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I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websi

I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.

lamontcg 2y ago
I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are). And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem. They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.
fennecbutt 2y ago
Discord is meant for gamers playing games. Who tf cares what happened 2 years ago in that context. Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.
slimsag 2y ago
I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord. If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer. Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for <specific term> in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google. I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
  - aaravchen 2y ago
    That is the exact reason Discord isn't sufficient. I've had to support enough projects as a maintainer to know that you will always get hammered with the stupidest questions and the same questions all the time. The less you have to repeat yourself the better, and Discord, or any chat application, ensures you have to repeat yourself as much as possible. There's virtually no way to retroactively follow the stream-of-consciousness that is a chat-style discussion with no single topic instead of the post-style single-topic threaded discussion. I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.
- politelemon 2y ago
  I've seen it on numerous game, book, and software related discords. Your experience is alien to mine.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  The forum threads ARE the FAQs. When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.
- aaravchen 2y ago
theshrike79 2y ago
I have the same feeling about Matrix - and I've used IRC since the 90s so I'm used to jank. Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums"). I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do. Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view. There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious. I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard. [0] https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds
- WGH_ 2y ago
  Matrix has so-called spaces, which group rooms together. Chaos Computer Club used this for 37C3, it was quite neat.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, but i hear ya about organizing in the matrix world! There certainly are opportunities for improvement. That being said, i feel like the challenges are 80% ~ 90% UI/UX challenges that need to be evolved, and maybe 10% ~ 20% protocol/architectural challenges. I have a feeling that there will be improvements from the client/app side that will create a positive jump in experience in the matrix world...of course i am biased. :-)
soerxpso 2y ago
> People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord" Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!" Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.

lamontcg 2y ago

I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are). And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem. They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.

fennecbutt 2y ago

Discord is meant for gamers playing games. Who tf cares what happened 2 years ago in that context. Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.

slimsag 2y ago

I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord. If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer. Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?

iforgotpassword 2y ago
I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for <specific term> in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google. I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
- aaravchen 2y ago
  That is the exact reason Discord isn't sufficient. I've had to support enough projects as a maintainer to know that you will always get hammered with the stupidest questions and the same questions all the time. The less you have to repeat yourself the better, and Discord, or any chat application, ensures you have to repeat yourself as much as possible. There's virtually no way to retroactively follow the stream-of-consciousness that is a chat-style discussion with no single topic instead of the post-style single-topic threaded discussion. I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.
politelemon 2y ago
I've seen it on numerous game, book, and software related discords. Your experience is alien to mine.
AlienRobot 2y ago
The forum threads ARE the FAQs. When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.
aaravchen 2y ago

theshrike79 2y ago

I have the same feeling about Matrix - and I've used IRC since the 90s so I'm used to jank. Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums"). I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do. Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view. There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious. I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard. [0] https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds

WGH_ 2y ago
Matrix has so-called spaces, which group rooms together. Chaos Computer Club used this for 37C3, it was quite neat.
mxuribe 2y ago
I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, but i hear ya about organizing in the matrix world! There certainly are opportunities for improvement. That being said, i feel like the challenges are 80% ~ 90% UI/UX challenges that need to be evolved, and maybe 10% ~ 20% protocol/architectural challenges. I have a feeling that there will be improvements from the client/app side that will create a positive jump in experience in the matrix world...of course i am biased. :-)

soerxpso 2y ago

> People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord" Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!" Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.