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The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which h

The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which historically were publicly searchable and often had a lot of great information about various hobbies and things.

mavamaarten 1y ago
Agreed. Some use it as a knowledgebase and issue tracker and forum and chatroom in one. I absolutely despise it for that use case. I mean I use it for voice chatting with friends while gaming too and it's fine for that. But if I have to beg and plead to a discord bot to join a channel to just read some docs, I'm just going to ignore your project. Not sorry about that at all.
- pteraspidomorph 1y ago
  Speaking as someone who has been running discord servers since 2015 - plus I maintain my own discord bot and am deeply familiar with the API - it's absolute garbage as an issue tracker. People really need to stop using it for that. I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.
  - Macha 1y ago
    Yeah, I think they choose "servers" at the beginning because they were targeting the gamer VOIP crowd as a sort of teamspeak competitor and so they were trying to draw an analogy between a discord group and your MMO guild's Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble server, but the terminology has stuck long after it made sense.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drooopy 1y ago
There is a special place in hell for software (including game) developers who exclusively use Discord to release patch notes, documentation, technical support, etc.
- __loam 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    Not really, when devs use discord as a hub of documentation and discussion it inherently makes the information harder to access, especially searchability-wise. You could argue "well you can just scrape it and post it online, like OP", but: 1. That's still an extra step and requires an account that could get banned doing it And 2. Others (like yourself, even!) in this thread take issue with that approach. So which is it? Just close down the information forever, yet accept no criticism about the fact you chose to host it on discord, knowing this would be the case?
    - __loam 1y ago
      The original comment wasn't "Oh this is inconvenient for me" it was "I hope they go to hell". That's a lot of entitlement in my view. If you don't want devs to run their community on discord then write your own software.
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  they dont work for you?
- Kiro 1y ago
  Why? I follow a lot of solo game developers who only use Discord and I completely understand them not wanting do deal with multiple platforms. They should focus on on the game.
  - chneu 1y ago
mjr00 1y ago
> The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder. That being said, this feature also makes Discord inappropriate for things like release announcements, patch notes, etc. which should be publicly accessible.
- GaggiX 1y ago
  >than public places like Twitter That seems to be a counterpoint to your argument. Users on Twitter usually do not hold back.
  - mjr00 1y ago
    The environment is drastically different from how it was 1-2 years ago, but the average white collar fortune 500 employee is still not going to post anything too controversial on Twitter under their real name and picture. If they are posting controversial things, which has certainly exploded post-Musk, they're making an effort to ensure they're not getting doxxed. Contrast this to Discord which is more like old-school IRC, in that even when everyone is using an alias, if you talk to the same people day-in day-out, you know a fair bit about their personal lives, such as name and where they work.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- jowea 1y ago
  You think so? I believe that's properly a consequence of culture, Discord being originally a gaming platform, and of pseudoanonymity, the same thing you have on reddit. Anyone who cares even a tiny bit can join any of those public servers and see what you posted. The big difference is that you don't have as many lurkers who just got there by googling and are going to leave immediately. By the 1-9-90 rule of thumb, that's a lot of people.
vlovich123 1y ago
> which historically were publicly searchable Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Reddit has invite only forums that I believe aren’t searchable unless you are a member. Oh and searchable if you’re a member? That’s true for Discord.
- Macha 1y ago
  You couldn't search with the forum software's built in search feature unless signed in sure, but they were usually indexed and searchable via google, and indeed many of them disabled their forum software's search feature and just directed you to google's old Custom Search Engine feature (basically a search box with hidden prefilled "site:" parameter) setup to save on server resources.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  In the pre-Internet days, even if a forum was general access, it was usually community based, such as BBS systems (literally bulletin boards, where anyone could post messages) or Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve. These communities generally comprised subscribers whose identity was known to the admins, and therefore even in a forum anyone could read, access was limited to known individuals, and people had a sense of community there, if not confidentiality. Let's hearken back to the olden days of Usenet, when every single message was transported from machine-to-machine, in the clear, and it was an essential feature of NNTP and the Usenet groups themselves that everyone could read every message and process them any way they saw fit. Usenet was helpfully indexed by topic, and so most sane posts went out already pre-sorted into the place where you'd want to search for them, but if you were a privileged user with a local Usenet feed, you could literally loop around the filesystem searching any term you wanted, because all messages and forums were plain files sorted into plain directories. A famous consequence of this openness, for example, was a talk.bizarre denizen by the name of "Kibo". One of the possibly-true rumors about this larger-than-life figure was that he exhaustively "grepped" Usenet for his name [pseudonym] and thereby found out immediately whenever he was mentioned by another poster, and therefore able to join the conversation with his acerbic wit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry Myself being introduced to Usenet around 1990, and MUD/MUCK/MUSH around the same time, I feel that it did not take long to condition me to living life "in the clear" and at least subconsciously knowing that everything I wrote had zero essential privacy. This was orthogonal to my home life, where my parents heard everything I said and did, or my religion, where there is an omniscient deity, who is thankfully full of goodness and kindness. For anyone who's paranoid or got their knickers in a twist about surveillance culture in this modern world, I suggest that you study Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders [there's an American remake, but please forget that]. Wings of Desire is a character study and a meditation on the possibility that ubiquitous surveillance doesn't need to be nefarious or evil, but perhaps, just maybe, has some benign and even beneficial effects on a cohesive society which tends to act in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire
nan60 1y ago
This is especially a problem for devs/artists that post updates exclusively over Discord. It's even worse if they don't do so in a separate channel and you have to dig through everyone chatting to find what you're looking for. This as well and the absence of threads (yes Discord has threads but who uses those) makes searching for troubleshooting help awful. Thank god BBS's are still around.
lenova 1y ago
I remember seeing a ShowHN a few years back for an app/company that made synced your Discord server with a publicly-searchable/SEO crawlable website... I wonder how they're doing: https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908

