Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.
And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s
In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it.
I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now.
Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days.
In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.
Agreed about Reddit. Maybe it's just my specific age (almost 30), but I detest the UX of old mailing list software that shows one email per page. The only thing worse is something like IRC, where you have to hope someone is in the channel with an answer at the exact moment you ask your question, and the logs aren't very practical as a store of knowledge because they're so conversational. Despite a significant interest in retrocomputing, I've never once used Usenet and would actually have to read up on how to start. I think most people my age or younger would be in the same boat with that.
The sweet spot for me would be something like Discourse or even an old-school PHPBB. Slack has a similar problem to IRC - it's ephemeral and the answers don't show up on Google.
That's the exact use case for forums and bulletin board software, actually. Being able to leave messages asynchronously, but also aggregating the responses together so they're not disparate single emails.
NodeBB's a lighter and more performant alternative to Discourse.
> Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then
It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing.
The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS.
Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?
> Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days.
I think Google Groups killed Usenet when they made a web interface for it. It was flooded with people who didn't understand how it worked. There was a definite turning point at that time, and I cancelled my subscription.
It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the beginning most people using it were from the academia. At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm.
Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
People introduced me to Usenet and told me to lurk on any group for a few weeks to see how people communicate before jumping in.
I remember coming back to school in the fall of 1993 and there were all these new people on the forums asking dumb questions. People would reply "Read the FAQ!" and they would just ignore it and ask questions already answered in the FAQ
I remember people making filters and kill files for anything ending in @aol.com
I think the enculturation model is incomplete; I think another big aspect of it is that the system’s capacity as an IQ filter diminishes. It’s easy to get 100 people together that are mostly >2stddev, but it’s basically impossible to get 10,000 people together that are mostly >2stddev. The same process has occurred on many websites. I don’t think the culture necessarily changes as much as the userbase just gets dumber.
Axiom 1: Knowledgeable and mature people are repulsed by windbags and vicious people.
Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.
Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.
Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people.
Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community.
Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community.
Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable.
Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline.
Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
> Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
This sounds about right to me, and has been my understanding of how communities homogenise and decay. Gatekeeping, in my opinion, doesn't deserve its bad rep. It alone is the only way to stem the tide in most situations.
IQ doesn't have the relevance you think it does, it's basically an thinly veiled excuse to be an elitist jerk.
Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products, Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations" and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely different thing to what those users were using back then.
Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT.
More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children.
Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
> More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children
I think netiquette breaks down the moment you have a diverse group of participants. (Early Usenet) and (Fidonet) were comprised of very knowledgeable participants of very similar cultural milleus. Usenet was mostly scholarly, young, white, and male (the standard demographic of academics at the time, I'm not trying to insinuate anything more than that), and Fidonet was more diverse because it was less tied to academia but was also very specific. That's not to say something like netiquette couldn't be enforced, but I also think it's correlation and not causation that early Usenet and Fidonet had meaningful conversations; I've been in Discord/Matrix rooms with mostly highly educated people with similar outlooks on life and they rarely require moderation, even with varying strong opinions.
> Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
This just comes off as angry and elitist. Discords are there for regular people to engage in conversations. I don't think putting up these barriers to engagement is relevant for anything other than selecting for technical trivia or ability. If you want to actually select for a good community, I agree that moderation is important, but not using technical barriers. I'm glad the internet is such that nowadays I'm not just talking to some other person who is interested in heavy metal, anime, gaming, and programming (as it was until the late-90s for the most part).
I find plain mailing lists to be less search-friendly. They're fine if you're an active participant but IMO need to be complemented with a proper web facade for passive consultation of past issues, design decisions, etc.
really depends on the mailing list software. unfortunately there is basically google grouops and/or mailman2/mailman3. for self hosting there isn't even a choice at all: mailing lists suffer even more from what forums suffer as well: little software choice that ticks all the boxes for different people with different needs.
however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to...
i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text.
with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
The traditional way as a mailing list subscriber is to automatically filter incoming messages of each mailing list into a dedicated folder, which builds you an archive from when you first joined. In addition, mailing list servers (at least used to) provide zip archives of messages by month/year in mbox format that you can import into your local folder. When that wasn’t available, I sometimes asked long-time subscribers for a copy of their archive. The benefit is that you are not dependent on whatever search tooling the list server provides, but can use the email client of your choice, and you still have the archive in case the list server shuts down.
Is it possible for me to use a mailing list if I want to send HTML mail because it's more expressive and allows the client to rewrap emails to the width of the reader's screen? What if I want my 1:1 emails and forum/mailing-list broadcasts to be sent to separate user interfaces, rather than using a client-side filter to separate them after the fact? (I'm fine with top-quoting specific lines out of long messages, but would rather have threading capabilities when I'm replying to an entire message, so readers won't have to scroll past a second copy of the message.)
> I want to send HTML mail because it's more expressive
For thousands of years prior to the invention of HTML email, back unto the ages of cuneiform on clay, people managed to express themselves. Entire competing schools of rhetoric developed to teach people how best to express themselves, long before any form of electronic mail existed. Some of those schools focused on eloquence and interest, others on brevity and clarity, and those were both possible with plain text written by reed pens and ink on papyrus. I wonder whether relying on HTML for one's expression is really better than cultivating a writing style that suffices to convey one's thoughts independently of the medium used.
> I'm fine with top-quoting specific lines out of long messages, but would rather have threading capabilities when I'm replying to an entire message, so readers won't have to scroll past a second copy of the message.
That's great because mail readers have supported threading for decades. It's pretty essential for using a mailing list.
Most mail readers support it, but not Microsoft ones. Somehow they managed to ruin this simple feature. This caused Google to reinvent it in the early 2000s and announce it like it was an innovation of their own.
The reason I brought it up is because when I read mailing list archives, I see both threading, and certain messages which top-quote previous messages multiple layers deep. Deeply nested top-quoting is inconvenient for me to mentally parse.
> if I want to send HTML mail because it's more expressive and allows the client to rewrap emails to the width of the reader's screen?
I’m almost certain thunderbird soft wraps plaintext emails when composing rather than inserting actual line breaks for that reason.
Besides, shorter lines are easier to read and parse; I’d take an 80 columns width text anytime over a 120+ cols, like more and more people tend to use.
Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option.
If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.
I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.
My wife gets emails all the time meant for a particular woman in a different state with the same name as her. For some reason, this other woman consistently uses my wife’s email address. We know where and when her kids go to ballet classes, how much she pays, when she gets Botox, and how much she pays, invoices from her therapist, etc. How does she never notice that none of these emails are going to her and correct the email address she has given out?
I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys from harbor freight.
This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.
Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account.
But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.
Buy a domain, use different email addresses for different mailing lists, automatically filter into different folders by To address and list headers.
From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.
> Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.
That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.
I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.
Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.
Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.
Why not have another email address for less private uses then? Spams and scams are everywhere and imo email filterings is good enough to snuff out most these days, unlike DMs on social media (the junk in my reddit "chat" inbox is insane).
Matrix is mostly used to chat. But really it is just a distributed graph database. Some of the founders of the project have very nice memories of NNTP and something like NNTP (but modern) can certainly be built on top of matrix.
> Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.
Yeah, Slack is even worse than email for most uses. At least with email you have conversation threads that consolidate discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put it back together again.
IMHO, Slack is only good for a few narrow cases (e.g. replacing long coordination email chains, organizing lunch).
I've found the opposite - if I start an email discussion, people reply-all from different points in the thread (and some people accidentally hit reply instead of reply-all, and then someone will notice and reply-all just to send that message to everyone. And this all makes it hard to consolidate the conversation.
While if I start a slack discussion, the thread is in once place, and everyone sees the state in real time, so the thread is more coherent and easier to follow.
>Yeah, Slack is even worse than email for most uses. At least with email you have conversation threads that consolidate discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put it back together again.
Just recently I spent an hour unbundling a mail chain with layers of poor quote - reply - ask for clarification - further reply.
The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
> The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
Same at my company: Top level comments initiate a thread, and all responses must be made as comments within the thread.
If I had my way, I'd take it a step further and require that Slack be treated like a message board, not a chatroom. If you have something to say, then say it all at once in one cohesive paragraph or set of paragraphs -- just as we do here. I do not want to be pinged multiple times in rapid succession while someone sends every thought they have in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, e.g.:
>> hi
>> can you help me with a problem?
>> i need to do x with y but i'm not sure about how to handle z
I love Slack. I love waking up in the morning to be told I need to upgrade to use exactly the same product as I'm forced to use every day, and which behaves exactly the same (except a bit slower) after I've updated my OS to install the latest browser to access Slack.
I love the bad search, the poor integration, and the web interface to a product with the functionality of an '80s app. It just burns so much time, but hey the wasted hours are all chargeable and that sure pays the bills.
How do I use mailing lists properly? Last time I tried, I embarrassed myself by replying to someone directly. Couldn't figure out how to add the email to the thread.
Usually by doing "Reply all" instead of replying to just one recipient. One of the addresses will be associated to the mailing list, and forward you message to everyone when you send it.
Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
"Reply all" is the best single answer, but it also varies between lists -- on some lists, the norm is that you reply only to the list and don't CC the sender.
For example this is the norm on many Debian mailing lists. Or at least some people firmly consider it a norm, and will grouch at people CC'ing them.
The fact that this varies from list to list, and it's not encoded in software and you're just supposed to know which style to use, and that people then blame the human senders for not getting it right all the time, is among the reasons that mailing lists can be an unwelcoming medium.
Traditionally, many mailing lists set the Reply-to header field to the mailing list address, so that replies would go back to the mailing list by default. For various reasons, that has fallen out of favor. Nowadays the message headers of mailing list messages usually indicate the list address in a separate header field, and mailing-list aware email clients provide a “reply to list” action. Unfortunately, too few email clients are mailing-list aware in that way. “Reply all” is the fallback, but make sure to remove the non-mailing list address, or else the original sender will receive two copies of your reply (one through the mailing list and one directly), which can be annoying.
Good question. I don't think there's a way to set mail headers on gmail or protonmail web interfaces. I'm under the impression some headers are required. Message IDs, I think.
On Thunderbird I get a button that says “reply list” that lets me do that. Failing that I guess you can just do a normal reply and then change the To: field to the list address.
Drew DeVault managed to make a mailing list renaissance of sorts. https://lists.sr.ht/
I guess that's something. I've made "the leet list" of my own and encouraged friends to join (my friends are in their early 20s, so they are not quite acquainted with email, lol) and this worked out. The slow pace is a feature and people seem to be loving it. https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet
Two things: In Zulip, you can't not have threads. Threads in Slack are an afterthought and the UI actively tries to prevent you from using them (they're a narrow column on the sidebar and you can't see everything), whereas in Zulip they're a first-class citizen.
The second thing is that Zulip's UX is fantastic. You can zoom in and out of conversations with a single keystroke, and the UI is responsive and does exactly what you want. Slack is so slow on my new Ryzen that I frequently out-type it, and half my keystrokes end up interpreted as channel-switching keystrokes, so I end up having typed something random in a random channel instead. Fuck Slack, sincerely.
