case, which would be participating in low key low risk projects, discussions, bug reports, feature requests or searching through source code does not need any of that. As would be most people case. So, having discussions in place that requires it is just wrong choice. I do suspect github did that intentionally so that they dont act like free storage place for unpaid projects, so going elsewhere is not even hurting them.
andrepd 3y ago
Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.
- pacifika 3y ago
  How is it less searchable than slack?
  - Gabrys1 3y ago
    The assumption is that forum is viewable by guests (including Google) and Slack is not, so to search the Slack history you need to log in to Slack and use the Slack search (which might be broken / paid in the future, etc)
- sholladay 3y ago
  I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
  - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
    Not entirely. 3rd-party search engines still can't reach these, thus reducing discoverability.
- jayflux 3y ago
  As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.
  - Kye 3y ago
    It's the real time chat all the things people want to search are moving to. Minecraft mod? "Find us on Discord!" Hot new indie game? "Find us on Discord!" Interesting little open source project? "Find us on Discord!" 30 year old forum shutting down? "Find us on Discord!"
CM30 3y ago
I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines. If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information online again.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The general problem with forums is that once they get good SEO placement they then become targets of the army of spammers, real and human, trying to use the highly ranking forum for their unscrupulous SEO spam, and now the maintaining team has to do heavy loads of spam management.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Then only allow paid/subscribed users to post.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      That’s not very Old Internet.
      - plutokras 3y ago
        With the sea of SEO and AI spam, we aren't living anymore in the age of the old internet. Communities need to adapt.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It’s not going to happen. You can’t put ads on them anymore. Means someone has to just run a loss-running enterprise for you. Few will do that.
ryanSrich 3y ago
Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI. Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.
- pronik 3y ago
  The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!
  - ryanSrich 3y ago
    The list of things I hate about it is longer than the list of things I like about it. Certainly the workspace selector is miles better. Almost everything else is worse.
  - lenkite 3y ago
    I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.
    - nxm 3y ago
      Product team needs to add value
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      Careful, you’re digging at the great HN conflict. Everyone making these pointless and disruptive UX changes logs off at the end of the day, jumps on HN, and complains about other products’ pointless and disruptive UX changes.
barefootsanders 3y ago
I've had trouble w/ the same thing and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. I'm actually about to release an app that can automatically convert slack threads into knowledge base articles. Would love to share it w/ anyone who's interested to get some feedback.

jmspring 3y ago

I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…

ekianjo 3y ago
Discord represents the same problem
ironmagma 3y ago
Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.
- hannofcart 3y ago
  Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    I much prefer being a lurker.
  - andersa 3y ago
    This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I really don’t trust this behavior. The difference between an account and an identity was so unclear when I signed up for Discord that I actually just closed the app and gave up on whatever led me there. The identity and “server” concepts are complete non-starters for me. Discord is in complete control of what information is shared with other users. There’s no mechanical prevention on them changing this behavior by accident or on purpose.
  - david_allison 3y ago
    Only the username, the avatar is a paid feature.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > publicizing my joined servers to other users You're making this sound a little more dramatic than it is. Discord only makes your membership in a server public to users who are also members of that server (and who could thus see you in its member list).
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    "Only". I'm not into Discord in a big way, but this is propping up my reasoning as to why I don't like it. Being forced to join a server to browse it and having that shared with others is as bad as being forced to login to Twitter/X. Not to mention that conversations on Discord don't get indexed on Google, so finding solutions for some problems is an exercise in frustration.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      reminds me of that site 'experts-exchange.com' which was a pre-StackOverflow login-only forum that nonetheless used to top Google search results. HN would have hated it. I'm surprised Discord gets a pass here.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    The client also now sort of supports multiple accounts, but one issue is that the whole point of the discord client is to spy on your activity. If anyone thinks they're just collecting data about game application use, I have a bridge to sell you. There's also a Chinese firm that owns a decent stake - tencent, I think.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    For now. But you of course have no way to know that. And there’s no architectural reason for this to remain true, if it even is.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I signed up for discord once, was horrified by what I saw, gave up, and never looked back. Everything about identity and “servers” seemed to be the opposite of what I would want. On the plus side when it inevitably shuts down I will be unaffected.
- amatecha 3y ago
  My favorite "wtf" moment is how Discord reveals to users when I have blocked them, because they can no longer apply emoji reactions to my messages. Good times.
  - asia92 3y ago
    I mean, they're going to find out anyways when you don't reply
- sph 3y ago
  What about the constant, flashy popups of GET DISCORD NITRO MEGA PLUS FOR 10% OFF, FOR 5 ANIMATED GIFS AND COLORED BACKGROUNDS? It does really not help that the target audience for Discord is 14 year old gamers.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    Psst, there's a free gift! Surprise, another feature you don't care about! I paid for decent audio quality, got advertisements too
sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model. I would never use it for something professional/business related.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - iknowstuff 3y ago
    This is correct. Why is this comment gray?
    - dang 3y ago
      No doubt because it crossed into personal attack, an obvious violation of HN's rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
  - viraptor 3y ago
    You're right that Discord as a platform provides a thousand ways to make the server more pleasant. But it's not happening by default. The spam/bot control could be extremely improved on their side so that people don't have to use third party solutions by default.
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it. But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen. Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since. The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly. Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on. Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case. I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free? I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.
encom 3y ago
I tried to use Discord once, but they demanded my phone number to use it, so I deleted it and never looked back. Absolute cancer of a platform.
ljm 3y ago
In a professional context I would avoid both. I don’t want to join chat servers for various SaaS I pay for where I just want a simple support question answered. At least with a forum, the questions and answers are indexed so I might find exactly what I want without having to reach out to support. I’m not a community member, I’m a paying customer.
- rchaud 3y ago
  'Community' members tend to evangelize the product on social media, so you can understand why a lot of apps beg you to join the Discord.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack. Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them. Zulip is also available as a container.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  Not in my experience. We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course. That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    [flagged]
ssivark 3y ago
1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work? 2. What is the way around the free plan message limit? 3. What do you use Slack for?
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  1. Discourse. Might be different for others but I had 0 time to manage the deployment, and upgrades took a lot of time. 2. I used https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ but I think there are others. It turn Slack conversations in a searchable static site. 3. Developer community for an open source software product.

