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The Zig Discord is a great resource for anyone learning Zig. At any given time, the zig-help forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make

by rob74 1y ago

The Zig Discord is a great resource for anyone learning Zig. At any given time, the zig-help forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes. Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? Discord is basically just a chat platform, and while it's nice that there are always people there who are willing to answer the same questions over and over again, you can't rely on that staying the same in the future. Whereas SO crowdsourced a "canonical" answer to a question, and if someone came up with the same question later (and didn't find the existing answer via the search function or Google), they could be pointed to that answer.

dragonelite 1y ago
I agree i rather see all this discussion etc take place on dedicated forums or other text based options so search engines can index the stuff..
interpol_p 1y ago
Totally agree But once we opened a Discord for our product we had so many more questions and users coming in. I do not like that it is locked up on a proprietary platform organised as a chat interface, but damn is it popular and often-used. Having users communicate with us more regularly is very motivating, and we've had so much more quality feedback by having it available It is, unfortunately, where a lot of the people are and it makes your user base feel very "alive"
- jjani 1y ago
  Why not use AnswerOverflow to make the chats indexed and searchable? It's definitely a lot better than nothing, multiple times it has already helped me find answers to questions I had.
  - interpol_p 1y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion! I had no idea this existed
sebtron 1y ago
I agree, Discord is a terrible user experience for me. The UI is confusing and any piece of information older than a few hours disappears forever into the void.
bmacho 1y ago
> Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? I have a long-held belief that the single best community information database format is Stack Overflow. (As opposed to wiki, chats, user groups/mailing lists, flat/threaded forums.) An editable top-level question, answered by several editable top level answers with different weighting on different things. (And then chat or small comments, there should be a place for some busywork that should carry no relevant information ideally.) Not necessary the website, but the format. The second is blogosphere, allow users to write articles and engage in comments. For some reason basically no communities have these. They tend to have discord, and maybe a wiki.
tobyhinloopen 1y ago
SO is a very beginner-unfriendly platform. Every time I used it, I either did not get any replies or had my question altered, deleted, removed, closed etc. I have no clue why anyone still uses it.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  The two options are: 1) no one has had their questions answered on stack overflow, or 2) your questions were duplicates or needed a lot of rewording to make them useful to people in the future.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  Asking a question on stackoverflow that is long term useful to the community isn’t a beginner-difficulty task.
  - rob74 1y ago
    Yeah, I guess if you have a very specific problem that you need help with, it's better to ask about it on Discord. But for the general questions that many noobs are likely to face that the blog post mentions ("How do you make for loop in reverse?" or "What allocator to use in WASM?"), I still think SO would be the better platform, if only to avoid trying the patience of the helpful people on Discord too much...
    - troupo 1y ago
      And even for specific questions like the one he mentions after that you really want to have them somewhere in public, because someone will eventually run into a similar problem
  - firesteelrain 1y ago
    It’s beginner adverse site today. It’s got a lot of great existing questions and answers though
  - tobyhinloopen 1y ago
rembicilious 1y ago
I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication. IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go. Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat. Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.
- troupo 1y ago
  > forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes. You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.
  - maccard 1y ago
    Yes you would.
    - troupo 1y ago
      1. Not as much because people can actually find the answers to their questions before locking to the chat 2. On top of that you can make info on and solutions to other issues/problems actually available and accessible. Like the one the author describes later in the same text Instead all this info is locked behind a proprietary chat platform
bsder 1y ago
Ziggit is a Zig Discourse that is pretty good: https://ziggit.dev/ https://ziggit.dev/ It's almost as fast as the Discord and much friendlier to searching and context. I make a point of avoiding the Discord simply because I want my questions and answers to be searchable by people who come afterward.
- cassepipe 1y ago
  Except discourse is just a forum and thus less useful than the SO format where good answers bubble up
  - kristoff_it 1y ago
    Discourse has the feature where the comment marked as answer will be placed up top right after the question.
  - bsder 1y ago
    I'll be honest, for me, SO feels sclerotic. Any question that is more than a couple of years old and applies to something under active development risks having the "bubbled up" answer being actively incorrect. Maybe this is just because I'm not developing in Javascript.
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  Ziggit is indeed another active community and it's perfectly legitimate to want to stick to a platform vs another for personal preference, the people who downvoted this comment should really re-evaluate the way the approach this subject.
charlie-83 1y ago
I always found SO really slow. Often I would get stuck on something, ask a question and then have to wait an hour for a response (which would often become a back and forth of comments with large periods of time between them). Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes. I think this is likely due to the incentives SO creates. I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. I will often contribute to a discord question even if I don't full know the answer just because I think I can add something useful.
