I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.
That'd almost definitely turn me off from using that project. Whenever I'm assessing if a project is good enough to use, the first thing I check is the issues to see what bugs/missing features there are and what things users commonly need help with.
If I had to waste time digging through their discord to understand that when the issues page can give a quick overview, I wouldn't bother with the project unless it was something extremely unique and important enough to me to deal with such a mess.
Yep, it had this effect on me! Ultimately I did not get that device working on my debian desktop, though it worked without issue on the raspberry pi I also wanted to use it for and that was good enough. Would love to have this device (wireless xbox controller dongle) for my desktop too, but I am not going to hang out on discord to debug a computer problem unless I desperately have to. I can just plug in my xbox controller and use it wired.
I can see a trade off here: effectively we're talking about different strategies for reducing the amount of noise.
With GitHub you reduce the noise because people who know how to use Google will find the relevant issue and either contribute to it or find an answer to their question. OTOH everyone else submits issues with no regard to what's already in the issues list.
With Discord you do it by putting an auth wall in the way, which reduces the overall number of people reporting issues and asking for help but, OTOH, everybody who signs up has to ask for help.
Even with that, I'd still prefer GitHub issues, but I can see why some owners would get annoyed with it.
I think sometimes people want communities rather than projects so they go the whole hog with realtime chat: IRC, slack, gitter, discord, etc.
Personally I find it a barrier to entry since I have no desire to sit around in a chat room where support is typically blended with shitposting, infighting and drama.
At least perhaps consider a middle ground like Discourse or phpBB.
That makes sense, and I think I probably come down in a similar position to you. I'd say it can be great for a project to have a community, but I don't think I'd conflate managing and supporting that project, with interacting with the community in quite that way.
Years ago I looked after a product that the company I'd worked for had acquired which had hundreds of thousands of users. Originally the only avenue for support for that product had been email and that was a problem because we were overrun with emails asking very similar questions, and nobody was responding to them (or had time to). So I started creating blog posts to answer these questions, every time I encountered a new question, and sending them in very short responses to emails. I.e., effectively I created a knowledgebase, but I used a blog because it was the most convenient, and least bureaucratic way of achieving the solution: I won't say it wasn't politically charged, because it definitely pissed a couple of people off, but it got the job done and avoided a zero outcome scenario because I didn't get blocked by these people (one in particular). Sending out these knowledgebase posts started to reduce the support burden because now, of course, we had a search-engine indexed body of content that people could find online.
The point being if you're a small team and you want to minimise the amount of work you need to do to support your project, unless you have a very small and niche community, you're much better off creating resources that are openly available, than in some sort of walled garden, especially if the walled garden means you have to repeat yourself a lot.
But Github has the closest thing to a solution - a public repository of all the previous questions which people can search to discover if someone has already had the same issue.
Maybe the people of HN are just a small minority of users that contribute GitHub Issues on popular public repositories and not very well representative of the whole? Have you maintained a popular repository on GitHub? I can vouch for tons of spam/duplicate Issues.
> Sorry for a stupid question; but does not Discord have full-text search?
So if I grep something in /var/log/foo.log, find an error, I can copy-paste it into a search bar to start seeing what others have said about.
How does that work with Discord? I now have to sign up for the channel(s) of that software… and do that for every piece of software that decides to go with Discord.
Whereas if folks go with publicly accessible web forums, Github tickets, mailing lists (either old school Mailman or Google Groups), all those discussions and threads are universally available to web search.
Discord has the most infuriating search I've ever seen. It's fuzzy by default and you can't turn the fuzziness off - there's no way to search for a literal phrase, or even a literal word.
> They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.
But their choice will make some people decide not to use their software. If I have an issue that I'm looking for support for, and discover that it doesn't exist outside of something like Discord, I would stop using that software.
It may be that there aren't many like me, or that the devs don't want users like me, but nonetheless, choosing a poor support forum will lose some users.
On Discord, if it's an active community, 99% of the time the person to respond first will be another community member and not an active maintainer. Because people are already on Discord, they'll see a channel light up and decide to drop in. Compare that to GitHub issues where pretty much just the maintainer will get an email and the advantage is clear.
I wonder why GitHub never implemented "does this other existing ticket already cover your issue?" suggestions like StackOverflow. That would probably help in a lot of these situations.