Slack's thread UI is simply atrocious. Zulip's UI makes it harder to not be part of an existing thread. In slack, anyone can just wander into room and start typing things that should be in a thread, outside of any thread, even (especially) if the thread they want is right there. That's not impossible with Zulip, just harder enough to do that it's not an issue in the same way.
If I understand Zulip's threading correctly (I can't log in right now to check), it imposes a strict two-level threading system. Quill (https://quill.chat) has nested channels but unlike Zulip, clicking on the "outer" channels doesn't show you all the content of all the "innner" channels.
> When I'm on my phone I stop commenting on HN midway quite often because the effort is not worth it. On a computer, it's too easy to type.
With longer comments I usually quit because the editing required to sound like a halfway intelligent person is way harder on a phone. I imagine some other people can nail their first draft, and others just don’t care how they come across.
Google Wave may not have picked up, but Google Docs certainly did. In the broader topic of online discussion, I feel like we'd be remiss if shared Google Docs didn't get a mention. (I assume MS O365 has a similar set of features, but I haven't used it extensively, so I'm avoiding using a generic term here, at the risk of sounding like a commercial.)
Usually, a heavy email thread will start with a multi-paragraph essay, and try to get to some sort of consensus from the participants. Where google docs lets users comment on a specific phrase or word, and have a discussion thread based on that highlight, Google Docs makes it possible to have a conversation about a specific part of the document. By allowing for shared editing, Docs allows someone who came later to rewrite words or phrases (if that user is allowed to).
If I'm working on any sort of a doc - engineering design doc, marketing copy, whatever - with multiple people, both email and slack fall short compared to a Google Doc. It's got a specific use case, so it's not remotely a replacement for slack or email, but there's a lot of good, focused communication happening in those comment margins.
I don’t so much mind (yet) slack replacing IRC. I use slack at work already. So more slack channels is an easy extension of that communication space. Collaborating with Kotlin or Elixir folks in their excellent slack channels feels like a modernized variant of the IRC communications I used to have with Python and Smalltalk.
Like you, I much prefer mailing lists over any sort of web forum (discord included). I hate Swift’s forums. I like the Python mailing list. One idea the reasons is that in the mailing list, I get to pick my tool (my mail client), and you can pick yours. We’re leveraging an already strong communication ecosystem of tools.
I think there are a bunch of issues with using mailing lists this way, but they are fixable:
1. Moderation tools on mailing lists are extremely rudimentary. A healthy community _needs_ moderation of some sort.
2. A lot of tooling is necessary to make a good mailing list experience. I would expect an inclusive community mailing list to have a web interface for posting and searching, and a separate interface for searching.
3. There's no documentation on setting up email clients to use mailing lists and it isn't a trivial/intuitive process. The email spam problem has made the registration process non-intuitive and often drops emails to/from the list.
4. There's very little documentation on setting up your email client to use a list properly. What are best practices for organizing your inbox around a mailing list? How do you reply to a list? How do you quote a previous response?
5. There's no easy basic flow for folks to get started with. The power of more "modern" approaches is that the default web interface is highly opinionated. This makes it easy to join and easy to participate. When there's no basic flow to use, folks never get to the basics before they get to a point of wanting to customize their flow.
I think a blessed mailing list flow using a webmail client, a web newsgroup/BBS interface (which doesn't exist now sadly), or a blessed email client workflow would go a long way to making mailing lists accessible. Unfortunately because mailing lists are only popular among tech people these days, I doubt you'll see much work on this.
Some of the best chats I've ever had have been on niche Internet Message Boards using some of the worst technology run by people who didn't understand how to run a website. But the communities were so tight-knit and dedicated to their conversation topic and produced brilliant and entertaining ideas.
And sadly most modern search engines don't rank these conversations highly in searches. There's a treasure trove of unbelievable hidden ideas out there that you'll never come across because search algorithms prioritize garbage, corporate churned content.
Indeed. I think the technology is somewhat orthogonal to the community, but it's the community that's important. A lot of technical people equate the two. (Though there are definitely technical and systemic benefits to more open standards than Discord, even if that doesn't necessarily help the community.)
Slide is a great, open source app that works on Android and IOS for reddit just fine. You don't have to use the reddit site or app if you don't want to. But it's fine to skip it too I suppose. I just find it far superior to other social media like twitter, facebook, and instagram. It certainly has it's warts but it is quite easy to simply choose your subset of forums and ignore everything else.
The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to their successful use. Not to mention that a lot of hosting providers are totally clueless as to the existence of discussion mailing lists.
I have to put up with Slack due to work, and to dismay of other people, I just use it exactly like email, by turning notifications off and only looking into it during "compiling" moments.
And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.
I’ve looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for Mediawiki. Some communities miss out on the potential of mailing lists because they implement the distribution list aspect without taking the additional step of implementing the browsable archival website. The archive is important because it lets late joiners find and participate in discussions.
People love to say email is a bad technology, but my hypothesis is that other messaging tools have succeeded because people use email improperly. Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well. When people behave selfishly or rush (lazy subject line changes, reverse chronological messages, lazy quoting & replies written deep in old messages, off subject replies, etc.) email gets hard to read.
> Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well.
I'd argue that is a bad technology, at least for a general-use tool. I admit that I don't use mailing lists but I don't see how they have any advantages over a well-implemented forum. Trying to run a project over email and building an archival service to cope with it seems like a reversal of priorities.
Linux [1] and Mediawiki [2] are two communities finding success with email lists. In those examples, the list archives can be read like a forum. Replies must be sent by email. It seems like the archive browser could benefit from a UX upgrade.
I really, really support that. It’s threaded by default, requires only a simple signup and in the end is just text email. You can use a mailing list with any email client you choose. Web-based forums are notoriously unsafe and each one has its own eccentricities, not least regarding text formatting. I don’t want to put up with that.
That being said, the old Usenet was indeed a place to properly discuss. I can even remember a time before that, of using FidoNet, a BBS-based messaging platform. The quality of discussion in the proper channels there was pretty great.
I loved forums and mailing lists, so I don't have to be on 24/7 to join a conversation.
Hate discord since you can't jump in a conversation that happened 30 min. before, as it would get mixed with the current conversations. Now they have the threads, and the `in reply to`, but I feel that they way they did the threads don't help for separating the conversations and keeping them on long-term
> I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.
Jesus no. Please, just no. There is a reason why people are favoring Discord, Slack, Facebook Groups and whatever else over the old strongholds (mailing lists, IRC):
- anything email based (including usenet) requires you to expose (at least) your email address to the general public, meaning you will get hounded by spam
- mailing lists (by design) have to break common anti-spam schemes and it's difficult to get the workarounds done correctly, so you'll end up fighting your spam filter all the time to read the emails you want to read
- mailing lists require strict moderation to avoid people abusing it for spam, which leads to issues when the sole moderator goes off on holidays and no new mails come through.
- mailing list management tools are often enough a pretty horrid/inconsistent mess
- for each mailing list you join (and want/need to stay in longer), you have to setup folders and filters in your mail client/provider, and you have to follow the incantation of the specific mailing list to opt out, whereas IRC and Discord make organizing and leaving easy
- mailing lists and many IRC channels end up being publicly indexed in Google which may or may not be in your interest
- many mailing lists and IRC in general restrict incoming content to plain-text or limit file sizes which means it's hard to enrich a question with screenshots, videos or binary files.
- mailing lists are asynchronous and don't support different modes of communication that do not require exposing your phone number publicly - it's not (easily) possible to have a quick call to quickly solve an issue, yet a 1 minute phone call can transport much more density than wasting half an hour playing email ping-pong
I'm sad about IRC though given that there hasn't been any major reaction to Slack and Discord, which led to an erosion of its userbase and then the final implosion of Freenode.
In other words, mailing lists are a poor replacement for private instant messaging. Indeed!
They (and news groups) are better for a different kind of discussions, and especially for digging out things that have been previously already discussed, and already contain a solution to your problem. Good luck doing that in instant messaging software.
The problem with a mailing list is that the interfaces for interacting with mailing lists are all terrible. I've yet to see one that comes _close_ to the UX that discord/slack (and tbh even IRC) provide.
Please not mailinglists. They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?
What's more, not everybody follows etiquette:
- reply and just keep the original message at the bottom
- reply in between the original message
- reply at the bottom with the original message on top
- Some mix quotes and then reply to some parts in the original
And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address?
I heavily disagree that emails are the way forward in this regard (maybe even in any regard).
> Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address
You seem confused. Signing up to multiple mailing lists won’t require you to have multiple email addresses, and at the same time they don’t require you to subscribe using your main email address either. Many email hosts will give you as many mailboxes as you like, either using plus–addresses or just new mailbox names.
> And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Every email has a unique message id. Simply include a message id in the body of the email, and your email client should turn it into a link (provided you happen to have that message available). If your email client doesn’t do that, perhaps you need a better email client.
> They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?
It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
>It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email client for this task. A properly designed forum software is always going to be easier to use for its express purpose than a mail client.
Could you make some recommendations then? You are kind of just grand standing, because it looks like you are absolutely right, but as some one who likes what you are talking about I don't know much more than I did before.
I use Gnus, which does this. It automatically turns message ids into links in both the headers and the body of the message.
It has some restrictions that I occasionally want to relax though. It doesn’t keep a complete database of all message ids it has seen in your inbox, just a list of the ones it most recently pulled into a summary. For example, if you pull up a summary that includes the latest 100 messages in your INBOX, then the links will take you to any message within those 100, but clicking on a link to a message older than that just tells you that it can’t find the message id in the summary.
I work for Automattic (Wordpress) and internally we use https://wordpress.com/p2/ as well as slack. P2 is basically every team having an internal Wordpress blog. This serves the same purpose as mailing lists but with rich content and other nice features I think it works really well for long form discussion.
> I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works.
I feel like Slack would have been a lot nicer for those discussions iff you could sign up to one and sign in to many. I have way too many slack items in my password manager. It's a pain having to making changes to multiple ones.
Not sure about the mailing list thing. I just started watching sci.electronics.design out of curiosity, and >80% of the posts are just two guys (one of them with an IEEE email address!) who appear to have been waging a years-long politics flame-war. The few posts about, er, electronics design are completely drowned out by self-righteous screaming about Trump, Biden, vaccines, elections and covid.
Now I understand why Google's mail service automatically classifies any alerts the user signs up for from Google's mailing list service as spam.
There used to be a third participant in that flamewar, a brilliant analog IC designer whose hobby was ruining s.e.d by posting off-topic political flames and trolling. His participation ended a few years ago when he apparently died of cancer. I say "apparently" because there was no obituary, no funeral, no mourners. His family won't talk about him. He had been so proud of his granddaughter.
It's unfortunate because there are/were a lot of talented and knowledgable people on s.e.d who could be talking about circuits instead of flinging dung at each other.
Flamewars are an ugly Usenet tradition. Usenet also provides great mitigation tools (killfiles/scorefiles).
I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability but also because it's difficult to have multiple identities with Discord. It's frustrating to be looking for help with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join their Discord server. I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give up at that point.
> I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming
xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
I agree with seneca. HN os one of the last places on the internet to have serious civil discussions. The absence of low effort meme jokes is one of the ways it soft discourages people from opening the gates to memeery.
