What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past information is, because they were there when that information was communicated and therefore never need to look back at it. These people will (obviously) recommend using Discord, since it works so well for them!
The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.
I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it.
I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.
I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online.
If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good.
Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling.
And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?
Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.
Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.
I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow.
I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what the message's level of urgency is.
It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally feels like going on vacation without your phone or something. My brain can finally relax. https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).
I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.
I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.
They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay.
As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service.
Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all?
Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.
In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.
How? I look through my discord search settings and it’s pretty straightforward. I search for something a friend posted some months back and found it pretty easy. The only difficult part is knowing which server it’s on.
Discord uses default elasticsearch settings for search, so almost every word belongs to an equivalence class of synonyms and conjugations that are often not equivalent or mutually relevant in technical usage (for gaming-related use or for work-related use!), multi-word phrase search is impossible, searches including words in the stopword list are impossible, searches including programming language syntax are impossible, etc. "ide" is a fish or an Integrated Development Environment but belongs to the same equivalence class as "i'd" (contraction of "I had" or "I would", mysteriously NOT on the stopword list!) or "id" (part of the mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory). If you go to a server concerned with programming, psychoanalysis, or fishing, and you search for "ide" or "id" you probably weren't looking for every single time anyone ever said "i'd."
So you use something designed for gaming to run a technical community, and when the search wasn’t built to handle highly complex or technical queries you complain?
It doesn't work for gaming either. I mentioned this in my comment.
Slack is a worse product in almost every way, but it does have better search than Discord if you pay 850 yen per person per month. Do you think that e.g. the Sorbet slack or the Zig community discord should pay 850 yen per person per month for any random person who wants to discuss their open source project?
Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.
I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.
The service is still very gamer centric, Discord Nitro for instance gives you a game subscription. I really hope they’re not trying to become Slack, that will be the death of them.
As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.
In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyone use them except to be weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.
In TS/Mumble/Vent terminology, there was no federation (unlike IRC), so a server was generally literally a single server hosted somewhere. All the channels, all the users, etc, went to a single machine.
Discord's selling point isn't really being a "better IRC", it's the voice chat. It's a better TS/Mumble/Ventrillo. Low-latency, decent audio quality, push-to-talk or an actually functioning level detection, with an easy to use interface. It's "Chat for Gamers" for a reason, not "IRC with history".
True, but you had to pay for a server for TS/Vent/Mumble as well, so the $5/month Discord charges for the higher voice quality is comparable (or cheaper).
Discord is voice chat, with text as a nice extra, and with image/file sharing and screen sharing and emoji/stickers/profiles (these are attractive to some people). IRC is text only. TS/Mumble/Vent were all voice chat, with really awful text chat interfaces (TS was sort of OK, Vent may as well not have had text chat).
I don't think Discord is good as an information archive, and I'm not terribly fond of seeing FOSS projects using it as a primary means of communication, but it's great for gaming compared to what we had before.
FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.
This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are.
"Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."
That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.
Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their platform, especially to something unfamiliar.
The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its extremely fast to begin, well known and even works in a browser.
If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this exact experience, what would have been egotistical would be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the thing that already works for everyone.
Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with.
We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels.
I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im
Just gonna go ahead and call it, it’s dead. Gifs are required. Even in the Slack I manage for work for a large team the primary request is we add giphy.
this tends to not be an issue for work slacks, as the fear of being fired for what could be considered abusive chat or procrastination would stop most of the spam.
Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero.
Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other people physically around the user, by breaking their concentration / getting their attention.
Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and having to be that guy who goes around asking people to silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user.
Another point for working from home is that one cannot easily distract others.
> Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user.
This is a fun one. What if the new hire doesn’t know Slack? They’ll miss all the messages until figure out how to configure their notifications. Or we leave them on by default and then still tell them how to configure their notifications. There’s no magical way to determine the users preferred setting. You also can’t do something like leave it on for mentions only, as sometimes you need to be in a conversation you were tagged in.
A better solution is to use a hammer on their volume buttons. Or buy a nice pair of noise canceling headphones.
Many of us have tried for many years to complain our way out of open plan offices, with no luck.
> What if the new hire doesn’t know Slack? They’ll miss all the messages until figure out how to configure their notifications
In my experience, the "new hires" are overwhelmed by Slack notifications, turn them off, and I have to remind them later, after they failed to respond to semi-urgent public @ and direct messages, that they can configure Slack to be notify only on @ and direct messages, and they won't be bothered by regular chit-chatter on public channels. It's happened to me with at least 4 people it can't be a coincidence.
For what it's worth, I'm even younger but completely agree with GP.
I now only use Discord for voice with two or three friends in a specific "channel" (or is it room?) but even then I would gladly use Teamspeak instead if possible.
I find it even more interesting that people want notifications from arbitrary webapps as well. It’s bad enough the amount of notifications received from installed apps, and we want random websites we go to to have the same ability?
The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day.
If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.
I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.
> Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free.
Reddit is cancer. Their karma system is ripe for abuse, and a great majority of their mods have power issues and ban for frivolous reasons. Reddit is just a joke for any real conversation.
After years and years of making bad changes to the site, they recently did one thing right: they removed or greatly extended the period that you can reply to and upvote posts. It used to be that after 6 months everything was "archived", but now I see an open comment field on posts that are ten years old.
I've already gotten one or two comment replies to some years-old comments of mine, and I was able to help answer their questions.
Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.
Just use Google. Reddit's built in search is useless in comparison. Yesterday I found a great thread about suit tailors in my city. The posts were all 3 years old but fortunately the tailor was still active. Digging up this info would be impossible on Discord, because at best I'd be locating individual comments asking about the topic, then scroll down to see if anybody bothered to post a response instead of changing the topic to something else.
I would disagree, searching for a topic or question on any search engine and appending 'reddit' gets me reddit discussions that are frequently relevant to my question (game tips, bugs encountered in some software, often real user reviews for products, etc).
Reddit's redesign is annoying and their own search isn't great but the alternative sources for a lot of communal information is completely inaccessible. I cannot search Google for Discord conversations and get information about my Lenovo laptop's rear thunderbolt port misbehaving, even though I witnessed that conversation take place multiple times on the unofficial Legion Discord community. If you're not on Discord and sort of active in a community it might as well not exist.
I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.
I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord).
That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.
I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).
I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.
And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.
However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
> However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
Slack doesn’t have a self hosted option either. This doesn’t stop literally every company on it from using it. This argument is a purist mentality. At some point you have to use someone else’s servers, or invent everything yourself.