Then make a (readable) FAQ with the commonly asked questions. Any project that has a large number of commonly asked questions either has major UX problems or poor documentation, or both.
I suppose this can be at least partially explained by typical modern attitude "What is the most recent is most important. What have been long ago can be ignored". Let me give you examples:
- Chats in modern IM applications like Telegram or WhatsApp are sorted by the time of the most recent message in chats. Yeah, there are various workarounds like folders and pinning, but the default approach is "sort by time"
- The default for modern monitoring, Prometheus, does not bother with storing aggregated information for the long time. And mostly people are OK with this. Compare with old school RRD which retained aggregated data for a year by default.
- The common UI for photo gallery on mobile devices is the timeline. Other options like grouping by GPS location or folders are not easily accessible and feel like an extra not very polished feature.
And in a way this is a reasonable strategy to cope with too much data, too many things demanding our attention.
Now let's get back to issues vs discord. In the point of view that I have just described there is no need for search and discovery. If the issue happens frequently it is frequently mentioned and grabs attention and therefore get fixed eventually. Something that happens infrequently does not matter anyway. Eternal storage feels like a burden. Every issue that have been posted just keeps begging for attention and does not sink in the depth of time!
But even if I can understand this point of view I am an old-school guy and can not accept it.
> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.
> On GitHub, I had to log in and search their thousands of issues to find an error message, only to find it's like three closed issues without any replies and there's one troubleshooting step in chinese.
I don't see how this would be an issue exclusive with Discord rather than the project itself.
You don't have to log in or even have a GitHub account to search through issues. Hell, in many cases you don't even need to be searching on GitHub to find the relevant issue since they're indexed by search engines. Neither of these are an option with Discord.
Maybe GitHub issues are bad as a support forum, but the point that OP was trying to make (that Discord is even worse as a support forum) is still valid. On GitHub issues, you at least have a chance to find the solution for an issue yourself, on Discord you basically have to ask and hope that someone is nice (and competent) enough to answer your question.
Totally off topic, but I just got two Xbox Series Controllers working over Bluetooth flawlessly, connected to a Raspberry Pi, using xpadneo driver. Can highly recommend that driver.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am still using my crusty old launch day Xbox One and the original launch day controllers for it. All of the hardware is working great, and somehow I have a lot of those controllers. But that generation of hardware uses their proprietary wireless interface rather than bluetooth. There is a cute little $20 generic dongle you can buy for this, and it works great on for example the raspberry pi I use with steam link. For some reason though the kernel driver did not properly load on my debian system. This is where I encountered the discord based support chat. I did post some info there and got some suggestions, but I really dislike discord for working on software issues. Github Issues works extremely well for me for this.
I guess what I'm wondering is, what are people trying to prevent or protect by moving to Discord?
On one hand, I don't see Discords as any different to web forums, except with no personal control and the knowledge barriers removed. In that way, they're not really different from the defunct AOL communities or Yahoo Groups of yesteryear, outside of their inability to be conveniently scraped or archived. Can you port your Discord channel to a different platform or self host?
On the other, it seems like the people who like it /really/ like it. But then again, people have always liked being gatekeepers, even if they don't really hold the keys and it's not their castle. But that surely isn't all of the appeal?
> I don't see Discords as any different to web forums
A rather huge difference is that you have to sign up in order to use Discord. You usually don't in order to search web forums. Signing up for something is a pretty huge ask.
- More people get notified immediately on Discord, and then everyone chimes in. When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue. It becomes even more of a community effort to find solutions.
- It's much easier to use a single account for multiple purposes. If everything is on Discord, then a single account is all you need (vs a separate account for GitHub, GitLab, random bulletin boards, etc.)
> When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue.
You can customize your repository notifications in a granular way, including subscribing to issues (Watch > Custom > Issues), discussions, releases, etc.
This is the primary method I use to track OSS releases. More in the GitHub docs:
But people don't do that. Pretty much only the maintainer(s) of a project opt in to be notified of issues on GH. On Discord, by default the channel lights up if a channel has new messages.
IMHO, Github issues vs Discord is a false dilemma. Searching in Discord or searching through hundred of issues with months of comments are equally bad.
A place to report issues and a place to discuss have their use, but any project needs comprehensive documentation and a FAQ page. Yes, many won't read them. But also, many will.
> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.
Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
"It doesn't drive engagement" is overly cynical. Discord was designed for chat, not as a support forum, and the search is surprisingly functional for a chat client.