I'd rather rather compromise on a couple of laughs than see HN become a generic reddit like forum / social network.
If they're making a point, I don't understand it. They seem to be ridiculing someone for trying to protect their identity. Any famous person will be acutely aware of how problematic it can be to "just join a server as your real identity."
I've had similar problems. I fully agree with the other commenter: if you have a point, just say it minus the cheek.
It was a point agreeing with the person they were replying too. The social rules of technical communities and informal gaming communities are very different, and the commenter highlighted that. I wouldn't want the same name in a technical and gaming community for basically that reason.
> They seem to be ridiculing someone for trying to protect their identity.
As mentioned in another comment: Quite the opposite.
Discord should easily allow to have completely separate identities with no connection to each other at all.
If that's not possible and there's the risk of mixing up my private life and whatnot with my work life, Discord should not be the place/service to use.
HN has not been a serious place for civil discussions in a long time. Users are now actively hostile towards opinions that don't score well on reddit. A larger percentage of posts contribute little to the discussion. Many of the early members who helped shape the community have left. The "interesting" posts that are supposed to make up the front page have steadily gone down in quality.
3 posts up and you're making a pussy destroyer joke. I invite you to go back and look at posts from 2013. Tally the redditor-style lame jokes and unsolicited opinion posts against the paragraphs of industry experience.
I have expressed a good few heterodox opinions on HN that are accepted without vitriol. So, I am not sure I agree.
HN expects you to be civil, and abide by the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence " paradigm. I find them to be reasonable requirements.
If you'd like to express more heterodox views then there are a few rationalist-adjacent splinter groups around the internet with excellent discourse over a wide range of opinions. Each splinter group has different overton windows, but they're all of a really high quality.
Some servers I'm in has notifications when you join, and then if you ever leave it also has a passive aggressive notification like "OK BYE I guess!!"
Mods in smaller communities frequently greet everyone. If you pop in to check something then leave, you might as well @everyone that they're not good enough for you so you're out.
That said, Threads seem like they could have some functionality in some technical discords.
Elsewhere in this thread I’ve claimed people should use the web app with a password manager. Sometimes you’ll get a “new login detected” thing and be asked to authenticate your current ip address via email. That can be a headache when switching accounts but you can easily just use an email client which supports multiple email addresses without having to manually log in and out again.
I think that's a very valid concern and I think it's a actually problem when Discord does not allow you to have different identities or switch easily between them without any connection at all.
> xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
Not even that. I just don't want to have to join a chat group to get documentation or ask questions. If I don't know the sorts of people in the server, joining is not generally something I'd be super comfortable with.
That's certainly another barrier. As someone very socially anxious, it can be difficult to muster the courage to join a real-time conversation. Making forum posts is a lot easier.
I also resent that discord/slack are companies that own their platforms, whereas IRC/Usenet/phpBB/etc were all software anyone could own and operate their own instance of. Sure you can have your own discord server, but youre still subject to the whims of Discord Inc. While they may not have done anything notably bad yet(I think there was a mini controversy with wallstreetbets but I didnt follow that story closely), but it's still centralization where it wasnt there before. Would you be ok with X Corporation you dont like buying Discord for cash tomorrow, even if they promise not to change any rules? Or does it make you feel easy to think about what they could do ? The Microsoft offer certainly scared some people.
and then you have the godawful bots. Try to join a server, get spammed by 5 different bots that want to verify your identity. And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud
As someone who runs one of those Discord servers, let me say that the rules have a purpose. Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel). Or they'll @-message or PM every mod. Or their attitude will be nasty, treating volunteer helpers like a personal servant. There will be posted rules saying not to do these things, but they'll do them anyway.
When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who deal with this stuff over and over will start getting tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame them.
I feel for mods, having moderated digital stuff for decades.
But this seems like a problem of your own making.
If users keep doing the same thing over and over, then the problem probably isn’t the users but the forum.
I think this is because discord was designed for deep users and groups of friends who had lots of preexisting context as well as a desire to be part of something longstanding.
Support forums are for people with no context and don’t want to join anything, they just need help. So making someone join a server, with specific rules they don’t give a shit about results in these problems.
There needs to be a “read only” mode that lets me read a server and explore without joining. This is a strength of forums, mailing list archives, and even IRC.
Mods complaining about modding hard stuff because they set it up to be hard doesn’t warrant much empathy from me.
I get what you mean, and I agree with you that Discord shouldn't be a company's primary support system. I also haven't heard of any companies that do this.
The issues I described come up when you have a community that occasionally offers help. For example, there might be a Discord devoted to a game mod. People can gather there to hang out with the mod developers or just talk about gaming. They sometimes answer newbie questions, too. If you come to take advantage of their generosity, you should do it with the right attitude and respect-- just like if you show up at a game shop in real life hoping someone will teach you how to play Dungeons & Dragons.
Right, but this is not a problem for IRC which sort of does the same thing.
And IRC has solved this problem for like what 40 years. The issue, I think, is discord servers have variable and unintuitive rules that users fail to understand.
I think I like protocols that follow the robustness principle in being accepting of lots of different inputs.
Forums had all the same rules and rule enforcements for moderation. (Agree to the community rules, agree to the community terms of service, verify your email account, for the first few hours/days of your account you see only a curated subsection of the forums, etc.) It's a lot of the complexity in forum software that accumulated over time because it wasn't handled by "third party bots" and instead had to be baked into the forum app itself, which lead in part to why forum software is so hard to build/run/host because for a good, well moderated forum you need all of those moderation tools and generally can't just bolt them on with a "Forum Bot" from someone who isn't the forum software's author.
This is one reason why I always look at how support is handled when choosing software. If I run in to this, I'll go look at the next thing on my list.
I'm not trying to downplay the problems you run in to, I've seen all of this and worse. It just seems that you chose tooling that doesn't work well for actually managing support, so you have to beat your users into the right shape to fit your software.
If we're talking about formal support for a paid product, I agree with you. But I don't actually know any companies that use Discord as their primary support system, usually it'll be email or some sort of ticket system. Sometimes small internet companies will have a public Discord as well, and you might even be able to get questions answered there, but I can't think of any cases where they actually promote it as the primary support system.
I was referring to things like open source software, game mods, photography enthusiast communities, etc. These kinds of communities are often on Discord these days, and suffer from the problems I mentioned previously. These lead to heavy-handed moderation.
> Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel)
That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.
People would do the same thing in forums: spam their question in the first or possibly every "board" whether it looked appropriate or not. The moderation needs don't change that much between chat and forum.
Expectation in different media differ even if technically they can be used in the same way. Nobody uses search on discord chat. Google doesn't index discord chats. You cannot easily link to a discord message from 10 years ago nor quote it permanently. It's ephemeral for all intents and purposes.
Meanwhile people mostly arrive at forums from google searches and link to posts without thinking about it.
It's the difference between writing a book and giving a speech. Imagine if we started burning books because people can just talk over a phone. That's what replacing forums with discord is.
Moving from forums to discord is another step in destroying everything that made open web great. It's sad that people don't even understand what they are losing.
Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors.
For what it is worth, Discord does have permalinks to old messages. You definitely aren't going to find a 10 year old link today in large part because Discord hasn't been around 10 years yet, but I've copy and pasted Discord permalinks before to get points across and I have friends that use it for answering FAQs (have notes full of Discord links to copy/paste to answer common questions).
For what it is worth, there are users that use search on Discord (including the sorts that copy/paste the permalinks to answer FAQs). Maybe "nobody" thinks to "search first" is a truism, but even then I've seen plenty of forums full of the exact same users that never think to search first when they enter a forum and go directly to asking a question previously answered many times before. (Even when they arrive in a forum from a google search on that very question, people like/prefer the immediacy/power/relationship of folks responding directly to them than a canned answer.)
I'm not saying Discord is particularly great at some of these use cases or even the right answer, but they are very comparable and it's definitely nothing like burning books to chat over a phone. (That's a really broken analogy for several reasons.)
(ETA: If there is something to criticize Discord here for, it's much more the centralizing force problem that old forums used to be distributed across every style of web host in the old web, but Discord is a single for-profit point of failure for so many eggs to be put in one basket.)
> Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors.
forums don't necessarily need to block search engine crawlers to prevent bad behavior, that would most likely be done with restrictions on account registration or limitation on what new users can post (one forum I am on hides posts from new account until they've been reviewed by a mod)
for all of those reasons you're better off with a forum. plus the lack of expectation for instant replies will discourage those users from spamming all threads
You know why volunteer helpers get treated like servants? Because people are looking for answers, now. And there’s so many pointless barriers in the way, it’s maddening. Imagine if instead of Google being a search engine the way it is now where you get results damn near instantly, you instead had to jump into some big Google chat room and ask someone a question and wait some undefined amount of time to get a response, and often a useless one.
People are in a hurry, if you’re not giving them what they want, then just get the fuck out of the way.
If you aren't willing to interact with people as humans, that doesn't give you the right to treat them as tools. The people who are interested in talking about some game mod don't owe you the ability to quickly look up information about it.
Running a Discord of any size sucks too, to be fair. I run a small (<1000) Discord related to hacking of a video game engine, and even the amount of drama that my server has encountered is sometimes quite unnerving. I plan on expanding it with a forum and/or a wiki in the coming months, because Discord is unsuitable for long term preservation of content. I consider Discord a more modern version of IRC, in a practical sense. Great for real-time communication, bad for long-form content and long-term preservation.
100% in the same boat. I don't want my gaming identity to be related to my day-to-day work. If I see a product/tool has a community Slack, I'd be more open to joining that.
It's still out of reach of traditional search engines like Google, right? Stack Overflow and other forums have the huge advantage of being indexable by outside services.
Many, probably most, Discord servers operate under assumption that discussions are private and are limited to invited users. Making all of these discussions public would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.
But then you run into the problem of having one username across Discord "servers". I don't want what I say on servers with my friends to be easily cross-searchable from what I say on a "server" for some software development library.
I've thought before about how Discord could deal with this. Ideally we would be able to set up aliases, and when joining a server get to select which alias is used. They would have to look externally in every way like they were distinct accounts including when friending or DMing people.
Alternatively, in the UI they could let you sign in to multiple accounts and then provide another layer of tabs to let you switch between those. That would help keep things organized but also can make navigation more difficult by adding another level to the navigation tree.
Easy account switching is the sort of thing that browser extensions would have been developed to cover in the past, something like like RES for Reddit or XKit for Tumblr.
That's obviously less relevant when a majority of users are using desktop or mobile apps rather than browsers, but a plugin interface even for closed-source commercial desktop software used to be far more common than it is now, leaving users dependent on the development team to add features and usability.
I assume this decline is due to security concerns, wanting to be able to develop faster internally rather than needing to continue supporting old APIs for external developers, and marketplaces like Google Play and the App Store not wanting to enable competing marketplaces within the apps they distribute. It's a tradeoff to be sure, and I'm not sure moving past plugin functionality is a bad thing, but I find it a bit sad.
Discord accounts have hidden (until someone uses a bunch of hacking tools known as "dev tools") IDs which uniquely identify an account and never change. The username#1234 stuff is pure fluff. The per-server thing is also just an alias on the server, it still shows the foo#1234 name if you click on a profile.