Self hosting doesn’t even give you control, the app owner can easily put command and control software in the server image and still do whatever they want. Don’t pay your license fee? Good luck getting the keys to your encrypted data store.
In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people.
Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment.
Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't understand how people put up with that.
About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.
The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker. So I'm left skimming an entire channel that includes 50 other things that I don't care about at the moment.
The sheer volume can be overwhelming too. I went on the Zenith (VR MMO) Discord the day after release to ask a question and I found it to be useless. The channel was moving so fast that 2 min after I asked my question I couldn't even find it and had to search for it. There's no way to follow something going that fast (at least for me) and a lot of the chatter is tangential, so in addition to being poorly organized the signal to noise ratio is low.
> The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker.
And what if they don’t click the thread button? You’re back in the same problem. So the issue isn’t with discord, it’s with users.
User convos on discord are (thankfully) not indexed by google, so how? Did you also know google search devices are a thing and you can implement google search in your produce quite easily?
That’s basically how I use. Just as a replacement for Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games. It’s rather good for this use case. I think there’s maybe 10 people on our server, and I’m pretty happy with the UX.
> 2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so.
Do you perhaps have multiple sessions of discord open at the same time? I only get the login when I accidentally open discord multiple times, otherwise I never really get asked for a login.
Yeah, the company I work for actually has a public Discord server for providing support (and hosting our "community" - with some exclusions due to privacy concerns).
Because of that all of our internal staff discussions takes place in Discord, in channels that can only be seen by the "Staff" role (though modded Discord clients can show these channels' names - because channel listing, both voice and text based, seems to have been relegated to client-side so the server just sends ALL channel names, but not the actual contents unless you have the role since that is checked server-side).
While we do have a system that management based staff are invited to (I won't name it because NDA, but it's incredibly easy to guess), but it is only used in case there's a *massive* Discord outage and the staff end up in an extended communications "blackout" because of the outage - however it has _never_ actually been used, at least in the time I've been part of it.
Yes, most of my work conversations happen on discord servers. Discord provides a better chat service than slack, so I don't see how it would be unusual for people to use Discord over slack.
Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for multi account, so your account for talking with your friends, taking classes and finding information on that video game is the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect your identity online.
To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc.
I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.
In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place, will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become the manager /s.
I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with the "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature.
I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
> I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
As far as I'm aware, Discord usually only hands out bans for this when you use an alt-account to ban evade. Though I can certainly understand not wanting to risk it if you use it for work (I'm affected by this as well).
This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.
I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common.
The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"
USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one.
Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).
The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7.
On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes forever.
One thing I never understood is why so many forums neglected to implement sage functionality like what you have on imageboards. There would never have been bans for so-called 'necroposting'.
If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.
> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.
You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.
That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
> I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer
Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.
> These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits, which are usually touted as superior alternatives to Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found a solution to a problem predating Discord.
Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on.
Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.
I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic.
Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.
I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.
That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.
Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.
You are missing the meta of informational channels which are read only channels which come with information for people to reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.
Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea.
If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible.
Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way.
Anything that funnels people into multi-thousand post individual pages is going to lose information.
Old proboards forums, github issues, and wikis don't have this problem. Content is in smaller blocks that can be linked to easily, and there is a strong culture of keeping topics focused. You don't have multiple unrelated conversations in one place.
You can jump to the end or beginning of a thread when quickly skimming to see if it's relevant.
And you can see all threads in a given time period pretty easily with pagination, when you want to understand the larger picture at a point and time.
These are all things that are useful both for a sense of community and for technical work itself.
I've been working with this idea for a while, that it's immutable pagination that makes any written work worthwhile. With it we can spatially reason about it and we commit its location to memory. You can never do that with an infinite scroll.
Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use slack for example.
The problem with growing content is that either the location changes because you either see newest first or you autos roll down to the latest on entry.
Navigation through a time based ToC seems like a compromise but not one I love
Forum pagination locations never change unless a whole bunch of stuff is deleted. Page 0 is always the oldest.
Even with deletion, and traditional pages, you could make pages immutable in several ways. actually creating explicit page objects in the database, saying "page 40 starts at N time and goes until the next page object"
> There is a strong culture of keeping topics focused
I think you're mistaking the type of content on Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their platforms.
Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of academic citations.
GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe.
They both have the same property: end users displaying individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments.
People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work.
And that's okay, we all do.
Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use. It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search, grep, or any other search bar I've encountered.
Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord than picking up regex and grep ever was.
- in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that would make it possible to index without setting up a separate archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172
- messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)
- you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you clicked on search result, you lose the context about the remaining results
- you can login with Github (so no need to register for many people, at least for programming-related projects)
Zulip is great in concept, but the execution lets it down a little. "stream events" for example sounds awfully techie. The UI is not very pretty, fonts are small, etc. It's not clear where to start a chat in a brand new (or empty channel). If they focused on UI for a few months they'd have an easy winner, but in its current state I've had two separate non-techie teams look at it and recoil, and go back to Slack.
(Also, Zulip should try to compete against NextDoor - but to do so they'd need more control around content expiry once the storage limit was hit. No neighborhood is going to pay $7 per user, so the free offering needs to be compelling.)
I hate the discordification of communities. A lot of them did not survive the modern era and moved en masse there, but the experience is miserable, and they're usually moderated in a manner that doesn't spur discussion ("move to this section for X topic", et cetera, that's just one I see often). Finding content? You have to use some weird bot or the awful search function worthy of a high school assignment website project. Besides, it's also difficult to access it from my recent experience. You can provide a valid email and phone number, validate, and it may still suspend you for "violating ToS" (?) immediately after signing up. I don't think it's suited for a lot of things that end up on there, that shouldn't really be in IM-form, but maybe it's just old-me.
That's actually my number one issue with Discord: the stratification of discussion. With IRC, your "community" is a singular channel where everyone congregates and talks. It can be chaotic, and maybe you only check in and catch up so often, but it's all in one place.
Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super specific topics. So you're not only spreading discussion over tons of channels where things will be evenly quiet and unnoticed, but you now have to go and laboriously check each of them to find new stuff. Or mute half of them you don't care about so you're not constantly being spammed with unread indicators. This also creates the "internet cop" problem, where whoever created the community (or someone they added as a moderator) feels the need to constantly yell at people for having organic discussions instead of searching for the specific channel approved for topic #365.
Basically, the whole thing seems to discourage discussion more than foster it, because people simply don't work that way. That sort of structure works for forums, but not for something happening in real time.