- milesrout 1y ago
  [dead]
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes. On SO, at its peak, you got an answer even faster because it was public (i.e. the answer was already there, you just searched for your question). So you're comparing minutes to instant.
  - tester756 1y ago
    But zig's discord is also public ;o
    - feelamee 1y ago
      Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no. So you need to manually search in discord chat instead of using google to search the whole internet.
      - tester756 1y ago
        >Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no. Why they cant? it's up to them to add support for it
- 1y ago
karel-3d 1y ago
You can still ask your Zig question on Stack Overflow, or they have a semi-official Discourse forum Ziggit (which I find preferable to Discord) where I got answers quickly... Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  > Zig Discord is also just semi-official Is the Zig creator not there? I'm pretty sure he is.
  - atiedebee 1y ago
    That wouldn't necessarily make it official though
  - wmedrano 1y ago
    I thought the Zig creator abandoned Discord due to invasive ads sometime last year.
  - kristoff_it 1y ago
    No, Andrew deleted his Discord account a while ago. Regardless, having the creator present does not make a space official, it's a matter of who owns the space and what the general policy is. The general policy of the Zig Software Foundation is to not have blessed community spaces outside of spaces used strictly for coordinating the development of Zig (those currently are the Ziglang GitHub Organization and the ZSF Zulip), so all communities are equally non-official. The main Zig Discord server is owned by community members and is actually not even the only Zig server on Discord.
rkangel 1y ago
I agree, but I think that you could get a useful middle ground by continuously publishing the contents of your Q&A Discord channel to the internet (in a way where it gets indexed by search engines). Yes, Stack Overflow collated these questions and answers better but then at least you could google for something and get the answer, rather than asking again.
gyomu 1y ago
Agreed - humans like participating in chats better (when you have a problem, you want live humans ready to answer you now), but the SO style archive is better for long term archiving & retrievability. A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.
- Klonoar 1y ago
  There are already several projects that have tried the “expose Discord data for indexing” model. Problem is no chat servers ever actually use them, perhaps because they’re at odds with expectations of people in the servers themselves.
krapp 1y ago
In a world where every surface of the web is infested with bots, trolls, spammers and AI slop, persistent static and public information is a hazard. Moving knowledge to ephemeral communities is an immune response to what the web has become. I'm usually not a fan of gatekeeping but doing so to filter for human beings seems like a necessary evil.
kristoff_it 1y ago
Discord is just one of many places where you can get help from other Zig community members. Over time I've seen plenty of comments like this one about platform A vs platform B and I find them all absolutely uninteresting. Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere. Some people prefer Discord and they made a comfortable home for themselves. If you prefer a different platform (which could be a matter of personal preference or an objective advantage, it really doesn't matter which it is), then go make yourself a comfortable home there and start offering help to others on it. If you're a newcomer and can't really offer much help, then you're asking for people who do have that knowledge to help you on a platform of your choice. That's certainly something you can wish for, but you can't demand it, regardless of how much objectively better your platform might be.
- thunky 1y ago
  > Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere. It actually does when users are pointed to discord to ask the same questions over and over. Look at the two example questions in OP's quote. Sending users to discord for those means nearly nobody else will benefit from the answers. And I think it's fair to point this out.
  - kristoff_it 1y ago
    1. Questions and answers on Discord are searchable, there's a channel format that makes every conversation a thread and the UI even automatically searches for matches as you type the title of a new thread, which is what the Zig Discord server uses. It's correct to say that Discord answers will not be searchable outside of Discord, but it's factually wrong to say that you won't be able to very easily find out if your question has been asked already. 2. OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience. Zig has multiple communities and you can get help also elsewhere. A blog post that recounts one's experience doesn't need to list all other ways of getting help and it's wrong for you to assume otherwise.
    - thunky 1y ago
Zambyte 1y ago
In the context of Zig, Ziggit has been pretty nice also. I use that instead.
zamalek 1y ago
I previously worked at a fintech and they, understandably so given the domain, blocked Discord. Think for a second what wonders that does for participating in open source (which the same employer had no problem with). Discord is not a suitable platform for developers. I think Matrix is pretty good but, fuck it, I'll take IRC over Discord - it's still perfectly functional.
Buttons840 1y ago
Discord is really bad if you want more than 1-on-1 real-time communication with other humans. This is also its primary advantage.
drob518 1y ago
Discord sucks. Slack is so much better, IMO.
TUSF 1y ago
I don't think SO's "canonical answer" concept really jives with a pre-1.0 language like Zig that is still in constant flux, regularly making breaking changes. One of the questions the blog brings up as an example, "What allocator to use in WASM?" would have a different answer last year than it would this year, and may well have a different answer next year.