That won't work. Discord is pretty eager in protecting their data. They even kill legit bot-abilities to prevent people from harming their space. But to be fair, discord-space is also very toxic and borderline in some content, with phising and other attacks are being quite common. So it's justified that they protect their customers.
I guess if a big name like Google would ask them and ensures that privacy is preserved, they might cooperate to some degree.
Search engines are a big deal, so much so that I could see crawling with a browser extension or browser automation. However, Discord also discourages use of the web app.
How about if when the app's data is fully locked down, people start recording their screens and OCRing them? Incentivize it somehow. That way at least content that the participating users viewed would be indexed. Then you get back to trying to block people from recording their own screen with software, and after that hardware[1]. Never ending cat and mouse game.
Of course, will it be always possible to catch data some way. But it's a difference whether you actively work against the company and must invest money and time into it, or not.
And outside the technical level, discord also has the legal way. They can try to shut down your service, remove your code from public space and make you sink more time and money in an uphill-battle.
This is the same battle people are fighting against all walled gardens. And so far the gardens usually win. So someone taking on that fight, should be aware of this.
Because the only way to find info on a Discord server is to join the Discord server. That means the info is hidden from standard search engines and that even just to see the info I need to reveal myself to the Discord server.
Forum representation is search results on Google in particular is abysmal. The way Google misrepresents the information mankind has created is actively making us less intelligent.
At least there IS a representation. Once some clue is found one need only go from there to the primary source and its native representation. What's so horrible about that?
Stuff squirreled away in some discord server effectively doesn't exist outside of Discord's gamer chat platform. I'll take a poor representation that doesn't involve logging in and searching multiple platforms over essentially anything. What good are forums that don't appear in common search engines?
You can open Discord in a private window in you browser to get another identity. On Linux, I can also recommend firejail with the --private= flag which allows you to have unlimited instances (well, limited by your RAM).
Please do not use firejail. The code used to have, and probably still has, very amateurish security flaws (like trusting the USER env var) and should definitely not have SUID, especially now that linux is getting unprivileged namespacing.
I frankly don't understand what to trust when it comes to sandboxing in Linux.
On the one hand, there are SUID binaries like Firejail and on the other, we have bubblewrap which uses unprivileged user namespaces, also used by Podman and Docker rootless containers. However, linux-hardened disables unprivileged user namespaces by default and the Arch Wiki has warnings plastered all over the Podman page about potential security risks of using unpriv user namespaces.
I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend firejail), considering the audience of RedHat (particularly some government agencies)
Well yeah, and Microsoft is the world's most experienced software company and a superscaler who really knows how to secure infrastructure well, you really can't hope to compete with their security teams, right up to the part where their images come with a garbage port of their WMI garbage containing uncountably infinite LPEs and RCEs running with uid=0.
> I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend firejail)
You speak as if these "random Arch Linux users" have written their opinions on the wiki rather than reasonable conclusions based on how unprivileged user namespaces have been a source security vulnerabilities in the past and is still seen as a security risk.
Agreed. I used to use Firefox Profiles like above comments may mention, but multi-account containers are great and far easier to use than re-launching Firefox instances. Simply click "Re-open this tab in..." while being on the Discord page to open up another account.
This is true of a few other services too like Instagram and Twitter. Firefox containers are useful here, but it's a bit harder with native clients and mobile.
That is a feature to forum admins, because it means no longer having to deal with sock puppets, or at worst reporting them to Discord who then takes action to protect the platform.
We've had twenty years of pseudonymous identities on the Internet and we've put the social fabric of humanity at risk. The needle is swinging towards "you get one identity, use it wisely" and I think that has absolutely been earned by those who abused pseudonymity to hurt others. No doubt the needle will swing back someday, and I will look forward to that once I've had a few years' break from the tragedy of today.
Is it? I can see this being the case for malicious conduct, but they have stated [1] that it's not a violation to have multiple accounts (granted, this was 4 years ago).
There are services for virtual phone numbers that still work. I expect many users to use them because you won't tie your ID to your account, even if many users have been groomed to share that by now.
Last I tried you could reuse the same phone number to verify multiple accounts. There's just a cooldown period after each verification before the same number can be used again.
I don’t thinks so… it’s relatively difficult to get different phone numbers so it’s a good way to limit spam.
Plus in the real world, it’s also a way of separating your identities. I have a work number and personal number, and only attach the work number to business services. Sure, it won’t prevent Google from banning all your accounts but for everyone else it’s a hard barrier to correlating that you are the same person. Added to the fact that my work laptop uses VPN, and I’m pretty sure that sites like GitHub have no idea I have multiple accounts.
Does Discord store the number alongside your account? The smart way to prevent issues with associating accounts by phone number is to only store the link up until the account is verified. After that, they don't need the number linked to the account. The number just has to be stored in a list alongside the last time it successfully validated an account, and then only stay in there until the cooldown period expires.
I think they also force phone verification if you make multiple accounts connecting from the same ip. I don't want to run VPN just for a throwaway discord account and I don't know how to get burner phone numbers.
I completely agree with this. For a while I’d have a second device for different discord identities. I really hope they add this support natively because I use discord in so many different contexts with real people and online strangers.
If Discord could implement a "workspace" (or game-space or whatever) similar to slack, that would make me a lot more comfortable joining various servers.
Apparently someone on Discord is paying attention, because I just now updated my copy, and a popup came up drawing attention to their new feature: different nicknames per server!
This has been a feature as long as I remember (I've been using it since late 2015). The nickname is still tied to your name#dddd account identifier. And if someone checks your profile, they can still see mutual servers and friends. GP is asking for multiple accounts, not nicknames.
You're right. Apparently the new part of the feature must be the ability for those with Nitro (the paid tier) to change their avatar per server. (At least, I'm guessing so; I've never had Nitro so I don't know if that was already available.)
This is what I get for posting too early in the morning.
Maybe it's just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming), but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for. I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton. It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again, and then I get bombed with emails after I'm done. And when I leave, it's worth noting my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone [1].
I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.
The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite hard to follow the intertwined discussions.
You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related projects.
But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions" (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up things.
It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives to see whether someone already asked it before.
> I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed
That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in. The scenario is that you discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not quite with the improvements you're interested in being planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again.
The threading support in discord will be interesting to see. I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.
That reminds me of Reddit's endlessly repeated questions. Possibly there's a large audience that refuses to look for an answer prior to asking a question? Almost an expectation of free "service".
That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal to research it's free developer tech support.
Well, that would explain why "users" prefer it, but not why "developers" prefer it.
I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite that behavior.
I see a lot of communities on Discord will use bots that recognize keywords from commonly repeated questions. The bot then spits out the answer typically associated with that question. It seems to be somewhat helpful that way.
I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned answer to that commonly asked question.
Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned message from a bot explaining how a user can get that info.
In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can link out to support articles.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The reasons Discord works well for you are unfortunately ... why it won't work for me. (I'm a late 30s male, but, I don't play video games. Nothing against games or gamers, I'm actually jealous! Just never found anything fun since Zelda and Tetris)
I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find information!! I have "account fatigue".
I already have a web browser!
Why should I create an account on some closed source platform (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them), and learn yet another style of markup and communication and lingo...
It's much better for this information to be on a webpage, possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still on the page, and indexed by a search engine for those to find after I'm gone.
Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms might suck the useful people and information away from areas of the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard to get.
I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side", but remember it slices both ways. :)
"Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform itself.
A possibly better solution would be something that doesn't put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)
Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
I find quick answers through web searching literally all the time. The walled off nature of discord and similar semi-private messaging platforms is a huge downside in disseminating information and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.
Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this. Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of useful discord servers is impossible for information you cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe discussion/subforum area you actually care about and sign up and join in then.
Discord is an information/knowledge blackhole. Information goes in and never comes out. The amount of times I've searched for info and found it on some obscure forum I've never heard of before is staggering. Like, where the fuck would I be without xda-developers and its massive font of knowledge spanning back a decade, which is organized by device and topic? Like, Discord simply cannot replicate that, yet every community is defaulting to it.
There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come into contact with that have coalesced around Discord instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to find any information that I need.
Yeah, what we have here is a failure of the post-GenX generations to understand how things work, and to not consider the ramifications of entrusting years worth of discourse to one platform.
Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took its information to the grave with it.
> Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again
Which is part of the point anyway, it's "people new to tech/young people" culture to never search for things by yourself and always ask. That's why so many people use discord.
Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all that information be lost? Can people find that information in the Discord by googling now?
The company I work for is in the process of migrating internal chat away from Discord to something else. It's a fully remote company, so chat is really important.
I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the company's values, and there is a constant search for better, more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google services as well.)
I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be active on it in the old days).
The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with publicly archivable channels, would be great.
But the way high quality information is constantly being posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the company's online materials will never find the content in Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by far, the highest quality and quantity of information is.
As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the years of high value content people have put into Discord will effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when they aren't even using it any more.
What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord content to be available in other platforms, generally searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for public channels.
If our Discord content was more openly accessible and shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.
Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your messages are in a database you control, you can translate them to whatever you want.
You should look into Discourse. It's great for internal use aswel as public usage. Real example on their own meta: https://meta.discourse.org - I even use selfhosted instance for personal stuff.
Lots of customizations possible to make it to suit all your needs.
I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself.
Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school.
So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time.
It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things.
Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes.
Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.
At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can find some nugget of information on a web forum without having any prior relationship to that forum.
I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine.
I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question.
Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites.
I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.
> I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for.
This is my problem with Discord-instead-of-forums. I completely agree with your privacy point, I don't want or need every word I type recorded and crawled by every search engine. Ephemeral conversations are useful and important.
It's incredibly frustrating when a Discord server is the only avenue for help with a project. Discord, even at its best, isn't discoverable and is barely searchable.
It's not necessarily a new problem though. Ten years ago it was "find us at #projectname on Freenode". Before that it was join a mailing list.
What's amusing in an annoying way is groups are running into old problems but not learning from old solutions. FAQs were invented because online conversations weren't necessarily persistent. If you joined an IRC channel, mailing list, or followed a newsgroup at time t there was no guarantee you'd have access to any conversations that happened at t-1. So people would make curated lists of common, that is frequently asked, questions. These would end up posted regularly to those ephemeral communications or added to a persistent presence (web, FTP, etc).
I'd be far less annoyed by "join our Discord" if someone involved would persist some common or just novel questions to a persistent FAQ that's discoverable on the Web. It might not be as good as a wiki or forum but it's a lot lower friction than joining a Discord server to ask a question a hundred other people have asked.
I had a seven year old forum get deleted with no backups. Internet Archive saved virtually nothing and there is no way to search it. You have no clue which of the snapshots have saved a certain page of any topic or if any snapshot includes it at all.
With Discord you (or any user) can at least run one of the various off-the-shelf logger bots. And someone would still have to make it available, and who knows how nice it would be to consume, probably not very.
So I'm not sure either have much advantage here if the origin dies forever.