Yeah fair enough, I did say it wasn't designed for that though, I think I meant more like '[and] it doesn't drive engagement [in what the core product/use-case is] [so that's not a cause for a push to make it work well, history well discoverable etc., either]'. But basically I agree, my intended main point was it's not for that, you're not supposed to be spending much time reading old discussions.
(And I think the engagement cynicism might be at least a bit correct/warranted for Reddit.)
It has been some time so I have no clear recollection. Usually I hate waiting for replies though so I imagine I would have searched if I saw how. I cannot recall how that went.
One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users.
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se.
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
I use to run a lot of tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the hardest problem I had was the people I call “Superturkers” who would do a very high volume of work that is just barely acceptable in quality.
On some level they are very hard working and if I banned them it would take longer to get my tasks completed. If they did 5% of the work that they do the low quality wouldn’t bother me because (1) a little of that diluted in the whole is OK and (2) the individuals would not come to my attention.
With some feedback some of those people might get better (I was always open to paying more for quality) but I also didn’t want to get into arguments with those folks.
Save yourself the rules-lawyer hassle and add a rule saying essentially "all the other rules are good-faith guidelines, but we can ban you for any reason we want." This is already a de facto rule in all forums/etc; forums that don't state it explicitly just have moderators stretch and contort the other rules to essentially become this rule anyway.
A general principle I've used in moderation is that after I admonish someone about a behaviour what I expect is that they will scrupulously seek to keep as far clear of that line as possible.
If they're hovering right over it, they're out, based on the administrative burden principle.
The other rule is that all arguments with moderators are short, and lost.
Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.
Sometimes these people need a hard truth. I’d say most times. They usually won’t “get it” in the moment, but the only way they can ever get it is if someone respects them enough to say it.
These sorts of bans aren’t just good for the community. They’re also good for the recipient. (I’d only say that in the short term, depending on the person, there could be a danger of self harm and people should always be kind and careful.)
It doesn’t feel good. But that pain you feel is you caring about that person. Understanding that makes it easier.
"someone respects them enough to say it." "They’re also good for the recipient."
I've never seen anyone learning anything from being permabanned from anywhere. This is just post-facto justification to make yourself feel better for removing those people - but don't believe it even for a second that you've helped them in any way. Helping the community? Could be. Helping the banned person? Hell no.
I was banned from a Discord server for reasons like these, and I found it really helpful for knowing for sure that I needed to change my behavior. I think it fundamentally comes down to the person; I have struggled with knowing how to “read the room” and when something is acceptable or not, and it was a very clear “it’s not” after the ban.
To the degree that anything is 'wrong', it's your argument. You haven't experienced a thing even indirectly, therefore, you conclude, anyone else who claims to have experienced this thing must be lying (at least to themselves) to make themselves feel better about bad actions which harm others. This is just cynicism.
Your argument also requires the hidden assumption that the person making the claim you disagree with (specifically me), was the person performing the action rather than the recipient of the action. While it is true I have ended relationships (including permabans), it was by being the recipient of such endings that I came by my knowledge so this assumption in a practical sense is false.
This is the difference between banning in the aughts versus now.
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
I find blocks are almost necessary for me to be able to stand to use Mastodon.
There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.
One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.
So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.
You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.
While I can relate to that, as that's how I made Twitter tolerable, is that really as much of an issue on the Fediverse which doesn't have algorithmic recommendations? I only have to see posts from the people I follow and I don't follow anyone who has a tendency to like "rage post"ing so I basically never see that sort of stuff unless I look at the global feed.
I think people have misconceptions about algorithmic feeds.
You can measure what inflames people or you can predict what inflames people, measuring is always going to be more acccurate.
… and you can do that measuring by counting boosts or (on HN) taking the ratio of comments/votes. 0.5 is about the median, articles that go above 2 are well in the danger zone.
In my mind the chronological feed with boosting is pretty toxic on its own, an “explore” feed based on what is getting boosted is even worse.
YOShInOn’s main feed I look at every day is based on (1) clustering and (2) prediction of my upvotes and downvotes, I don’t particularly upvote toxic articles, in fact, I make a point to down vote them so my feed is calming and low in sensationalism. (Though there was a time I was into articles from The Guardian about how the UK is going to hell…). So that kind of algorithmic feed is not inflammatory.
