If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.
> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.
You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.
That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
> I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer
Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.
> These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits, which are usually touted as superior alternatives to Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found a solution to a problem predating Discord.
Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on.
Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.
I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic.
Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.
I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.
That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.