mavamaarten 1y ago

Agreed. Some use it as a knowledgebase and issue tracker and forum and chatroom in one. I absolutely despise it for that use case. I mean I use it for voice chatting with friends while gaming too and it's fine for that. But if I have to beg and plead to a discord bot to join a channel to just read some docs, I'm just going to ignore your project. Not sorry about that at all.

pteraspidomorph 1y ago
Speaking as someone who has been running discord servers since 2015 - plus I maintain my own discord bot and am deeply familiar with the API - it's absolute garbage as an issue tracker. People really need to stop using it for that. I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.
- Macha 1y ago
  Yeah, I think they choose "servers" at the beginning because they were targeting the gamer VOIP crowd as a sort of teamspeak competitor and so they were trying to draw an analogy between a discord group and your MMO guild's Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble server, but the terminology has stuck long after it made sense.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

drooopy 1y ago

There is a special place in hell for software (including game) developers who exclusively use Discord to release patch notes, documentation, technical support, etc.

__loam 1y ago
[flagged]
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  Not really, when devs use discord as a hub of documentation and discussion it inherently makes the information harder to access, especially searchability-wise. You could argue "well you can just scrape it and post it online, like OP", but: 1. That's still an extra step and requires an account that could get banned doing it And 2. Others (like yourself, even!) in this thread take issue with that approach. So which is it? Just close down the information forever, yet accept no criticism about the fact you chose to host it on discord, knowing this would be the case?
  - __loam 1y ago
    The original comment wasn't "Oh this is inconvenient for me" it was "I hope they go to hell". That's a lot of entitlement in my view. If you don't want devs to run their community on discord then write your own software.
nh23423fefe 1y ago
they dont work for you?
Kiro 1y ago
Why? I follow a lot of solo game developers who only use Discord and I completely understand them not wanting do deal with multiple platforms. They should focus on on the game.
- chneu 1y ago

mjr00 1y ago

> The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder. That being said, this feature also makes Discord inappropriate for things like release announcements, patch notes, etc. which should be publicly accessible.