If you use “boost count” or judged sentiment or the like you could make a model that amplifies or diminishes angry content. The thing is voting and boosting is not all bad, I post a lot of flower pics to Mastodon because they get boosted, up to a point discussions on HN are a good thing, If you used a sentiment model to suppress angry content in a voting/boosting process that might be very good.
Sometimes I think about making an “angry toot” model but I can’t stand the thought of looking at 5000 angry toots (well, i have thought about testing a weight loss plan based on inducing a psychogenic fever and maybe that would work…)
People have got worse, there are far more of them than in the early days, and the online/offline boundary has collapsed. And I think as we've all got older we become accustomed to the sad truth that misbehavior slides seem to rarely be recoverable. People lean in to their awfulness, until something terrible and offline happens.
> Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.
Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.
Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.
> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.
And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.
> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.
Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.
Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?
>Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
The issue with blocks as implemented on reddit is that they effectively work as moderation tools that instead of following some community norms are in the powers of individuals who are happy to abuse them. In at least one Reddit community it was enough of a problem that they made ot a rule that blocking someone was a bannable offence. Blocks should just be mutes for those blocking them. not an effective unilateral ban for whoever gets there first.
Check out rule 11 on https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/about/ (they have relaxed the rules a bit because Reddit doesn't provide for a non-abusable block, which is important and useful functionality). But essentially it's disruptive because you can simply block most of the active members of a subreddit and get an unchallenged soapbox, which in a community which wants to correct misinformation is not desired (I think they fixed this particularly stupid idea but for a while you could just block all the moderators and it would be quite difficult for them to even notice you)
But by virtue of blocking most of any given subreddit to get "an unchallenged soapbox" I mean... you will get that, but:
1) Your post will get very little traction or engagement, which means it'll be buried in New quite quickly
2) You won't really be a bother to the community at all, because of 1. Like, if someone posted something that was incredibly offensive to all in a given community but then hid it from everyone... like, is it even really posted? Isn't that just basically shadowbanning yourself?
I'm legit trying but I'm having a hard time picturing what purpose this would be used for, on the part of the poster. Seems like a huge waste of time to be honest.
Most internet community rules seem to spawn from a fear of authority. A mutual fear from the rank-and-file and the rulers. Endlessly debating a million little rules is safer than questioning each other's judgement. Authority resolves both those situations efficiently, but it demands a morality: a fair standard applied across all people.
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
Possibly. I was thinking more about Bay Area tech people who can't handle deep conflicts and outsource morality to their managers. But hey what do you know there is a Bible verse for this: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A15...
People should be reminded that rules are more of a guideline than a strict plan to follow, especially in the online world. Banning people is a crucial part of forming a community, and you should feel no shame for applying it where necessary to guide the atmosphere towards a better place.
It's even worse because whoever has enough free time to lurk and misinform also has the free time to network, so those people won't get necessarily banned but sometimes also be rewarded for being active in the community.
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
I swing the banhammer early and often without remorse.
If you don't learn after being reminded, there is no use keeping you around.
1 bad person can ruin it for everyone else - not having that.
I believe in second chances but not in online communities.
Doesn't the same thing happen with old school forums? There are some avatars I remember (I don't remember their user names) on certain product's forums who I know I can't trust, and they show up in every third thread I find on Google. At least they never change their avatar, if they did I might fall for their BS again.
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
I feel like it's different on more asynchronous mediums than just chats.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
Forums can also be small. Regardless of size, one or a cadre of like-minded or easily manipulated folks can dominate a forum.
I think the major difference between forums and Discord/IRC is that the conversations are more likely to be seen on the forums because they’re more persistent and can be more easily referenced to see the entire picture.
That’s certainly not impossible in IRC but it’s more work and less accessible to the less technically inclined.
That's because those platforms provide instant gratification, which attracts people with too much time. Busy, conscientious people are not going to loiter around and repeatedly answer questions that newbies ought to be able to solve on their own with proper tools (i.e., not Discord, Slack or IRC).
Who's going to answer the questions if knowledgeable people are repelled? I don't engage with these platforms because, among other UX sins, I know that their poor discoverability means I will only be helping one person and not the legions of people in the future who will encounter the same problem.
I joined the Bun.sh Discord a couple days ago to ask a question, and it got drowned out a flood of other questions or simply people hanging out making jokes. I think this is what you're talking about.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it?