The "human" aspect of discord annoyed me too much, there's indeed a lot of seriousness brought by the "possibilities" of the app and the spirit of today where everything has to be classified. People are becoming very tense about information, it's like music shows with smartphone filming except with admins in a chan.
The worst part about Discord is that it is against their ToS to use third-party clients (and there are reports of people's accounts being banned for them making the black hole effect worse). In particular, you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen:
>All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.
> you can't have a client that has [...] better information density on the screen
A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.
I'd argue that it's not too significant of an issue, as generally most clients do a good job of presenting themselves with completely normal behaviour to the discord api.
Most people are banned because of API limits, such as attempting to spam without keeping in mind the limits, (Random delays with around 1 msg/s last I tried), or there's a bug in the client, such as ripcord once causing a login loop for me.
If you keep it sensible, it's fine.
Most people using these custom clients know the dangers and keep information on how to get back into everything, so there's not too much of a black hole effect.
As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it.
I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others. I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.
The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a wiki).
Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums.
Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this property by requiring some sort of authentication for new members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of the channels.
Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box, discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages; like social media, it nudges you into using a single account for all your different interests. I can see how this combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards and IRC.
They usually were two separate parts on the same page, the shout-box was a widget and its content did not get indexed. The forum was usually not a single-page application, and forum threads were paginated. Here's a modern-day example [1]
I'm a discord user. I'm in several servers. I'm even Nitro.
...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not use the software.
Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to join is very low.
Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies you for every message until you tune it down.
I guess it is a personal preference then. I don't think any project will stop you from posting questions on GitHub in their issues. I for one will happily answer questions in discord or GitHub issues. I don't know about others.
One of my biggest issues is that the principles and ideas that come with the open source community are practically shutout by the use of discord. Information does not flow freely, it's locked in a server and it's not easily accessible by other people. It's not indexed by search engines. It might as well be missing completely. Half the time I plan to learn an open source project and learn that the majority of the discussion goes on in Discord, I already know that I'm going to have a horrible time finding answers when I need them so I just search for alternatives.
This is the argument that most of these comments are making. But Discord isn't supposed to replace a bug tracker or documentation. It's supposed to replace IRC or a mailing list.
The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all.
And if you really need some piece of information in the Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search for it, all you need is an email.
I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly prefer it to forums or IRC.
Isn't it an illusion though that GitHub is more accessible than discord? Yes, it's indexed by Google, buy these days it'll disappear quickly if it is deleted. I don't even know if all of GitHub and its issues are even indexed to be honest.
You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read only without an account.
> There are a few things that are repeated questions
I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails.
It's an issue with the people, not the format.
EDIT:
> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.
Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent.
For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever."
Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.
Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my experience. The way the discussion is structured changes completely when someone on the other end responds instantly, and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge.
There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.
Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse.
I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.
Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years later.
Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or less, large bots need approval) can see every message event in every channel they have access to using the websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API.
From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.
Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit will get leaked anyway
I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion.
Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.
As far as I can remember, I've never been able to use Discord at all as a guest through any device on my home network (always demands verification; never used Discord before through the ISP, and undoubtedly my dynamic IP has changed many times throughout).
This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid' screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for which the help link doesn't even include the case of being seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord.
Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.
Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
I've started doing my composer installs offline when I foolishly tried to deploy a decently sized PHP project to a VPS with "only" 2GiB of RAM. For some obscure reason Composer eats RAM like it's cake and I couldn't get it to complete fast enough on the server itself.
Composer on shared hosts is a challenge, mostly involving retrying until it works. That's why I fetch most dependencies locally. Sometimes I mess with the dependencies a bit when a specific dependency requires information about how the operating system is configured, but most of the time that's not necessary.
You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are going to want to pay to host a forum.
And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already familiar with setting up servers, handling access, setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you evening or two just to get going and after that it requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these custom forums actually have backups in case something goes wrong?
Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice, but then again you didn't know that when you started. Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course you need to setup the software and learn how it works and keep it up to day forever.
Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.
Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data.
TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.
the free cycle is the worst, vc money screws over a lot of people that could just be running traditional businesses - there are good institutional shake ups as a result sometimes, but then the new players ultimately become what they sought to disrupt
I know how to run pi, but that doesn't mean it makes sense for everyone else or even most of the people. Say you have some open source project and there is a need to have some form of communication. You can either jump through the hoops to host your own forum that you need to host and monitor. Now you are spending time you could be using to work on your project on sysadmin stuff. So either you pay for it, which feels bad when there is free alternatives available which will do the job just as well with only lacking some discoverability in form of text search, but you can redemy that by making a sticky comment where you have FAQ or whatever you need.
Evne with digital ocean you still need to worry your server and keep it up to date which again takes time out of your actual project.
I don't see what problems you people see with Discord. Yeah you can't take all of the conversation data with you, but is that really what you would even want? I don't know what kind of projects you are running where forum is so much superior to discord.
a project other people use? they can google answers or use forum search… I’m not at their beck and call to answer questions in chat
different people will like different things, but chat is transient
an hour a month on server maintenance isn’t going to make or break anyone’s project, but if you don’t like tinkering with things there’s nothing wrong with that
i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.
I'm more likely to go into Github issues or Discussions. If I join your discord, there's no guarantee I'll get an answer. I'm not staring at your Discord for a few hours trying to see if anyone decides to answer the question when they log back in
Discord "won me" over the voice chat. It's just so easy to use and setup for people. I know it's a hard pill to swallow on HN but NOT everyone wants and/or can run their own TS/Mumble/Ventrilo server. That's the number 1 reason Discord became popular in gaming groups. Want voice chat for your WoW raid? 2 clicks. Going to play CSOG with your friends? Here is the voice chat channel.
Discord is not perfect for sure (the search function is atrocious for example) but more intuitive and easier to use than the other options. And you can also stream, share screen, rich embed things etc.
You can get just as good voice chat on Signal, and it is miles easier to use than Discord, especially for people familiar with WhatsApp, Viber and other privacy invaders.
And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets glorified over work just as well over [matrix]
Signal is a pile of crap. Seriously I am in a small chat with four other people and sometimes it just doesn’t sync messages and when it does my phone turns into a vibrating sex toy for 20 minutes.
But you don't have to sign up to chat, you can open Discord in your browser and join a server as guest. Granted, the server might limit what guests can do.
I just went through the sign-up process and no phone number was required though, only email.
I feel like Discord is very different than Signal or WhatsApp and target very different use cases.
Signal and WhatsApp are basically replacements for phone, SMS, and MMS while Discord is meant to be more of a community with many people on many topics in many channels.
They are all quite good at what they do, but they do different things.