twelvechairs 3y ago

Matrix is the obvious option for chat style communication without being beholden to a for profit company

lnxg33k1 3y ago
IRC
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  Are old IRC chats discoverable over Google? I don't see any in my results. This was a stated aim of the forum
  - fleg 3y ago
    It's usually done by publishing IRC logs on a webpage. Examples: - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html - http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html How discoverable it is on Google depends only on Google and on how those logs are stored.
    - ironmagma 3y ago
      Not true; it’s usually simply not done at all.
    - thayne 3y ago
      Forum threads inherently have better searchability, because conversations are split into separate pages, with a clear subject/title, and usually a description of what the thread is about at the beginning of the page. In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.
  - herbst 3y ago
    With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.

shafyy 3y ago

100%. At least use GitHub Discussions.

watwut 3y ago
Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.
- spion 3y ago
  Do they force 2FA only or phones as well? If its just 2FA there is an option to use a TOTP application (e.g. andOTP for Android)
  - popinman322 3y ago
    I don't have my phone number attached to my GitHub account, if that's any indication
- LorenDB 3y ago
  You don't need a phone to do 2FA. You can use a TOTP desktop app or a Yubikey.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I do not want desktop app nor Yubikey either. I do not want to risk loosing account when I loose the stupid key or whatever secret. My use case, which would be participating in low key low risk projects, discussions, bug reports, feature requests or searching through source code does not need any of that. As would be most people case. So, having discussions in place that requires it is just wrong choice. I do suspect github did that intentionally so that they dont act like free storage place for unpaid projects, so going elsewhere is not even hurting them.

andrepd 3y ago

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

pacifika 3y ago
How is it less searchable than slack?
- Gabrys1 3y ago
  The assumption is that forum is viewable by guests (including Google) and Slack is not, so to search the Slack history you need to log in to Slack and use the Slack search (which might be broken / paid in the future, etc)
sholladay 3y ago
I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
  Not entirely. 3rd-party search engines still can't reach these, thus reducing discoverability.
jayflux 3y ago
As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.
- Kye 3y ago
  It's the real time chat all the things people want to search are moving to. Minecraft mod? "Find us on Discord!" Hot new indie game? "Find us on Discord!" Interesting little open source project? "Find us on Discord!" 30 year old forum shutting down? "Find us on Discord!"

CM30 3y ago

I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines. If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information online again.

bobthepanda 3y ago
The general problem with forums is that once they get good SEO placement they then become targets of the army of spammers, real and human, trying to use the highly ranking forum for their unscrupulous SEO spam, and now the maintaining team has to do heavy loads of spam management.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Then only allow paid/subscribed users to post.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    That’s not very Old Internet.
    - plutokras 3y ago
      With the sea of SEO and AI spam, we aren't living anymore in the age of the old internet. Communities need to adapt.
renewiltord 3y ago
It’s not going to happen. You can’t put ads on them anymore. Means someone has to just run a loss-running enterprise for you. Few will do that.

ryanSrich 3y ago

Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI. Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.

pronik 3y ago
The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  The list of things I hate about it is longer than the list of things I like about it. Certainly the workspace selector is miles better. Almost everything else is worse.
- lenkite 3y ago
  I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.
  - nxm 3y ago
    Product team needs to add value
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Careful, you’re digging at the great HN conflict. Everyone making these pointless and disruptive UX changes logs off at the end of the day, jumps on HN, and complains about other products’ pointless and disruptive UX changes.

barefootsanders 3y ago

I've had trouble w/ the same thing and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. I'm actually about to release an app that can automatically convert slack threads into knowledge base articles. Would love to share it w/ anyone who's interested to get some feedback.