I say this as someone who uses discord heavily for a couple of hobbies: I truly detest discord search. I'd be more accepting of this trend if search wasn't hobbled; please, for the love of zeus, honor the difference between "normal" and "normals" in channels about 3d modeling.
Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere would've worked just as well.
Discord|Slack, are the best all-around tools if you had to make a decision around one tool, and one tool only for a group of people. Discord being stronger for games, and Slack having insane integration capabilities and enterprise-enterprise communications provided the business partners are also on Slack, via their own corporation workplace or GRID plan.
However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior individually to:
A Wiki (Take your pick)
Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client)
Forums (Take your pick)
Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak)
Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others)
Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick)
Tying this together with a common directory or identity service makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities, but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a completely open "just join our discord" type community.
I've been building an intuition that we can't just pick. We need all of them.
Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki
Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies
Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape?
Which can be summarized as, in how long the information lasts:
Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year
Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people who just want the information. As the right side has higher standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down to a lower level.
What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the information that is happening in chats to make its way to forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis where all experimentation has been refined into just truths. All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different services all trying to hold their section hostage.
As information moves from idea to discussion to documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited to be a concise, focused document.
Oh, thank you for giving me (idea, discussion, documentation), I love it.
One of the key insights when you view the model this way is that people are always trying to avoid "filter bubbles", but it's actually totally okay to have filter bubbles in the idea stage, which should open up in the discussion stage, and should be totally gone by the documentation stage.
So one chat community -> one wiki community doesn't make sense. You want sub-communities that can come together to groom the information as it matures.
Another way to look at this is Breadth First Search vs Depth First Search. DFS moves fast and tries to find new ideas, BFS moves slow and makes sure it's taking the correct path. Think about Chess bots that need to go very far down the search space to make the next move.
It's okay for the idea stage to be bubbly. It helps them come up with ideas. if the wiki stage is of all one mindset, you have an issue.
Further thinking since I made this post, I realized when thinking through this model, no wonder why the internet is so toxic. Most people, the less experienced, who should be reading verified Wiki-level information are reading Facebook and similar, a Chat-level discourse. No wonder disinformation flows.
Of course it makes sense why. Unverified stuff is simply more exciting than known stuff that's been filtered of all of the impossible stuff. How do we get most people to read boring wiki entries? Read textbooks?
Unfortunately, for a gaming organization it really brings to the fore the need for knowledge management, and discipline around what makes its way into the Forum, to a Sticky on the Forum, and from there, to the Wiki as Doctrine/Policy. Kind of comedy how much this needs to resemble RL organizations
I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think there's really two different products.
I don't mind discord for chat, but it's awful as a question / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a question, and get an answer.
I'm not calling you lazy BTW.
My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at least for me).
That said, I think discord could get better with the new threading feature. As people create high quality threads the moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even create categories and let users create and manage their own threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol.
Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and the same questions get asked repeatedly.
Gotta be you, gotta be the personal preferences because I'm not that fond of Discord. I'm within same age and similar interests.
The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of longevity of information on Discord if server beside the generic social operation is being used as a way of support for the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you cannot access it again.
The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information on these is within the reach of every person by a standard search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there are of course downsides like limited access to content (register to access links, images) or search engines not being able to index all stuff.
I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums.
Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some communities use subs as one of official communication channels or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official strictly moderated forums case).
I actually agree, we use discord for our team and at the start i wasn’t happy about it. But after a while got used to it and now think its great. A lot of people in this thread saying its hard to find information in discord and disagreeing but ive never had any issues finding stuff with the search function.
I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest and easiest way
> It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again.
Wondering if https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a login to view on mobile/desktop web.
I get your point. Signing up for yet another forum with confirmation email, password and so on ... totally annoying.
Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
As useful as discord is for its primary purpose, it's probably also one of the worst development for communities in the last decades. Discord is a chat, not a forum, nor a wiki. It's just not meant to make knowledge accessible. And even proper discussion are barely possible after a certain group size.
But on the other side, it's a very well protected walled garden, and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the world there quite well. Not really sure whether it's good to have so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public attention.
I am a member in a tabletop gaming club, and no one wants to be responsible if some new European internet law is broken.
So our forum was closed an we have our private community on discord.
Your tabletop gaming club is not the target of GDPR unless you’re _very_ sloppy with user data or you’re selling user data.
All forums, even 20 year old ones, allow you to easily comply with GDPR data requests and deletions without additional tooling from the admin panels: because good moderation tools used to be a thing that didn’t need legal enforcement.
As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There doesn't seem to be any modern forums that I can just host.
If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back.
But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like the early 2000s.
Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never really get developed?
A couple of communities I'm a part of have switched over to Discourse over the past couple of years, and I hate it.
It's just a mediocre forum, but with "modern web" designs/quirks. It does the whole single-page app thing, tons of wasted space/terrible information density, every single thread is displayed in one giant infinite-scrolling list (I've yet to see an instance with proper "subforums", just tags/categories), and it barely works without javascript (although at least it works).
My favorite modern forum software I've encountered is XenForo, although it's neither free nor open source.
self-hosted is a blessing and a curse. Many people like and benefit from it, but also many will not use since they would need a host and setting things up. With Discord you just click a couple buttons
> A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation.
This is not high on my list of complaints, and I'd even venture to say it is an advantage. Asynchronous forums like HN / StackOverflow attract much higher quality (as in, self-contained, thoughtful, informative, and searchable) answers than the Discord servers I'm a part of.
I would agree. On a high-traffic discourse-based forum I peruse, both the automatically updating thread pages and the "soandso is typing…" indicators make for posts that are short, IM-like, and generally more combative.
The endless scroll is a problem too. Because nobody wants to scroll through n-hundred posts, you also end up with the same handful of posts being re-made ad infinitum. Old paged style forums suffered from this to some extent but pages being bite-sized lended to more people reading the whole thread.
and god help you if you're trying to read a thread in reverse order, any images popping in via infinite scroll will make what you're reading jump out of place
That is true, Discord is generally thought of (and used) as voice/chatting platform, more than a message board platform, but people still write random garbage even on those... as evidenced by things like Youtube comments or Disqus comments. So, the target community is still the king when it comes to the quality of the conversation. (BTW I didn't mention Twitter because that is the worst PLUS all the spam. Trying to read something like a response thread for a Musk Tweet is a nightmare.)
I've recently tried Flarum and Discourse, and the biggest issue is that PHP and Ruby on Rails are unforgivably slow and complex. Granted, Flarum/Discourse are way better than PhpBB/NodeBB/etcBB, but after few months I can't update to a new version due to a lot of PHP/Ruby complexity/dependencies related stuff.
Another thing is that forums eventually become a mess of outdated/broken plugins that extend functionality and add features. It seems extending functionality is an afterthought in most forum engines. As a result I try to avoid to use any plugins at all just to keep the site running and not to spend sleepless nights upgrading/fixing code.
The other issue not addressed here is the security aspect too. Via haveibeenpwned so many of the sites I have had data breached on are from forums. It seems so many different forum softwares that exist also have so many security vulnerabilities. And then forum owners often won't upgrade their website as often as they should to ensure it is more secure as they will have a lot of plugins that likely will break.
> > after few months I can't update to a new version
> forum owners often won't upgrade their website ... plugins that likely will break
Maybe then it'd make sense if I mentioned Talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard — it's forum software with automatic upgrades. I'm developing it. There's not yet any plugin system, instead currently "everything" is built-in, and there are (unfortunately) fewer features.
What do you plan to do about the plugin problem? A lot of forums come to rely on these plugins and often times the owners aren't programmers. It means that if they are stuck choosing between upgrading the core software and keeping a useful plugin they often will choose the latter.
Will an automatic upgrade break plugins then? Because I can't see that being optimal.
Maybe one answer can be 1) a public automatic tests repository, 2) release channels, 3) incompatibility auto warnings, and 4) organization internal tests.
1: (for plugin developers) The plugin developers could write automatic tests of their plugins, save them in a plugin-auto-tests source code repository, which the Talkyard developers then would run as part of the Continuous Integration builds (which happens many times more often than new version releases).
The plugin developers would get notified about plugins getting broken, before new Talkyard versions had been released. And could either fix those problems, or tell the Talkyard developers to "please don't do that change at least not now".
2: (for plugin users) Talkyard has release channels (inspired by Kubernetes [1]) — there's a Rapid, a Regular and a Stable channel. (Currently only a Regular channel.) One's Talkyard site could stay on the Stable channel, meaning, there'd be about half a year between the day when a plugin problem got noticed, and a new Talkyard version had been promoted to the Stable channel. That ought to be enough time to have done something about plugin breakage. (Security bug fixes, though, would get added to the Stable release channel, as soon as sensible.)
3: (for both developers and users) There's an automatic notices system in Talkyard. If a plugin uses deprecated functionality, Talkyard can show a warning to the Talkyard forum admins, and then they can decide what to do. Maybe contact the plugin developers? If they don't reply in a month, try finding a new plugin? Contact Talkyard and ask them to take over mainenance of the plugin? (These incompatibility auto warnings are less-noise than subscribing to new-releases-announcement emails, because these warnings would inform you about only the deprecated functionality the plugins on your site use.)
4: If it's super important that a plugin won't break, then the organization could setup a test environment with at a Rapid release channel version of Talkyard. Then they could do their own internal private tests of new versions, about half a year before they'd appear in the Stable channel.
If all these (at least 1-2-3) were in place, I'd think that theoretically, yes plugins could still break. But maybe it would no longer be the right thing to "worry" about. (Auto upgrades are optional, b.t.w., and enabled by default.)
Maybe forums were already perfect. Sure, design could always be updated. However, what's wrong with vBulletin 4 UX? Nothing. It works in all conditions.
Not some self-updating battery-draining endless scrolling website. Yes, I'm looking at you, Discourse. Not to mention the tremendous amount of edge cases where it fails because its complexity is simply out of control. For example, it drops posts on any kind of connection interruption (tab sleep, network down, device sleep, …) unless you refresh.
Growing bubble.io platform (tens of thousands forum members) community [0] use this since multiple years. And bubble community is one of the key aspects.
Ktt2.com (successor to kanyetothe, a huge hip-hop forum) has live messages. However from what I've seen it has the drawback of encouraging lower-content "chat-like" messages instead of the less spammy forum posts of yore.
I am on the same spot of running a future Discord community but planning of hosting a Discourse instance for archive and history of conversations. Discourse has extra batteries included and an active community of people developing for Discourse.
I don't know what forum software you used, but on xenoforo, when a new messages are posted on the thread, you'll get a button at the bottom (with text like 'new messages have been posted since you loaded the page, click _here_ to see them'), loading the new messages without having to reload the page.
Though I feel forums are more geared around asynchronous conversation anyway.
Slack came along and made a lot of money and since then the slack-wannabee-guys are making slack clones in an attempt to attract investor interest. Meanwhile google demonetizes forums , and facebook steals and locks in their users. There are few for Don Quixotes who will be interested in making another forum platform
No idea what software is running Manjaro Linux, Vivaldi or Skyscrapper City forums but these at least from front-end side seem to be pretty modern but, from a perspective of someone who was raised on MyBB and similar solutions, these are pain in the use and awful at displaying the information.