Does Signal even have some sort of channels? From their website it looks like it's just chats like iMessage/WhatsApp etc? It might be great at what it does but no Discord I'm in would work without channels.
It is exactly like WhatsApp. In fact, nowadays, WhatsApp is Signal (as in, they use the same protocol), but it's the same hierarchy: contacts + groups of contacts, and nothing else.
No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an app, not do they need to make an account.
Navigation is horribly broken if you don't login. You're just stuck in a loop typing in usernames.
Several OSS projects that I've seen even have sophisticated bot protection and code of conduct agreement schemes that will hide the useful channels until you apply reactions on verification messages.
IRC channels used to keep public logs. Can we at least have parity with that?
The app is only needed for a couple features of voice chat like push to talk when Discord is in the background unfocused.
Server owners are able to configure a verification level. When on the lowest verification level (which is the default setting when making a server) new users without a discord account can join by simply typing the nickname they would like to use.
Agreed. They also do some black magic where even with my mic wide open it won’t pick up things I don’t want it to. I could eat potato chips right into the mic and it won’t turn the mic on, but as soon as I speak it does. The vox in discord always amazes me. It seems to always know what I want to transmit and what I don’t.
Anecdotally, yes, but I doubt most users deliberately make themselves unprofitable. There're millions of kids who just want to use voice chat and share meme gifs. Plus Discord has been gating a lot of features behind Nitro in recent years, and they make a lot of money from Nitro/Boost purchases (it's hard to tell since they're privately owned but they might make close to 200 million this year). I suspect they can stay afloat without VC funding (though they keep getting it anyway). And their valuation is really high.
Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information.
Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.
Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.
In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion platform, make one.
And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's lots of unattractive platforms already.
> The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to create third party clients.
Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".
I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging.
Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you.
> A Discord community that I moderate
> The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
A ThinkPad with Ryzen 3500U, 16G RAM and NVMe SSD.
> I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Sorry, Discord is nowhere near the concept of being lightweight. I use both web based and desktop IRC clients and none of them make my laptop sound like it's about to be launched into outer space. Sure, they may not have all the features that Discord offers but both of them let me talk to thousands of users, which is what I expect.
Again, third party clients would definitely help here but Discord is hostile towards them. Spotify is a good example in this case. Their website is just as sluggish but at least I can use several desktop and terminal clients and not worry about buying a better laptop or more RAM.
> This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
I'm more suprised and disappointed with Discord than this behaviour by people on the Internet. Their rules say that they don't allow spam and raiding servers and even when we provide detailed screenshots of people talking about raiding us and leaving spam on our servers, they don't bother the least bit about taking any sort of action. The only response that we got from them, just once, after sending them multiple reports was "ban them". No shit, I didn't know I could do that, thanks Discord.
The problem with Discord is it fails to provide any way at all to move from chat to forum, or perhaps a better phrase would be "plazas and warrens" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... . Discord nails the 'fast' part but there's no way for good stuff to 'percolate up' into slower long-term mediums (https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design). Usenet had FAQs, IRCs had associated mailing lists & bugtrackers, Reddits have wikis, and so on. Discord has just an ever-increasing backlog. (The search functionality isn't too bad, but nevertheless, I regularly found myself searching for stuff I knew I or someone else had said or linked, and failing to find it simply because there were so many hits to scroll through snippets thereof.)
I don't see Reddit's Wikis, IRC Mailing lists, Usenet FAQs as "integrated" into the core experience particularly well.
Reddit Wikis are just a parallel communication channel vended by the same company. If I was going to do user journey analysis, from the core user experience of "Reddit threads" to Reddit wikis... it's not there.
Famously, nobody ever reads the Reddit sidebar/FAQs.
Someone has to essentially manually copy and update content in a wiki/FAQ. Which has gone from Web 2.0 esque content creation, to a very "Web 1.0-esque" approach.
Ultimately I feel like people are just demanding from Discord, something that IRC style communication has never provided. The closest we've ever gotten that I've seen is Slack search.
"Quick and easy to write" is honestly just perpendicular to "quick and high quality" to read.
I think with most chat mediums it's hard to escalate / archive a chat thread into a post somewhere that could be useful as a support reference for example. And there is nothing in discord preventing people from escalating into associated mailing lists, forms and bug trackers like IRC, it just isn't culturally done, except maybe a few with github issue trackers.
> Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists.
However, email has one property that basically all chat platforms lack: each mail is presented as a standalone unit of correspondence with its own metadata, from the start. Just like with forum posts, you spend some minutes writing it, then send it off and wait for a reply—not continuously mash the keyboard, sending your thoughts nearly raw one after another. Streams-of-consciousness that are chats, are not suited to be indexed and presented as separate and complete pieces of info, at all.
>Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord. Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private conversation with your buddies.
I agree 100% with the article. To community organizers: for the love of all that is holy, set up a proper message board with threaded discussions. Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?
Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-purpose channel, conversations die off as the subject of discussion is constantly changing. If I wasn't online at the time, I can't bring up the same topic the next morning, because it's been discussed already.
Compare this to something like the forums on rateyourmusic.com. There are long-standing conversations about specific topics that are years old. Everything is easily searchable, and can be refined to searching inside topics. On profile pages for artists and albums, you can see links to discussions related to that artist or album. This is elegant design that's extremely user friendly. The polar opposite of that is a Discord server with with 5-6 extremely broad channels, and a never-ended series of ellipses notifying you that someone is about to post another message that will soon be lost to the void.
It helps create a sense of community very quickly, and it helps keep it alive.
Honestly, trying to judge Discord for its ability to structure information is simply missing its point. I dislike many things about Discord, but projecting my needs or preferences onto it and saying it's bad based on that alone is quite shortsighted.
Discord is a wonderful program for real-time communication and asynchronous conversations. But are either of those use-cases how you want to provide a help system?
Imagine if Stack Overflow was ephemeral. If once you asked a question, the question and answer slowly faded into nothingness for everyone who wasn't actively on the system when it was asked? And anyone who wanted help had to ask again, while the experts rolled their eyes going "Ugh, we answered that like a dozen times already!".
It's a different use-case. It requires a different tool.
I think this is a serious problem for the companies you mentioned. Some questions are asked maybe dozens of times and there is no written answer anywhere. or this is the correct one i don't know but it's a weird problem.
We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like the same reason teams use Slack for the perceived relatively friction-free ability to post, despite its equivalent issues for business communication.
It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.
> It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be selling a product.
If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an answer. Users will ask for answers in the most convenient way (asking on discord) in hopes of getting a quick answer. This does NOT mean that they will not fall back to googling if that avenue fails.