by rob74 1y ago

dragonelite 1y ago

I agree i rather see all this discussion etc take place on dedicated forums or other text based options so search engines can index the stuff..

interpol_p 1y ago

Totally agree But once we opened a Discord for our product we had so many more questions and users coming in. I do not like that it is locked up on a proprietary platform organised as a chat interface, but damn is it popular and often-used. Having users communicate with us more regularly is very motivating, and we've had so much more quality feedback by having it available It is, unfortunately, where a lot of the people are and it makes your user base feel very "alive"

jjani 1y ago
Why not use AnswerOverflow to make the chats indexed and searchable? It's definitely a lot better than nothing, multiple times it has already helped me find answers to questions I had.
- interpol_p 1y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion! I had no idea this existed

sebtron 1y ago

I agree, Discord is a terrible user experience for me. The UI is confusing and any piece of information older than a few hours disappears forever into the void.

bmacho 1y ago

> Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? I have a long-held belief that the single best community information database format is Stack Overflow. (As opposed to wiki, chats, user groups/mailing lists, flat/threaded forums.) An editable top-level question, answered by several editable top level answers with different weighting on different things. (And then chat or small comments, there should be a place for some busywork that should carry no relevant information ideally.) Not necessary the website, but the format. The second is blogosphere, allow users to write articles and engage in comments. For some reason basically no communities have these. They tend to have discord, and maybe a wiki.

tobyhinloopen 1y ago

SO is a very beginner-unfriendly platform. Every time I used it, I either did not get any replies or had my question altered, deleted, removed, closed etc. I have no clue why anyone still uses it.

robertlagrant 1y ago
The two options are: 1) no one has had their questions answered on stack overflow, or 2) your questions were duplicates or needed a lot of rewording to make them useful to people in the future.
QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
Asking a question on stackoverflow that is long term useful to the community isn’t a beginner-difficulty task.
- rob74 1y ago
  Yeah, I guess if you have a very specific problem that you need help with, it's better to ask about it on Discord. But for the general questions that many noobs are likely to face that the blog post mentions ("How do you make for loop in reverse?" or "What allocator to use in WASM?"), I still think SO would be the better platform, if only to avoid trying the patience of the helpful people on Discord too much...
  - troupo 1y ago
    And even for specific questions like the one he mentions after that you really want to have them somewhere in public, because someone will eventually run into a similar problem
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  It’s beginner adverse site today. It’s got a lot of great existing questions and answers though
- tobyhinloopen 1y ago

rembicilious 1y ago

I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication. IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go. Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat. Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.

troupo 1y ago
> forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes. You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.
- maccard 1y ago
  Yes you would.
  - troupo 1y ago
    1. Not as much because people can actually find the answers to their questions before locking to the chat 2. On top of that you can make info on and solutions to other issues/problems actually available and accessible. Like the one the author describes later in the same text Instead all this info is locked behind a proprietary chat platform

bsder 1y ago

Ziggit is a Zig Discourse that is pretty good: https://ziggit.dev/ https://ziggit.dev/ It's almost as fast as the Discord and much friendlier to searching and context. I make a point of avoiding the Discord simply because I want my questions and answers to be searchable by people who come afterward.

cassepipe 1y ago
Except discourse is just a forum and thus less useful than the SO format where good answers bubble up
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  Discourse has the feature where the comment marked as answer will be placed up top right after the question.
- bsder 1y ago
  I'll be honest, for me, SO feels sclerotic. Any question that is more than a couple of years old and applies to something under active development risks having the "bubbled up" answer being actively incorrect. Maybe this is just because I'm not developing in Javascript.
kristoff_it 1y ago
Ziggit is indeed another active community and it's perfectly legitimate to want to stick to a platform vs another for personal preference, the people who downvoted this comment should really re-evaluate the way the approach this subject.

charlie-83 1y ago

I always found SO really slow. Often I would get stuck on something, ask a question and then have to wait an hour for a response (which would often become a back and forth of comments with large periods of time between them). Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes. I think this is likely due to the incentives SO creates. I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. I will often contribute to a discord question even if I don't full know the answer just because I think I can add something useful.