I wish they hadn't updated their forum software indeed. I share your opinion about it: very slow, lots of wasted, white space, and stuff which may or may not be displayed correctly depending on your browser; in a word: modern.
As in other kinds of software, even traditional "*BB" pieces of software follow the fads: add tons of Javacript and heavily revamp interfaces to look trendy. So you can't trust the same piece of software on which you've been relying for decades not to become like that one day.
If I am not mistaken, it used to be running vBulletin. Now it seems to be running Xenforo (which some posts in this thread seem to praise). The problem in SSC's case was that they had let the former piece of software and database rot (the former owner had lost interest/energy for some time, and then sold to a company which didn't do much about it for some more time), so there were frequent troubles, and that justified a big jump "forward".
Luckily I have been banned from there enough times that I don't bother recreating accounts and write there any more, I just browse it 3 times a year nowadays. :-)
> A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back.
I am building just that at https://sqwok.im & would be interested to show it to you.
On Sqwok, each post contains a built-in chat room, is open to the public, shareable by url, supports markdown etc, can be ephemeral or long lived, and are posted to the user's account similar to Twitter.
My friends and I started a website devoted to a multiplayer game back in college at the turn of the century. It had a forum that was heavily used.
Somehow, 20+ years later, it's still going. 14 million posts and 196 people online now. And the game series has been dead for over a decade. I moved on a long, long time ago, but many people remain.
There's a community there that just keeps going, despite the original purpose being long gone. I don't think that would happen with Discord.
I don't know if one can easily say what would or wouldn't have happened if you had chosen a different platform. There are a lot of communities based on irc that have existed forever.
> Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch.
Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who used to read Eurogamer’s forums probably read /r/games nowadays, and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.
> Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago?
Unfortunately, yes. I love reddit, but it suffers from a major issue that most forums didn't suffer from: homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who go against the grain, either in general or on one particular issue. If you have an unpopular opinion amongst a subreddit's members, your comment is ignored at best or goes to the bottom of the pile, never to be seen by anyone. How is this healthy for discussion?
Even if you were to go on a forum made of members with a completely different set of ideals and opinions, unless you were a jerk about it, your voice would be just as "audible" as everyone else's. Everyone could have their say and not be silenced just because they were outnumbered. And you weren't writing just to get the most upvotes, or having to tread super lightly in the hopes that you wouldn't offend anyone or have them downvote you instead of actually, you know, responding to you telling you why you're wrong.
Sometimes we all need to be exposed to things we don't like. Yes, the upvote/downvote tree system may have largely solved the "asshole forum member" problem, and that's great. And for some things, the upvote/downvote system is awesome. Finding a solution to a problem? On a forum you have to go through most of the posts - on reddit, the best answer is probably going to be at the top.
But at what cost? Reddit just feels like a form of censorship to me - even when politics aren't what's being discussed. Just because the government or a corporation isn't the one directly doing it, doesn't make it a good thing suddenly.
> homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who go against the grain, either in general or on one particular issue.
Doesn't this differ drastically from subreddit to subreddit? It's really hard to talk about Reddit as this one place with one line of thought when it is really made up of disparate groups each with their own moderation style.
What are these "against the grain" opinions that you can't find a subreddit for?
I wouldn’t lump upvotes and downvotes in as censorship, personally, but I hold the opinion that they’re a cancer slowly destroying society nonetheless.
Not even from a pure user posting perspective, it’s just too easy to manipulate them for things like subtle advertising.
I worry though that we’ve entered a world where people don’t know how to look for content without it.
It's not censorship in that it's technically still visible. But it's like shouting over someone when they try to speak. You're still preventing most from accessing the message unless people make a greater effort to find those messages.
I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord.
I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.
I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our Meta community.
I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
The first 3 points are something we hope to solve by making theming/configuration for new admins easier. Ideally I'd like to be in a place where those are all easily editable and Discourse can be as dense/sparse as you'd like!
Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
> Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
Highly agree of the timeline, a useful feature from someone who hates to read new +100 pages on a forum thread.
For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists, etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical structure. On mailing lists there's also a sense of time progression as things like sub-projects and issues come up from time to time, having made progress.
Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge.
Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical.
I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback.
Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege.
I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge.
When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me.
In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value.
For me I think these concrete changes might help:
- Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved.
- Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics.
- Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
I've seen people allude to this lack of "geography" here and there, but this really thoughtfully frames the problem in a way I haven't seen before. Thanks for writing all that out. I don't have any immediate solutions/answers, but I will keep it in mind.
I think we also hear this a bit when people say they prefer "old" forums for unspecified reasons. Traditionally they're very top-down, you almost always enter through a category page... so you're naturally getting a feel for the taxonomy just by navigating to content. Discourse can also be configured this way, but it's very common for sites to default to the "latest" view, which can certainly feel like an endless stream of content.
Here's my feedback based on my experience using it, and using try.discourse.org as a specific case to examine.
- You use 73 vertical pixels after every. single. post. for just the reaction and permalink buttons. My browser's inner height is 947px when maximized, that means if I'm seeing the bottom of 4 posts, a full 30% of screen real estate for reading posts is dedicated to showing those buttons 4 times.
- Similarly, having the username and date sit above rather than beside each post, eats even more vertical space. I'm on the page because I want to read. the. thread., let me!
- If I scroll up too fast from the middle of a thread, I end up pulling down the top navbar, which, once the next set of posts loads, is immediately hidden again leading to the whole page jumping after each upward scroll.
- The first place it puts me is "Latest". I can't speak to the distribution of use-cases, but that's never been a helpful place to put me when I first land in a discourse. If I'm new, I want the lay of the land. And this is more true, the more busy the site is. So dropping me in "Categories" would be much more useful.
- Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
- A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
- Once you scroll the topic list, you lose the header, and no longer have a reference for which number is "Replies" and which is "Views". You've got tooltips at least, but it still lends to the overall sense of confusion and not knowing where one is.
- I want to see the name of the original poster of a topic in the list view. No being able to hover to find out is not sufficient because it's not glanceable.
- In the list view, there is no visual distinction between the original poster, frequent posters, and the most recent poster. Original poster as first is fine, but it took me about 30 seconds bouncing around various icons and waiting for the hover to finally figure out that the last one is always the most recent poster. I thought that maybe for really popular threads it was only showing frequent posters.
- It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
- You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
- try.discourse.org in particular has a category "Uncategorized", but there are topics that have no category, not even "Uncategorized". Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
- I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
I sincerely hope this helps to improve my own experience when using discourse one day, but from what I've seen in investigating this, I suspect the level of minimalism in place is done on purpose, despite the negative impact on discoverability and usability, in which case basically everything I said will be dismissed since it's not what you're aiming for, or at least you don't think it is.
I really appreciate the time you spent writing this feedback. A lot of the time someone will say "I hate Discourse" and never offer anything substantial.
I'm not going to respond to everything here, but I just want you to know that it doesn't mean I think it's invalid or dismissible. I really do enjoy reading this stuff.
I also don't have the power internally to say "we're doing this now" but I do keep this stuff in mind when weighing in on new features or refactors.
> Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
Yes, it's kind of both. We call it a "timeline," which I guess puts the emphasis on time... but it's tracking how far you've progressed through the topic. You can drag it around to jump to a specific post or point in time.
> A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
I'd prefer this too... to a point. There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
> It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles. We have a few different category/tag styles that admins can configure, but if 90% of sites never change those... then it doesn't really matter... making the options for configuring this kind of thing more apparent is something we hope to improve soon.
>You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
ctrl+f is definitely a common gripe... we try to be smart about it, but the inconsistency may not be worth it in the end.
Essentially we try to avoid hijacking browser search unless we think we can do a better job. Within topics, if there are a small number of posts and they're all on screen at once, we'll use browser search. If it's a long topic and not all the posts are available, we use our search because it searches all the posts in the topic, not just what's on the current "page" of infinite scrolling.
You can also hit ctrl+f a second time to get to browser search, but it's not discoverable and as evidenced by this reply... this is overly complex to explain.
> Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
Good point. We should probably eliminate the color for Uncategorized unless we're using it elsewhere. Admins can optionally turn on the ability to always show "Uncategorized" with the color under uncategorized topic titles... but unless that setting is enabled we should suppress the color everywhere.
> I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
Yes, I agree here 100%. I've raised this a couple times and we're slowly getting there. We actually already have the UI, but need some more work to make it the default for tags. You can see it in action by visiting a URL like https://try.discourse.org/tags/intersection/test/art
You're right that by default we lean towards being more minimal, but we know that's not what everyone wants. One of the longer term objectives we're starting to work on is making it easier for admins to easily change the appearance when they're setting up a new site. There's a lot we can change within our theming system, but at the moment it's not very approachable for the average admin and too many sites look very "default." I'd like to see more different looking Discourse sites that cater to their specific audiences, with different information density, hierarchy, structure, etc... and hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
>There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
With a fixed width like you have, you could probably calculate height upon submission and just have an accumulating cache of total thread height per thread.
As far as it not working in the extreme case, I'll point out it basically doesn't work in any case right now. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles.
Bold was just an easy example. There's all kinds of ways you could make them differentiated beyond what appears to be the width of a double space between them. You could underline one, italicize, change the font size, change the color, put a '|' between them, put a box around each tag, etc. It's a design challenge, but hardly an insurmountable one.
> hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
I hope so too that one day landing on a discourse page when looking for information doesn't elicit an eyeroll from me. Clearly there's a talented team, and I wish you the best of luck.
I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting.
I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore.
Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums!
They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I was because instinctively on those kinds of linear threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've basically totally given up on it
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app than a good-old website.
It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and fanciness.
I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat, but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one - took forever. And the result didn't run very fast.
After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.
I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a prefab droplet.
It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.
phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse made, there could have been a chance.
Forums do indeed have terrible UX… but it says a lot that they still compare favourably to what we have today, in many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes) slightly easier to use (once you know how), but with no instructions.
People don't read instructions. If you need instructions on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
[b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like that out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i]italic[/i]… had to be told how to do that. Does that make Hacker News particularly bad?)
“Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).
we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience
That's why your example of needing tags to bold text is an excellent example of shitty UX. A WYSIWYG editor where you click the Bold option to enable it, and click it again to disable it would be much better.
But that means hidden state. If I quote somebody, I can see how they produced their markup in BBcode, but in WYSIWYG I can't see which icon button to press.
Quite funny, because when bbs became the norm, the old generation was quite vocal on how bad they are because of their flow-style discussions. At that time, Usenet and mailing lists were the norm, which had thread-like style, like this forum or reddit.
Discourse can also be accessed as a mailing list (for those lamenting its use of JS, etc.). Not sure if it requires any different setup, but that's how I interact with the Nix Discourse, for example.
I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I’d recommend it if you need this kind of solution.
well, the gaming forums of RockPaperShotguns (video game news website), built on Discourse, are set to close next month, so it's less a technological choice and more how much the maintainer/owner of the forum wants to keep it online
Weren't they the ones whining a few years ago about how people insisting on using Android phones (as opposed to wonderfully performant iPhones) were threatening their plans for a glorious JS-only full client-side rendering future?