You're totally right and of course we help away. Reducing the steps to be able to ask a question is also a better user experience, hence ditching the forum. Give users what they want, including timely responses.
But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the friction.
I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually improving documentation as common questions emerge and a "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response, which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the development of new tutorials, etc.
Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved replies and voted :)
”Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron.” Nothing to add!
elephant in the room: discord is another set of closed network protocols with a lot of centralized/multicast/relay servers. And it is free as in free beer: the discord ppl were granted tons of money. Where those tons of money do come from? From the usual blackrock and vanguard funds or their proxies? This is probably public information, but I have not looked into that.
If I want to interact with ppl on discord servers: either I have to build a google(blink/geecko)/apple(webkit) browser (which I don't and won't), or use their linux proprietary "app" which expects a massive distro with tons of big deps. The steam client is very far from expecting as much from a distro than this app, and they are both, roughly speaking, packaged/librar-ized google blink engines (libcef).
Why something that much toxic for internet can "succeed" (or make a lot of noise): it is insanely easy to use, provides full voice/video calls and more, and is free as in free beer (yeah... massive free bandwidth at a worldwide scale!!).
How to do the same with "open and sane protocols" and not force ppl to use a google/apple based browser?
Well it is super ez:
1 - get massive amount (I guess at least as much as the discord guys) of funding to make all the servers and bandwidth free as in free beer, worldwide.
2 - if you get 1, we'll talk about 2...
Discord channel sprawl is a strange phenomenon. It happens to each server I’ve joined, just gets worse over time.
I think park of the issue is that you cant /part a channel in discord. Every channel you have access is automatically joined, you can’t leave and you have to adjust notifications for each to avoid an overwhelming number of messages.
That and the communities are usually small-ish so you have the same people in most of the channels.
The solution I use to combat this is right click > mute server for every server I join, and also check the box under notifications > suppress @everyone and @here notifications. Then if I want notifications (either just the visual dot indicator or an actual ping for messages) I can do that on a per channel basis.
The only notifications I get are when I'm explicitly tagged or if a role I've opted in to is tagged. This cleans up the notification spam almost entirely, I only wish there was a way to set that as the default for any new server I join.
Even small communities can have painfully unaware, "organization" obsessed OCD people in it. They are generally the ones that keep insisting some particular thread of discussion really belongs in #xyz.
I am constantly infuriated by companies who sell actual products but leave user support up to some crowdsourced endless scrolling nightmare. Even if they do have a forum the topics (if they exist) will be so broad that everything gets jumbled in together. The search function is often sub par and kind of useless for new users who may not know the exact keywords they are looking for and apart from a little gamification (points or titles) you have no idea which is an authoritative answer or who actually knows what they're talking about. Ask any technical question anywhere on one of these and you're bound to get someone telling you to reinstall your operating system/reset your device to factory settings no matter how minor the actual fix is.
I just recently got into a few old games with mods and stuff, and am having my share of sites gone up Lethe, search engines being clueless lately, file sharing sites poofed into the wind or serving a 404, and things just not behaving in my environment. Now that I'm also presented with the thought of all info being clumped into endless inaccessible chat logs, I'm already mourning for when I try to fiddle with current-ish games in ten years from now and fail miserably. Plus, If Discord itself disappears, that'll be a massive brain fart for gaming as a whole.
Individual pages for each discussion are awesome, how are people not seeing that? There are of course two sides: that keeping Discord channels is easy (I guess) and brain-dumping into the chats is effortless, for better or worse; and that searching for past info is impossible—but who thinks of that now. Good luck to me in ten years, with reading through ten years worth of chats.
(Gamers are already pretty bad at having their mod files preserved and served securely, what with shady file sharing sites that keep dying, and no checksums anywhere. And with complete absence of open-source culture—just download this binary linked in a forum comment, from a shady site, and run it with admin privileges, what could go wrong!)
My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling logs.
There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file.
That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in.
Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.
By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.
I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done completely offline.
If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're interested in out of it.
The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can sometimes be useful) and voice chat.
Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for me than IRC.
I don't know a way to export logs, but I am in some Discord channels which have a bot joined to connect them to an IRC channel in a 2-way echo. The IRC side of that could be logging everything from that channel with standard IRC logs.
> "The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images and voice chat."
Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python markdown syntax; replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.
> replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.
I actually really despise this feature, because it pings the user you're replying to by default and you have to explicitly turn it off as a user sending the message. "Server" admins cannot change the functionality around.
From a personal standpoint it's not generally a problem, but my company uses Discord as a support platform so we (the staff) end up constantly getting pinged when we do not want to, especially when it's for a message that we may have posted in our general "community area" a few hours ago, and someone has just now decided to reply with "lol" and it generates a ping for it.
Pinging should be opt-in not opt-out, just like when replying to someone before hand, you explicitly needed to make a conscious choice to ping them.
Even worse, when the feature was first released, literally editing your message (even if you explicitly turned off the ping) caused it to ping the other user.
It's actually against our rules to ping support staff in ticket channels (primarily because someone will either ping everyone with the staff role upon two seconds after the ticket opens - or ping a staff member to "bump" their ticket), but its not like we can realistically enforce that for reply-generated pings due to the fact that most of the time its accidental (we do ask them to turn off the ping after the first time - and a good chunk of the time people "forget" to still do so, whether intentionally or unintentionally). /endrant
I remember their official twitter responding to someone that exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump
But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.
I agree, but it's not discord's fault.
Discord is great at what it does. I find the same social issues with discord, slack, gitter, irc, matrix.org, etc. Chat may be good for the questioneer, but it's bad for search/retention. I kind of miss the prominence of phpbb.
Under "Room Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Who can ready history?" do you have "Anyone" set? I believe this controls whether it can be indexed or not, as if you have it on any of the "Members only" settings, their bot needs to be in the room for it to see history.
Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to administrating a Matrix server so I could be wrong, but the logic seems to make sense with my suggestion.
Discord is the open source equivalent of companies replacing customer service call centers with a phone menu "assistant". It saves time and resources for the maintainers to just say "check the discord!"
At Typesense [1] we face a similar problem with Slack. Slack has been great for us in terms of quickly discussing an issue but the free plan limits the searches to last 10K messages. We would be happy to pay for it but the current pricing model is just not catered towards large communities where users interact in periodic bursts. Most communities will not be able to afford it.
I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that it's against Slack's ToS.
If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.
Several people in this thread have complained about it, but I haven't had any issues.