GaggiX 1y ago
>than public places like Twitter That seems to be a counterpoint to your argument. Users on Twitter usually do not hold back.
- mjr00 1y ago
  The environment is drastically different from how it was 1-2 years ago, but the average white collar fortune 500 employee is still not going to post anything too controversial on Twitter under their real name and picture. If they are posting controversial things, which has certainly exploded post-Musk, they're making an effort to ensure they're not getting doxxed. Contrast this to Discord which is more like old-school IRC, in that even when everyone is using an alias, if you talk to the same people day-in day-out, you know a fair bit about their personal lives, such as name and where they work.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jowea 1y ago
You think so? I believe that's properly a consequence of culture, Discord being originally a gaming platform, and of pseudoanonymity, the same thing you have on reddit. Anyone who cares even a tiny bit can join any of those public servers and see what you posted. The big difference is that you don't have as many lurkers who just got there by googling and are going to leave immediately. By the 1-9-90 rule of thumb, that's a lot of people.

vlovich123 1y ago

> which historically were publicly searchable Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Reddit has invite only forums that I believe aren’t searchable unless you are a member. Oh and searchable if you’re a member? That’s true for Discord.

Macha 1y ago
You couldn't search with the forum software's built in search feature unless signed in sure, but they were usually indexed and searchable via google, and indeed many of them disabled their forum software's search feature and just directed you to google's old Custom Search Engine feature (basically a search box with hidden prefilled "site:" parameter) setup to save on server resources.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
In the pre-Internet days, even if a forum was general access, it was usually community based, such as BBS systems (literally bulletin boards, where anyone could post messages) or Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve. These communities generally comprised subscribers whose identity was known to the admins, and therefore even in a forum anyone could read, access was limited to known individuals, and people had a sense of community there, if not confidentiality. Let's hearken back to the olden days of Usenet, when every single message was transported from machine-to-machine, in the clear, and it was an essential feature of NNTP and the Usenet groups themselves that everyone could read every message and process them any way they saw fit. Usenet was helpfully indexed by topic, and so most sane posts went out already pre-sorted into the place where you'd want to search for them, but if you were a privileged user with a local Usenet feed, you could literally loop around the filesystem searching any term you wanted, because all messages and forums were plain files sorted into plain directories. A famous consequence of this openness, for example, was a talk.bizarre denizen by the name of "Kibo". One of the possibly-true rumors about this larger-than-life figure was that he exhaustively "grepped" Usenet for his name [pseudonym] and thereby found out immediately whenever he was mentioned by another poster, and therefore able to join the conversation with his acerbic wit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry Myself being introduced to Usenet around 1990, and MUD/MUCK/MUSH around the same time, I feel that it did not take long to condition me to living life "in the clear" and at least subconsciously knowing that everything I wrote had zero essential privacy. This was orthogonal to my home life, where my parents heard everything I said and did, or my religion, where there is an omniscient deity, who is thankfully full of goodness and kindness. For anyone who's paranoid or got their knickers in a twist about surveillance culture in this modern world, I suggest that you study Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders [there's an American remake, but please forget that]. Wings of Desire is a character study and a meditation on the possibility that ubiquitous surveillance doesn't need to be nefarious or evil, but perhaps, just maybe, has some benign and even beneficial effects on a cohesive society which tends to act in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire

nan60 1y ago

This is especially a problem for devs/artists that post updates exclusively over Discord. It's even worse if they don't do so in a separate channel and you have to dig through everyone chatting to find what you're looking for. This as well and the absence of threads (yes Discord has threads but who uses those) makes searching for troubleshooting help awful. Thank god BBS's are still around.

lenova 1y ago

I remember seeing a ShowHN a few years back for an app/company that made synced your Discord server with a publicly-searchable/SEO crawlable website... I wonder how they're doing: https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908