It's a real shame. The most thoughtful discussions usually take place on forums. Chat has this feel to it where it's better to reply fast and short instead of taking a bit longer but providing an elaborate reply.
I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like vBulleting or phpBB have had it's fair share of security issues. Let alone the costs for a small community forum.
However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the different topics that are discussed in the same channel.
I didn't even realize there was a character limit. A quick search shows me that it is 2000 characters. Which is not _that_ bad, since most forum posts will likely be something shorter. But the entire UX surrounding it is all about quick responses (hit enter to send etc).
I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums and they're much easier to search and access if you're not a member.
But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.
I bought a product that had moved their support to Discord. Their Discord requires that you verify your phone number. I tried to do so but Discord told me my number, which I've had for 22 years, is not valid. I contacted support and their solution was:
"Just find a friend who hasn't used discord and use their number".
Why do people trust this company with anything important?
And what happens when your friend needs to use discord? I have to have separate discord accounts for work, gaming, and the third reason, and I can only use my phone number on one of them, but I'd prefer to use it on none of them.
Scariest thing is Discord isn't accessible without an account. And it WILL close down within a decade. And with that all that information will be gone.
If you don't have an account, discord asks for a nickname, and you still can enter the server without register that account. I think they will create some kind of guest-account. And that access will disappear at some point, so you need a new invite for this server.
Yes. And the account also requires a phone number as often as not, and of course the agreement to their abusive TOS that is so restrictive that it even bans political cartoons.
Forums and plenty of other websites close down. They are not always archived or backed up. What is wrong with data being deleted after a service closes?
They _can_ be backed up by the internet archive and other interested parties, because they are accessed through web standard technology. Discord is closed. It's worse for your information.
A good example is CyclingTips[1]. They are using Slack for years but lots of people never went because it's messy.
A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and there is already a thousand members and three times that of posts.
I'm so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with a "fast and easy tool", and then improve this by setting up your own platform to welcome everyone.
I use Discord everyday but I agree, it's not THE tool that fits every need. Especially if we're talking long term engagement and knowledge repository.
Long time IRC user here. I didn't mind using discord for some communities but it seems as though they now require phone verification which I certainly will not provided them. I feel as though one should be able to use it similarly to IRC and not be tied to one account for one phone number.
I haven't been able to find a temp phone number to use for this purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports SMS but alas, that didn't work.
It's not strictly required, but you need a high reputation email address verification. For example, a custom domain email will not work, but gmail or outlook.com will allow you to make an account without a phone.
Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I don't use either and being disconnected from information about my government because of that is really shitty.
> Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter.
I'm fine with that, since they are popular platforms, the problem is when Twitter or Facebook are used EXCLUSIVELY for communication, this is insane. Governments should have RSS channels or forums maintained by governments themselves as a redundancy.
Another thing is all these businesses that have delegated their entire customer service to... Twitter and Facebook. My ISP did this recently, you can't even call them anymore or email them, they don't have a public phone number or phone line, you must go through Twitter for support, this is INSANE. I immediately cancelled my plan with them as soon as I found out.
I am really not fine if you need to have a Facebook or Twitter account to follow. Add Facebook blocks any RSS attempt to grab post from their pages. Facebook is GeoCities with restrictions.
I so much agree with this. That's why our team is starting to use Discourse for Teams instead of email and Microsoft Teams.
Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should have a title. That's how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but also Zulip work. That's what I miss the most in Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.
Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying like a chat system.
I run a small, free browser-based persistent strategy RPG. We've had a forum for about a decade, and for a time, it was extremely popular.
A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the game, and people started joining immediately.
It's been nearly a year now since there was more than a single forum post per month.
If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they are—or where they want to be. I'm not at all thrilled with the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper monetization, but I am thrilled with how much people love interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don't have a realistic alternative to offer them.
I wonder if we're headed for a future in which knowledge is far less accessible than it was in previous years. With communities moving to these closed/proprietary platforms (Discord, Slack) which aren't fit for purpose (making knowledge accessible and easily searchable), I suspect it'll have a negative affect on the ability of individuals to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge.
Forums started dying off when social media started rising. I liked them better than what we have now, too, but... it is a little odd to attack Discord for the downfall of forums.
Lack of singular identity or algorithmic feeds would be the big two for me.
Forums are decentralised so you are someone else on the forum for game A than on the forum for hobby B, unless you work to link your identities. Whereas the big social media platforms aspire to be a one stop shop.
Additionally forums generally sort by "newest thread first" or "most recently replied thread first" rather than trying to push the "hottest" threads or "trending threads" or similar at you.
To add onto this, the identities on good forums, with reputation scores, post counts, tenure, etc. served as a useful proxy for some degree of expertise or experience with the general topic at hand.
On Facebook everyone has a transparent identity, yet somehow seems more like an anon if outside of your real life circle. On Twitter post and follower counts don't correlate with having thoughtful or informed opinions. On Reddit shitposting dilutes everything, with a dash of Instagram-like flex culture for karma points, and the effect / bias towards a hive mind is too powerful.
Forums were content-centric, while social media is person-centric. Every user got the same content, with the same experience. I consider HN a forum for these reasons - even though the content is ordered algorithmically and are voted on, Rando A gets the same view as Rando B (for the most part)
Yeah, when I think about social media I think something like MySpace or our local IRC-Galleria. That is where user presence is main thing and not discussion like usenet or BBS or simple forums. Not even sure if I would consider Discord a social media...
Yeah I dislike that everything is moving on to there.
I dont like having to share one account with all the random servers I join.
I dont like all the bots and the gauntlets to enter servers.
I dont like the format for most of what it seems to be used for.
I dont like the centralization and the general corporate overlord vibe they have.
I’m going to be downvoted for this, but I love discord for communities. GitHub issues for tracking long-standing bugs or feature requests, and discord for more granular, spontaneous support queries is great. The new Threads feature is nice, the amount of control and automation with channels and bots opens up endless possibilities. Not to mention the search is powerful and blazing fast. Forums feel sluggish and dated in comparison. I spend an hour or more providing support in the Svelte discord, and I love it.
I don't think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and most frequent conversations to the web.
The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.
Discord is amazing for getting fast answers to questions, but terrible at accumulating knowledge.
For example, several times I've joined a server to ask a question about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a few minutes.
The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future could benefit from my Q/A session by finding it on a search engine.
The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I post in a random server, I want anonymity.
I have the same problem with Gitter.im or slack for FOSS projects - quite a few communities have switched from being fórum based (and therefore the conversations are logged and indexable by search engines), to being ephemeral conversations in Slack channels.
You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral platforms, but most large communities provide some form of indexable log of the conversations
While I agree with the article that they are not the same, people using one thing may not be interested in the other, or at least not be aware of it.
I've used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before that, and forums alongside it.
Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues more ephemeral (or fun).
A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would go to IRC.
These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any discussion on proprietary software/data integrity/ownership etc).
As a product, I really love Discord. I don't want everything to end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of which is discoverability and persistence.
Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat, in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better served elsewhere.
I hate discord. Every time I jump on to get help or engage in a semi-intellectual conversation, you end up talking to the same “regulars” on the server and often times you end up with a lot of misinformation. I end up leaving because there’s also a lot of gate keeping going on.
I agree. Very unlikely that I will find a meaningful discussion on discord, about a subject or problem when I'm searching for it on Google/DDG/etc.
If i cannot find it, I won't be able to participate.
A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord's support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1].
Did people not learn a lesson about closed communities from Facebook? At somepoint Discord will want to agressively monetise the numbers of people using its platform, and a lot of the convenience it currently provides will find its way behind a direct or indirect payment mechanism.
Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to actually have quality conversations there as communication is by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less chance someone will read what you have written, and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated.
Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.
> and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated.
I am reading a manga and there's a reddit sub for it. Until a year ago give or take we were like 30 or 40. The manga was slowly moving the storyline but it picked up again and now there are tens of thousands of people. When there were only 30-40 people there used to be a stupid puerile joke related to the manga. You could see it once a week, or maybe in a lot of posts but quickly drowned or irrelevant anyway since only person did it. It was not mentioned much.
Now with all those people ? That supid joke/meme is present in every post, every comments. Every new chapter release gets many comments with that dumb joke.
I also feel like comments are now shorter and story theories much simpler and... well, quality is reduced. As you said, predictable comments are ruining the fun.
There's also the aspect on how you deal with simple questions that are asked repeatedly. But in my experience, both Reddit and Forums aren't dealing with it perfectly.
For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?" or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially, questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum veterans.
In Forums, moderators often close threads with those questions with comments like "This has already been answered 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately, exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who came up with that idea).
In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable. Especially considering Reddit's search function has also turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to look for terms that have definitely been mentioned a lot of times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any results.
I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls.
[1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard answers.
HN is closer to chat than forums. Topics after the first page are effectively closed forever and it’s near impossible to continue a conversation without constantly checking it or relying on some external tools/extensions.
The point based default sorting also makes it difficult for any late entrant to participate in the conversation. The community has already decided what consensus is and that topic will quickly disappear anyway.
HN and forums have different use cases (this site is called Hacker _News_ after all). So I agree with you this format is better for HN. When discussing news longstanding discussions are not really the point, and this site is fairly strictly moderated.
But that's not true for most types of discussions and communication.
It really depends on the size of the subreddit. There is definitely an inverse correlation between subreddit size and quality of content / discussion as more karma is available for bots to farm.
But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new content that the default view isn’t static, but not so much that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based, forums suffer from this as well — if your post reply isn’t on the first or last page, it’s probably not getting read.
Forums suffer from significant bitrot — particularly when images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful forum posts from 10 years ago aren’t really useful anymore because all the images are gone and the links are dead. Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is actively maintained.
Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably the best option.
You can sell high-karma accounts or leverage them into mod positions. For whatever reason people take high-karma accounts to be a signal of quality (or at least activity). Mod positions on large subs are used to signal-boost corporate social media campaigns (ever notice how a bunch of fast and furious memes always pop up across a ton of subreddits a month before the movie comes out?) There’s money in that and it’s basically the same role and business model as a social media influencer on Instagram.
Some people also do it for the lulz, it’s not that hard to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same meme, which is an interesting engineering project for someone wanting to learn those methods).
"move it all to reddit" has some of the same issues as moving it to discord. It puts control in the hands of a single company who might say, decide your subreddit is only available to mobile users if they install the app and sign in
Notably, however, this was not the issue focused on by the article (somewhat to my surprise). The article is about real-time versus asynchronous communication, and reddit would solve for that.
No, reddit is absolute garbage for long-running threads. Their algorithm is predicated on people constantly posting new threads. This leads to people constantly posting the most common discussion topics over and over and over.
I would like to think putting everyone’s eggs in one basket to be used for unstated purposes would bother most people, but it really doesn’t.
I think they’re right though. I’m inclined to think that chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts. Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious argument by contradiction of this.
Reddit is at the whim of hyper political, power hungry mods. On top of that, everything is superceded by hyper political, power hungry admins and the same for the company itself.
Forums sometimes had those issues, but the centralization of Reddit is the problem.
The sooner Reddit dies and forums become decentralized again, the better
I much, much, much prefer the original, threaded and immutable conversational structure of traditional forums.