It's O(log n), it has fuzzy search (e.g. noun/verb forms the same word), and you can add qualifiers like `from:Author#1234`.
I can normally join a Discord server for a project, search for a keyword, find someone else with the same question, and read the chat log from that point in time.
no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.
Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects, like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems, audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?) scheme...
> no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.
No, the reason for that is more likely that all the darn generation-Z kids are deathly afraid (and therefore pretend to be deeply contemptuous) of any old-fashioned technology created by Unix greybeards.
You put in a search engine network_name channel_name and hope someone else logged. If its a technical channel, someone almost always did and also did share it.
At least with IRC, many would run bots which made channel logs available somewhere that could be indexed by a search engine. Doing the same with Discord will earn you a TOS ban.
IIRC, scripting your own account is bannable, so you can't download the contents of servers you join. But I don't think there's any prohibition on inviting a proper bot account to download messages, provided you have admin access on the server to do so.
I experienced this when I bought a niche 3D printer (a CR30, which is a belt printer).
The machine required a lot of finessing to get working properly, and almost all of the information was in discord channels.
The people writing and sharing info in those channels were of course very gracious and helpful, but it was frustrating to try and search for things there instead of on a traditional forum.
I posted an Ask HN:[0] about this a few days ago but somehow it did not turn up in Ask HN. Probably my mistake. Still, this is a bad issue imho. I like discord and use it a lot, but I would just, at least for the open source projects I follow and work with , that everything is dumped in HTML so that it's indexed. When working on tech it's so valuable to be able to find architectural choices and solutions to problems later on; when they are solely in discord, they are hard/impossible to find now, let alone in a few years.
i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.
Discord is so overwhelming. I tried a few month ago to join programming related servers, and holy shit, what a stressful experience! I’m not that old school but compared to forums it is just so hard to follow what is happening with all those notifications and discussions happening at the same time.
After muting all servers and channels, and only joining small-ish communities things started to become better but I cannot imagine keeping the client open and try to follow what is happening, it feels like a full time job.
Of course I may be using the tool incorrectly, people seem to appreciate IRC and I never understood what was attractive about it, outside of small groups.
Yes - I think there is some general confusion about the different applications.
I personally think its fine that discord is a black hole. Its a voice and text chat program. Its great for instant research, instant interaction - its not for the detailed and considered laying out of some idea. Forums or blogs would be better for that.
PS Dark corporate spy note: I'm not saying btw, that Discord is literally a black hole. I'm sure they keep and measure everything and have their AI bots running over the data. The data will also be re-worked by MS or whoever eventually buys them in future, to build even better profiles of us.
It's weird that people have gotten so down on the concept of p2p and all in on federated services. To me it's so obvious that p2p systems have a huge advantage as far as adoption possibilities.
Maybe what we need is something like Web gateways for p2p services.
Have some ideas about a distributed live forum that uses webrtc and IPFS or something but since it's such an interesting idea to me and also not fully formed that usually means other people will hate it with passion and bury the comment.. making it a total waste of time to try to develop or explain the idea.
Discord is like having a conversation in a loud, popular pub between happy hour ending and business peaks. Some people love it. I imagine it relates to how much hearing loss and the depth of interaction desired. Github's various features and stackexchange appear to fill the gap covering the entirety of happy hour.
1) It's not worse than IRC or Slack, and in some ways superior since it has a lower barrier of entry (IRC is... IRC, and slack user management/invite system is weird)
2) When was recording of live, synchronous communication ever meant to be a repository of information? Do people complain that audio transcriptions of group discussions are an inadequate replacement for purposely written documentation? There's a reason you take notes during a meeting.
Hence the quote, "Issue queue or it didn't happen." That was Drupal's idiom and it still applies to projects in general.
> While all of these other communication mechanisms are great, esp. for hashing things out more effectively in real time, it's absolutely critical that a summary of what was talked about make its way back here for the benefit of those who couldn't be there, including Google, and yourself 2 weeks later when you totally forget what you talked about. :P There needs to be a URL to point people at who have questions later on. However. As a text-based medium, the issue queues are an ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE medium through which to have a heated discussion about whatever. For that you turn to one of the others.
I periodically see complaints like this posted here. I wonder if I am in an information bubble.
Are HN readers, a more traditional forum, biased against non-traditional fora? If nothing else, it would be hard for to post a link on HN to Discord discussion about the advantages of Discord, where, presumably, such a discussion would most likely transpire.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm tired of proprietary, centralized communication systems. What I want is open, accessible, and decentralized or at least federated, or something that someone can start up an instance of. I don't care if you want to start your own server, or use something hosted, I just want it to be the case that someone can.
Traditional forums aren't networked. It's not like I can mirror HN either. But I could go start a forum somewhere if I wanted, and there would be a record of posts somewhere.
Discord kinda runs into two problems for me: it isn't an open decentralized protocol, and it seems like it's being misused or something? I guess if devs want to use it and welcome anyone to come in and see what's going on, great. But then I'd prefer they use something decentralized, and it still isn't a substitute for a forum or forum-like place.
I think your question is an important one just as a sort of perspective check, but I can articulate pretty clearly what it is about use of Discord that bothers me, and can point to very popular systems that work much better as theoretical examples or templates in my mind (for example, Matrix, Reddit, or Twitter).
One can hardly describe Discord as non-traditional, since there are no new ideas on display. It’s well executed for the needs of a particular segment, that’s all.
I use Discord in the browser. There is no way I'm aware of to tell which 'server' the notification sound came from, making the sound a completely useless annoyance.
I do not enable desktop notifications, it's just playing the sound in the browser tab. If there is some other pop-up inside the browser tab I've never noticed it.
I haven't made that bad an experience with Discord. I remember having an issue with Svelte and simply not finding the answer even though I thought that should be a fairly common problem (disabling SSR). There were threads on Github with the same problem but no answer, and closed. I went to Discord to ask someone there, but first search for it in the chat, and lo and behold: It was there, white on black.
Maybe I was lucky, that the problem had such a clear keyword to look for. But writing an extensive documentation of ypur project takes a lot of time, and having a place where ALL people can ask questions and other people can find them is a good thing (nothing against Svelte's docs, they're amazing). Maybe Discord could improve search functionality, and a clear culture of channel organization still has to develop
If that would have been asked and resolved on a forum anyone using a search engine would be able to find the solution. Instead you have to create a discord account, install the client, join the server, agree to the server rules, search for what you want, hope you find an answer.