milesrout 1y ago
[dead]
lelanthran 1y ago
> Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes. On SO, at its peak, you got an answer even faster because it was public (i.e. the answer was already there, you just searched for your question). So you're comparing minutes to instant.
- tester756 1y ago
  But zig's discord is also public ;o
  - feelamee 1y ago
    Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no. So you need to manually search in discord chat instead of using google to search the whole internet.
    - tester756 1y ago
      >Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no. Why they cant? it's up to them to add support for it
1y ago

karel-3d 1y ago

You can still ask your Zig question on Stack Overflow, or they have a semi-official Discourse forum Ziggit (which I find preferable to Discord) where I got answers quickly... Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

koakuma-chan 1y ago
> Zig Discord is also just semi-official Is the Zig creator not there? I'm pretty sure he is.
- atiedebee 1y ago
  That wouldn't necessarily make it official though
- wmedrano 1y ago
  I thought the Zig creator abandoned Discord due to invasive ads sometime last year.
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  No, Andrew deleted his Discord account a while ago. Regardless, having the creator present does not make a space official, it's a matter of who owns the space and what the general policy is. The general policy of the Zig Software Foundation is to not have blessed community spaces outside of spaces used strictly for coordinating the development of Zig (those currently are the Ziglang GitHub Organization and the ZSF Zulip), so all communities are equally non-official. The main Zig Discord server is owned by community members and is actually not even the only Zig server on Discord.

rkangel 1y ago

I agree, but I think that you could get a useful middle ground by continuously publishing the contents of your Q&A Discord channel to the internet (in a way where it gets indexed by search engines). Yes, Stack Overflow collated these questions and answers better but then at least you could google for something and get the answer, rather than asking again.

gyomu 1y ago

Agreed - humans like participating in chats better (when you have a problem, you want live humans ready to answer you now), but the SO style archive is better for long term archiving & retrievability. A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.

Klonoar 1y ago
There are already several projects that have tried the “expose Discord data for indexing” model. Problem is no chat servers ever actually use them, perhaps because they’re at odds with expectations of people in the servers themselves.

krapp 1y ago

In a world where every surface of the web is infested with bots, trolls, spammers and AI slop, persistent static and public information is a hazard. Moving knowledge to ephemeral communities is an immune response to what the web has become. I'm usually not a fan of gatekeeping but doing so to filter for human beings seems like a necessary evil.

kristoff_it 1y ago

Discord is just one of many places where you can get help from other Zig community members. Over time I've seen plenty of comments like this one about platform A vs platform B and I find them all absolutely uninteresting. Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere. Some people prefer Discord and they made a comfortable home for themselves. If you prefer a different platform (which could be a matter of personal preference or an objective advantage, it really doesn't matter which it is), then go make yourself a comfortable home there and start offering help to others on it. If you're a newcomer and can't really offer much help, then you're asking for people who do have that knowledge to help you on a platform of your choice. That's certainly something you can wish for, but you can't demand it, regardless of how much objectively better your platform might be.

thunky 1y ago
> Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere. It actually does when users are pointed to discord to ask the same questions over and over. Look at the two example questions in OP's quote. Sending users to discord for those means nearly nobody else will benefit from the answers. And I think it's fair to point this out.
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  1. Questions and answers on Discord are searchable, there's a channel format that makes every conversation a thread and the UI even automatically searches for matches as you type the title of a new thread, which is what the Zig Discord server uses. It's correct to say that Discord answers will not be searchable outside of Discord, but it's factually wrong to say that you won't be able to very easily find out if your question has been asked already. 2. OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience. Zig has multiple communities and you can get help also elsewhere. A blog post that recounts one's experience doesn't need to list all other ways of getting help and it's wrong for you to assume otherwise.
  - thunky 1y ago

Zambyte 1y ago

In the context of Zig, Ziggit has been pretty nice also. I use that instead.

zamalek 1y ago

I previously worked at a fintech and they, understandably so given the domain, blocked Discord. Think for a second what wonders that does for participating in open source (which the same employer had no problem with). Discord is not a suitable platform for developers. I think Matrix is pretty good but, fuck it, I'll take IRC over Discord - it's still perfectly functional.

Buttons840 1y ago

Discord is really bad if you want more than 1-on-1 real-time communication with other humans. This is also its primary advantage.

drob518 1y ago

Discord sucks. Slack is so much better, IMO.

TUSF 1y ago

I don't think SO's "canonical answer" concept really jives with a pre-1.0 language like Zig that is still in constant flux, regularly making breaking changes. One of the questions the blog brings up as an example, "What allocator to use in WASM?" would have a different answer last year than it would this year, and may well have a different answer next year.