One thing I particularly despise about reddit is having to scroll past the bevy of meme/joke/tired reference (is that a jojo reference?? unexpected letterkenny!!!) comments that percolate to the top thanks to upvotes. In reasonably popular subreddits anyway, more niche ones may not generate any comments at all.
I'd much rather find a megathread about a subject on some popular forum, start some time in the past and work my way through the posts in chronological order as god intended.
Yes, how do I even search my own comments per subreddit?
And to read anything you are almost required to be logged in because of the threading mechanism, just trying to do use find in the browser is annoying.
It works fine, but you're beholden to the Reddit overlords, you don't have enough control, and if someone decides that your subreddit no longer fits with Reddit's brand, or that old posts should be purged, etc that information is lost. Then there's the whole old vs new reddit, its complete inaccessibility from web (for which Google will probably punish them at some point) in favor of the app, etc.
Reddit is a bad example. On smart phone they force you to use the app instead of the mobile web page. That doesn't happen with forum such as PHPBB. The exact reason why it is better to be a simple forum that works in simple browsers.
Yes there are various 'hacks' for using Reddit on mobile without an app, but the default discoverable Reddit web site that most 'normal' people will find is completely and intentionally broken on mobile
As the other comments point out, reddit has cultural problems, but I just want to say that I love old reddit's interface. It's compact, unlike forums where people's signatures and profile pictures take up half the vertical space, messages and message indentation is clear, unlike new reddit, and most importantly conversations are threaded, unlike traditional forums where everything is a mess of intertwined conversations of people replying to each other.
It's better than Discord, but still not great. A lot of helpful information ends up lost because some people do full purges of their accounts. It's awful to find a Reddit thread that used to have the answer to your questions but now just shows half of the posts as deleted.
Is discord indexed by Google? I don't think it is. If this is the direction we're going anyways then at least having the ability to find discord messages from a search would be beneficial. I know that in recent years my primary interaction with forums has been as a result of searching for things either videogame or Linux related. Losing that info into an unindexed service is indeed a loss
If you're a manager of a forum and are considering doing this, I would encourage you to look at discourse.org. It's mobile friendly, looks great and easy to install. They have a one-click DO setup, which requires only a little technical knowhow and is extremely affordable.
I've managed a community—Product Notes—for several years on the platform and it has been fantastic.
Forums are awful UX - really bad, it's why all this other stuff exists.
I don't like discord either and don't like the model of megacorps sucking up all our communication and locking it away while creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control.
I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads.
I'm also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of solving this in a way that doesn't centralize ownership while also enabling a UI that doesn't suck.
Asking people to use forums will not succeed.
As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree - but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.
"HN" comment chains may be better (but that's debatable) than forum's linear discussions, but
HN "news" model (front page oriented) is terrible and everything that falls from front page is automatically dead, end of topic.
Forum discussions can last weeks, months or even years meanwhile everything that's 2 days old is dead on HN, here's no discussion once something disappears from front page.
It's the threading model I think is superior - the forum pages model where you get hundreds of slowly loading pages and horrible quoting, signatures, etc. make it unusable for me.
Its design is interesting and the non-zero cost of IDs make sense as a way to build reputation and eliminate spam: https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf
I'm no fan of CY's neo-reactionary politics, but he's also no longer involved in the project and they're not relevant to the problems the design solves.
Similarly I think the 2008 monetary policy around QE was an incredible success, but I still think Bitcoin is worthwhile and interesting despite the fact Nakamoto thought the bailouts were a bad idea.
It's possible to look at these things separately imo. (John Nash, Bobby Fischer, etc. - long list of people that do worthwhile things but may believe things I don't agree with).
My company has started moving people to Teams and Yammer and its the most annoying thing ever. Nothing is available anymore as all the links are dead because everything is moved. Finding information now is a chore because a search for the right question returns multiple results rather than a page that once contained all the FAQs individually. Getting feedback means wading through the noise of multiple posts of "thanks" for some reason. Its all very annoying and I yearn for the days of forum posts and wikis.
I almost never use discord, not that I want to avoid it, but because my daily use of software doesn't require it.
Gaming, I usually use Steam's built-in voice chat and/or rooms, and search for community forums within the game's page without hassle.
For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don't have the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the group calls and screen share.
When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions or create an issue.
I really like when some random program or service I am trying to use has a Discord, cus I can just go on, ask my dumb questions and immediately get help in realtime from a human who knows about this stuff.
As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single response, and so on.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to make a brand new post on a forum. The guiding principle of 2000s forum etiquette was "do a search first", because you weren't the first to come up with that dumb question.
Some of these forum owners want chat instead of forums. Forums just used to be one of the only ways to facilitate chat in a practical way.
I think that the author of this article didn't really consider what the communities' and companies' needs are, and is more interested in criticizing them for "making the Internet worse." For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not about what the owners of the forums or their users want:
> Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum.
It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum.
There are going to be communities and companies that want forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They're great for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of knowledge. They're great for certain types of discussions. At the same time, not every community is out there looking to do that kind of thing. A lot of them just want to socialize live, and that's where services like Discord shine.
I second this article's sentiment. Back in the 2000s I spent a lot of time on forums and Wikia. I can still find lots of posts and conversations I had way back over a decade ago (on the forums that haven't shut down) and looking things up is easy. Even for forums you're not a part of, it's easy to benefit from their knowledge with an online search. In contrast, anything within discord is stuck within discord, and not only do you need an account to participate but it introduces a single point of failure: discord. If the company gets shut down or gets bought out and changed, everything's gone. If a server runs into issues with discord management/leadership, it's gone. Not to mention the slower pace of forums and chat nature of discord lead to completely different kinds of conversations and discussion.
Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and forums would hold real discussion. We'll see if that approach survives.
insert old man yells at cloud meme (just having a laugh)
My least favorite part about forums is having to create a new account for every single forum I want to access.
Sure, password managers make it easy to have hundreds of different accounts on different sites, but I just don’t want to do that because it makes everything feel clunky and disconnected.
Sure, most have Google/Twitter/GitHub logins available, but some don’t which only makes me think “wait did I use Google or Twitter to sign into this forum last time?”.
Discord has three things I like: a single account, infinite chat history, and the ability to star/favorite messages that are relevant to me for future reference. Those are all I really need to consider it a useful platform for forum-like discourse.
Speaking of that, some forum software like Discourse (and it’s mobile app, Discourse Hub) and Forem make it easier to consolidate tons of disparate forums, but any time I’m on an old phpBB or vBulletin site I usually don’t even bother making an account.
Tangentially, what would it take for forums to get a resurgence? Pseudo-centralization / connection through forum-software? Clearly a lot of users prefer the long-form format.
My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people's attention rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator, it's a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and content every instant.
It's not just forums, recently I looked around for information on an incremental game only to be told that there is no wiki or anything like that but to "join the discord".
WHY?! would I ever use a chat software to look up static information on a game?
I know that information may or may change between releases but the release isn't daily or even close to that, so using a platform where I might have to read through or at least skim over hundreds of messages in conversation/support channels to find the right crumb of information is just insane to me.
Also having to get an account and/or installing additional software for serving information which could just as well have been done with a fandom/wikia page and no unnecessary barriers is just utterly stupid.
I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics that persist and can be searched. On discord it’s all one long conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to find that it’s pretty much gone.
If Discord had one more level of hierarchy, that would make it work like a pretty good forums. Server > Channel > Topic > Messages. Where mods make the server/channel and users can make topic/messages
"Forums create a record, an archive we can search through"
This article touches on the biggest frustration point of communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.
I haven't found discord replacing forums but Facebook groups certainly have and it really hampers searching and finding information and stuff just seems to vanish.
We have both, it works fine, and both platforms have their own goal.
I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I know there's no public search history anywhere (gitter does have that iirc?).
There's a LOT of information and history in old forums and even old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably useless, but it's that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.
Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive). Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and Lean Prover, use it.
We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532.
We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete.
I routinely run a combination of Slack and Discourse for my online communities. I can move interesting Slack threads into Discourse for longer-term and more-thoughtful discussion.
The immediacy of chat has its place, but so does the semi-permanence of something like Discourse or Groups.io or a good, old-fashioned mailing list.
I feel the same way about Facebook groups. I'd much rather create a throwaway account registered with my domain (whateverforum@mydomain.com) for every forum than create and use a Facebook or Discord account to engage with multiple communities. I don't want or need a centralized "social" account.
This is destroying the internet in the same way we raze neighborhoods to build skyscrapers. Yes, we destroying something real and valuable, and it sucks, but it's the inevitable march forward of human progress. Why shouldn't digital redevelopment work the same way as physical?
Who does this? I haven’t seen that happen even once. They are completely orthogonal? Both have their uses.
What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving to discourse and that I see happen in tons of places. But closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat/voice-chat?
I've seen a lot of communities moving from IRC to Discord, which is a fantastic improvement in accessibility, search, etc.
For the types of communities I'm thinking of (eg, certain retro gaming niches), forums had essentially been dead for years before Discord rolled around and helped revive a lot of conversations.
Maybe it's an awkward fit for technical stuff where you really just want Q&A, but I love it.
I'm swimming the other way and trying to create hosted software for plain old forums (https://discoflip.com). I started it to scratch my own itch and then opened it up. Honestly, not getting much traction.
Cool concept with channels, but it took me over 7.5 seconds to load the front page with half of it before any visible content, and almost 2.5 seconds to load About. Also, hot-linking images is bad practice, it may be worth just getting rid of the images while you build out functionality. Are you planning on releasing the source for it?
The performance sucks. 30 out of 100 on chrome web vitals. We are overhauling it this week (including eliminating the post load). Great point about hotlinking images which I have taken a note of (also creates mixed content http issues). I didn't think there would be value in releasing the source. So hadn't thought about it. But now that you mentioned it, maybe I should.
I would love to have pre-spam Usenet back, or threaded forums like they used to make them before everyone used the BB-style flat forums. But I can understand companies not wanting to bother with this kind of software, moderation, data retention and privacy laws etc. ...
One downside not mentioned is the accessibility aspect. Screenreaders are great at reading basic HTML like forums. Discord? Significantly more work and trouble. Last I checked, VoiceOver completely skips emojis in Discord messages.
As a middle ground I'd at least love to see some way to expose Discord's pinned messages to the web for anonymous viewing. It seems like they're acting as the de facto "forum post" of yore.
I asked a very similar question on HN about this a few months back related to software support forums going to discord and slack. Total pain for finding answers to issues and problems
I don't know how people can read anything in Discord. It's a chat app, not a good medium to expose any information for people to be able to check when needed.
And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it's a hellhole.
As a crusty old barnacle in my 30s, I'm inclined to think (with no empirical evidence mind you) that younger users prefer chat because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly updating ticker of new info.
Twitch, IG Live, FB Live, TT all have these auto-refreshing streams of comments in the UI.
I'm the same age but didn't have Internet before the late '90s. MSN Messenger and ICQ were the big chat platforms of my time. I rarely chatted with strangers, although there were several city-based or activity-based rooms on mIRC where that could be done.
Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.
And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s
Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.