Discord is by no means perfect but we have to give it credit where it's due: It is a very fast and responsive platform. I am currently in "servers", as they call them, with thousands of users and it feels just as effortless as one on one chats. It also offers a great deal of separation as well as public options. Comparing it to slack for instance, where every chat is almost an independent ecosystem. and using more than one is always additional effort. Video calls on the other hand are second to none. The only true criticism I have is the fact that all file uploads are entirely public with no restrictions whatsoever and as far as I can tell, there is no option to change that. Still, it is my top choice of all the proprietary options by a considerable margin.
Twenty or so years ago I was running Hotline and KDX servers, and loved having "my own place" where people could visit and hang out. Recently, I started a Discord channel to rediscover some of that same feeling, but it's mostly become a persistent chat for my friends (in lieu of Messanger, Telegram, etc). Some other channels I've joined are quite quirky and fun though.
The main difference being that you could only be logged in at one server at a time – unless you had multiple client installs – and there's something nice about that limit; you have to choose a hangout and tend to engage more because of it.
I agree with the OP though – I wouldn't rely on Discord as a knowledge repo…
It just needs to export to html every 24 hours and dump that on a server; then it's indexed by DDG and Google etc. It's not like that costs money or anything.
Good idea, and I suppose people wouldn't have a problem throwing yet another bot into their server. I'd imagine the data it's scraping to be IMMENSE considering Discord saves everything.
Discord being a black hole for information is a feature, not a bug. It's for in the moment communication with some asynchronous applicability. But if you use it as your primary source for community-created information, you're using it wrong.
I think that feature makes quite obvious why Microsoft was interested in purchasing Discord - that would give Redmond an enormous amount of information to mine through every second, every day
What's really great about discord is how I keep running into a situation where I have random pings from the hundreds of server chatrooms I may or may not be a part of, with no easy way of telling where they came from. Great.
I was just interested in learning about a micro blogging project from Twitter and their blog is basically empty, but the discord has a lot of activity. It's a bit jarring to see these professionals interacting on a gaming platform, and adds a lot of friction for me personally. I'm really interested in the technology and updates but not enough to sift through their chitchatting. No offense.
My developer relations team uses Discord. For us, it is more about strategy and design questions that are often tied to the customer's particular use case. If there are common themes or challenges, we will turn it into a blog post, video, docs, etc to capture it.
Other discussions such as "why doesn't this code work?" or "this behavior seems unexpected" we redirect to StackOverflow and GitHub. Discord also serves as an activity hub for us as we have channels with automated feeds from blogs, youtube, stackoverflow, github, twitter, etc all located in a single location.
Never liked Discord. Always thought it was extremely confusing and cluttered. Information overload for sure, and very hard to keep track of things unless you are checking it constantly.
Discord is perfect, the only problem is backing up that information. I'm on several Rust discords. There's several orders of magnitude more discussion on there than the rust subreddit. If in 5 years the admins abandon one of the discords, and it gets taken over by trolls, and Discord is forced to ban the group, will that information vanish into the ether? Currently the answer is yes. But ideally there would be some way to archive channels to your own site or something.
I probably missed the window on this conversation, but what I want is a halfway point between Discord and Reddit.
Yes, it's probably proprietary.
- I log in to one website, and I see all my forums.
- I don't want to log in to seven different forums. Like Discord, I log in once and see everything.
- Forums are private. Like Discord, they're not scraped, they're not open to the public. There are some very public Discords, but all of them require initial permission to access, which can be removed.
- Conversations are chronological, not the weird reddit tree.
- Forums don't have a permanent URL. There is no 'r/programming' or 'r/politics' or whatever. _Your_ programming community is different from _my_ programming community.
Companies keep switching their private forums to Discord because they don't have to host. What if we just had a centralized place to host a forum? That ran like a normal forum.
People could pay for 'Nitro', forums hosts could pay for QoL benefits in their forum, etc. Minimally intrusive ads. Stuff like that.
I realize it being proprietary perpetuates a lot of problems, but I feel like we nerds haven't solved the distributed <-> ease of access problem yet.
>for whatever reason server admins just love to split the community across what feels like hundreds of unnecessary channels no one will ever use or look at
I see this one a lot. Server Admins love to customize their servers and the primary way they do it is by adding a thousand channels with emoji names that make them difficult to link to, and dozens of bots that have marginal utility at best and are absolute noise factories at worst.
I really like Discord, but maybe its cus I grew up without internet. If you joined some club (like geology club or something) back in the day, you would show up and ask questions and whoever was there would answer your questions and ye would chat. They wouldn't respond by simply saying "RTFM!!" or "Someone already asked this!"
I think that attitude (like on stack overflow) That they are building some kind of perfect repository of knowledge for the ages from these various question and answers is delusional and has ruined that site in recent years. Most stuff on the internet seems to be highly transitory, constantly getting taken down by DMCA or some other bullshit with new stuff being uploaded in its place. Also the questions and answers themselves quickly become obsolete as tech changes.
Also, simply RTFM is not a good way to learn. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that asking questions and interactive learning is superior to simply learning by rote out of a book. When I'm learning (especially at the beginning, I really wanna ask loads of dumb questions and chat to someone who is already versed in the subject)
For software projects, Discord isn’t my favorite either. But on the other hand, I have used it successfully for getting help, and finding previous answers to my questions. To say everything gets buried in the flow of chat doesn’t make much sense to me. Discord has a rather robust search feature, and it works well. Search for what you need, if it was talked about before you’ll find it. If not ask a new question.
I would argue that all timeline-based communication tools are black holes for information.
How much knowledge has been lost to IRC channels, chat conversations, forum threads, and so-on?
Yes, many of us have gotten good (or even excellent) at parsing through threads to find the nuggets of information that lead us to the understanding we seek, but it’s clearly not the environment that information wants in order to thrive.
Strange criticism. Feels more like the person is unhappy with community managers / admins who don't know better and shoehorn Discord into everything community-related, especially where a more async easier to catch-up with media like forum would work better.
Fast-moving chat channels and forums both have their very valid uses.
Again we have the two sides "everything is thrown away" vs "everything is kept forever".
This: "Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron." - Turd Ferguson
is not the same value as a piece of documentation for how to use a tool might be, both needing to be kept forever and surfaced in all future search results. Forum content is awful in its own ways.
Is there no system which keeps good content and poor content is deleted over time? For values of 'good' and 'poor' which mirror what people might want in search results, 'what does $error mean?' being good and 'I HATE THING, THING USERS ARE IDIOTS' being bad even if archaeologists might love it.
Something we're trying to do about this on the Matrix side is MSC2716 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc271...) - the ability to import archives of existing content into Matrix, and thus 'lock it open' and decentralise it for posterity: as long as one of the servers participating in that room stays alive (and the room is set up with infinite data retention, obviously) then the conversation will live on forever. (That MSC is also well worth a look for those interested in how Matrix works under the hood; MSC2716 was a surprisingly tricky problem to solve but it's basically finished now!).
Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards. After all, information longs to be free :)
The UI of Discord is really fast, plus it does voice and video. The problem with all the other chats is that they look (relatively) ugly, including knockout and zulip.
Perhaps if Discord had an option to expose chat histories as regular crawlable web then this problem would go away.
What he described is not only a Discord "issue", it applied to other modern communication tools as well. I feel Discord is better than Slack because there is no 10K searchable message limit for free accounts and ridiculous pricing model.
A few times when trying to search for something I've stumbled upon public logs from irc bots and found the answer there. It would be nice if discord had the ability to do this for communities that are centered around some software.
Separate from the more fundamental problem of using chat apps in general as a wiki, Element/Matrix's concept of spaces are a big step forward as a Discord replacement for me. They're a lot like Discord servers, but they can be nested, and you can add rooms to multiple spaces, and they generally seem to be a lot more lightweight.
There's still a ton of polish issues to work out, but stuff I really like that I wish I had in Discord:
- I can dictate which rooms in a space get surfaced by default. When I join Discord servers, it's really chaotic, you have this giant list of rooms you're suddenly subscribed to, and it's overwhelming. With spaces you're not auto-subbed to every single room in the space. There's even a way to search for rooms in a space, which would be a feature I would want in Discord if Discord didn't just throw every room on a server at your face in one list.
- I can import spaces into other spaces, so I can make a public space that's a composite of other public spaces.
- Nested spaces can be used for organization, they kind of act like folders. Discord sort of has this concept with sections, but Discord sections are only 1 level deep, and spaces can be nested multiple levels.
- The first thing I always have to do when joining a Discord server is update notification settings for all of the rooms I'm in, and Spaces has that problem less (although I wish there were easier ways to set notification settings for an entire space).
- A giant feature that I wish existed in Discord is that rooms can be shared across spaces. So I can have a private space in Element that is only for me that I use for organizing a set of rooms I've joined across multiple spaces. Say that I've joined tech support channels for multiple projects. I can have one space that lists out all of the individual support rooms.
- And obviously, Element spaces/rooms can optionally be previewable without forcing the user to join, which Discord still refuses to do.
----
I'm not saying that everyone should just drop Discord right now and that Element is better in every way, more just pointing out that the direction Element is moving is really positive. It's a little bit exciting to see a UX effort in Element that (while still very much in-progress and in-development) is not just competitive with Discord, but better than Discord's system on its fundamentals. I haven't seen spaces get talked about that much, and they're a massive UX improvement, one of the most exciting non-protocol/infrastructure changes to Element I've seen in a while.
Of course Element doesn't fix the problem that Element/Discord are messaging apps, not wiki platforms, and they're not going to get indexed by Google. But at least its a bit less of a black hole, even if I wouldn't advise replacing your wiki with it.
I agree with this statement and am disheartened that the solution for communities (in particular developer communities) that is now winning is Discord. This is however not a new problem. Both Slack and Twitter are also black holes of information by design. Lots of interesting conversation, but nearly impossible to discover externally.
I think community maintainers are choosing it because it has the best moderation tools and community management tools compared to the alternatives.
> Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron.
Shouldn't this problem solve itself? At some point, a question gets asked often enough that people realize they should document it somewhere, and lo and behold, Github issues are perfect for that.
I'm a regular user of Discord, but only for Rust. Rust already has lots of other archival sources, so the discord is not replacing them.
It's good for playing with a new idea, or helping a beginner get their code compiling. Often we link to blog posts/stack overflow/github for further reading.
Shameless plug: I’m building a QA web app where you can easily create a QA server for your projects, and users can join your server with a click. Basically a stackexchange with Discord onboarding UX. Shoot me an email if you’re interested. My email is on my profile.
If it's reliably used as an opportunity to improve documentation, then I can see Discord having a place and forums not being necessary. I wouldn't expect that to happen, though; I know how I feel about documenting even when I'm being paid to do it.
At least discord doesn't just paywall content you created yourself like Slack does. I have seen dozens of slack servers where entire channels are scrubbed of information because they are on the free plan and hit the 10k messages limit.
Yes, but why it it's Slack's job to pay for these archives? I'm sure they are not that expensive, at least individually, but I more blame the people who are encouraging these valuable discussions to be posted there.
I dont really see the benefit of having a dedicated forum for everything, sure that used to be the norm and arguably you can search forums easier, but stickied comments work perfectly fine on discord and you can search the comment history.
There’s a huge opening in the market between slack and discord for community conversation and organization. My startup is working on this right now with a web3 implementation.
"With the release of Granblue Fantasy Versus, many players are getting into fighting games for the first time ever. But often for new players, the genre can seem to be daunting or overwhelming. But luckily it’s easier than ever to learn how to play. All you need to get started is to just join the Discord. No, not that Discord, the other one."
Not having to take care of your own infrastructure is pretty nice though. This is just like companies that only have a Facebook page and no own website.
I think this is a weird consequence of social media - a local maximum.
- facebook, digg/reddit and twitter kill independent forums. They are 'good enough' mostly for friction reasons that people slowly move there. I think the twitter part is unappreciated - in the past when you had one simple issue, you had to register to communicate it. Now people are likely to tag the profile on twitter with their problem. Sometimes these people remained, now that user acquisition channel is lost.
- they suck at creating communities (I think intentionally), so people don't contribute as much.
- discord is a chat app with flawless ui. As a chat app it's great at building communities due to frequent interactions and instant feedback. This means most active people do everything there, same people who would have 1000+ posts on old style forums.
The tl;dr is that forums are best at preserving information for outside access, but are inferior in making new people join and contribute, which means they are never going to proliferate again. The old optimal balance of chat vs forum is never going to return.
As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to the defense of Discord here.
First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).
However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.
Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says
> And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.
which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say
> I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.
Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.
And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.
But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.
That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.
But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.
Discord is a chat program. Chat comes and goes. The fact that search sucks is a feature. If you need a good search feature, good categorisation, etc then you need a forum or something similar. People use Discord because they don't want a forum, they want a chat.
Most information, especially anything about video games, is tucked away in a discord nowadays. I'm in many that literally act as storage of information - a large number of channels that only the admin can post in where they post info.
The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.
Edit: Wrote "clique" wrong