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
It's only a problem because he can be an asshole sometimes, and he very nearly always gets in first, (I swear he never sleeps), so yeah, sometimes not a great intro to a community that does exist, honest, not that you'd know from the Slack threads.
To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
The discord should clearly state the community standards, including some variant of "don't be an asshole". Most importantly, the standards must be enforced.
These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid.
Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.
That's being generous. "Nothing better to do" also translates as "works as sales / business development for the gigantic expensive legacy tool you're trying to work around". End of the day, when one guy is spending all their time on your Support, and you don't know why, and they're persistently nonconstructive or just plain making shit up[1], you have to start asking, "why does this guy care so much?". Shortest answer is often "Cuz he's paid to".
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
That is presumably what they want though when they say they don't want (better options) getting bogged down in support - they mean they don't want to be the ones dealing with it, surely?
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).
I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.
So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.
Last time I needed them was a year or so ago to deal with a broken mouse for which Logitech didn't want to handle the warranty. Logitech stringed me around for 30 minutes with random questions from a dude via chat who was obviously doing something else. This was after their "AI" asked me the same exact questions. They apparently don't deal with claims from product bought on Amazon (regular Amazon, not marketplace). But this was the guy's last question.
In contrast, the limiting factor to getting on the phone with an Amazon support person was the distance between my desk and my phone. Two minutes later, the fully-paid return label was sitting in my inbox.
Amazon is absolute garbage, no idea why people praise it so much.
Scams all around and garbage products - ill take a bad return policy any day over that.
I've had 0 scams on Amazon in 15(?) Years of using it. I had one "new" product that was clearly opened, and two clicks on their website later I had a pickup ordered from my door the following day and a replacement in the way.
So I bought a six pack of socks off Amazon once. Seemed like a low risk purchase. They arrived looking like any other sock. New packaging, didn't see anything wrong with it. Socks looked new.
They didn't feel new. You know that new sock feel you only get fresh from the package, before they've been washed? They didn't have that.
I don't know if these were factory reject socks that failed QC after the fabric softener ran out or some sort of counterfeit sock or just some sort of error that could happen anywhere, but I will never forget my Amazon marketplace betrayal.
My point was about Amazon itself, or, at least, items shipped by Amazon. I only buy cheap junk from marketplace sellers, and even then, only if they ship via Amazon.
Never had the slightest issue with creating a fully-paid return label on my own. And if the products aren't very expensive, they don't usually wait to actually receive it before issuing the refund.
Other sellers are usually hit or miss, requiring jumping through hoops, like calling them up or filling half-broken internet forms and waiting around for them to "approve" the return.
Putting on a brand new pair of socks, fresh from the package.
They took that away.
It's like taking a bite of delicious cake only to find out it's shit. You can send it back to the kitchen, but it doesn't take away the whipsaw disappointment.
It's not intuitive but hasn't changed in a very long time. It takes me next to no time to create a return label and even for returns after 30 days, navigating to the chat, asking for a label and receiving it rarely takes longer than 5 minutes.
They've never refused a return I asked for which has frequently happened with other shops.
I really want to support local shops, but for any product where I'm not sure if I will have to return it, I usually use Amazon because of their return policy.
> Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things
> I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human
The lovely self-indulged and intimidating in voice so-called artificial intelligence Max assistant ham-fisted on Orange help line, right next to the "would you like to authorize yourself with your voice in future- it's totally SAFE" message. How I despise that thing. They even trained it to avoid "connect me with human" line as much is possible.
Whenever I need help from that ISP and I'm facing a perspective dealing with this thing, it feels like I should just shut the hell up, leave the money, sign newest service contract without any word because the rest doesn't matter for them at all.
I do understand this assistant (and similar ones) probably does the perfect job dealing with this kind of customer who calls them with trivial issues. But that puts those people whose issues are more complex and who do really need to talk with human consultant ASAP on a hell-hole loop fencing with an algorithm.
ChatGPT, your task is to return my item with these DETAILS, you will be talking to a bot for COMPANY.
I agree though, it's like finding the support email address. It's hidden on purpose. Use our Contact page. Please search our FAQ before talking to our Bot!
Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing.
So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?
This. I wouldn't want to risk to depend on software where it's literally impossible to Google issues. That would be self-destructive on a level I don't want.
I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords.
This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.
> nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down
some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
You're allowed bots, so why can't we archive it and make it more easily searchable? Those programming channels with QA style threaded answers would be great to log and make searchable. Is it against Discord's ToS or something?
And if you somehow are able to find an archive of the chat somewhere, you have to try to piece together the conversation because there are six other conversations going on at the same time. Not to mention, all of the valuable information/insights that was never shared in that particular discussion because no one with that knowledge was online at the time.
I just can't understand why anyone would think using a chat app for support is a good idea.
Say what you will of StackOverflow, but they completely solved this problem nearly a couple of decades ago. Answers may be getting outdated depending on what you're looking for, but new answers are always welcome and the site tends to always have the "current" best answer - and very search engine friendly.
> first read the error message clearly and try understand it,
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
I know this and do this, but I would add, make sure you _actually_ read the error message and don't _think_ you read it. This bit me just yesterday as I was encountering an issue and spent a good 30 minutes trying to solve a problem I thought I'd been having. When I re-read the error message it was clear that I'd been too careless and not fully understood the issue. It happens from time to time and then I'm more cautious for a while until I get _just_ complacent enough to have it happen again.
I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there”
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
Some degree of informational amensia is a good thing. We've all hit the "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more".
I don't understand your example. How does "informational amnesia" help against "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more"? If you can't find a solution, you should ask on the Q&A channel, regardless of informational amnesia or not.
IRC had a higher barrier to entry and a lot more common expectation of kickbans for various reasons (justified or not).
Plus the concept of +v doesn't really exist on discords. Sometimes you'd be stuck lurking while only a select few could speak.
And frankly being able to embed images/videos degrades the seriousness in various ways as it can become a bit of a meme/comedy competition (and they scroll disproportionately more text off.
And avatars mean less space is actually text..
<[@+]?shortnick>: <text>
is pretty much the optimal format for information density, which is ironic that twitch chat uses it (to mostly spam emotes)
Overwhelmingly the word I'd use to describe Discord's interface is "one". There is one interface. It's an interface that most people seem to like, but we've lost an important freedom there. It's against the EULA to modify your client or use an alternative one.
If with IRC one can have any interface, I would not call Discord's better.
Luckily since there is no expectation of an archive, migration is fairly straightforward if there is an alternative. If there are no alternatives, I guess they can try IRC ;)
Could be a bias too. I really dislike Discord. I'm on too many discords. It's just one of those network effect things that I wish wasn't everywhere.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
Here is the thing. You may be seeing more people seeking help because they are repeating the same questions again. Where as before they found the thread with the answer.
To me this is the biggest drawback for discord over forums.
From my experience it happens just as much on forums. Hell, just take a look at Stack Overflow! If someone is wanting to reanswer a question for the nth time, I have no problem with that, and the helpers in my community don't either. As another poster said, as well, sometimes "repeat questions" age out after a certain point, where a newer method is actually more appropriate than an older one anyway.
"As another poster said, as well, sometimes "repeat questions" age out after a certain point, where a newer method is actually more appropriate than an older one anyway."
I rather like the approach of editing the original question/solution or posting the latest solution there as otherwise this just creates fragmention.
Editing is somehow even worse than doing support on Discord, where at least there is a history and the (bad!) search or one of the regulars might remember something to find it.
> I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.
Reddit definitely demands an email to register. It's unclear to me whether they verify it (I didn't bother to check), but it's the first thing they ask for.
I explicitly avoid all of those and am willing to do the extra two clicks to get a real account.
I have no idea how long these random companies will keep providing auth services, I don't want to be part of the mess when they inevitably stop the service or start charging. It barely solves the account fragmentation problem because every website supports a different random combination of providers. It centralizes everything more than it already is, further increasing your dependence on these companies. Not to mention the tracking.
But the biggest thing is that with a native account I know that I'll be getting all the features of the app and everything will work normally. There have been too many times where I've experienced "your account does not support this feature" because of a botched external auth integration. Remember when Spotify users with Facebook sign-in couldn't change their name from the default string of random characters?
No thanks, the "effort" is more than worth it for me.
Specifically signing in with a consistent persona. All of these link to an actual "work" identity. Sometimes I want some customer support. Other times, it's a gaming identity, or a writer identity.
Part of the problem is that communities can get really nasty, worst case going as far as writing bad reviews at the place you work at. So it's useful to containerize your identity.
Sign in with Apple allows you the opportunity to generate unique email address aliases per service when you use Sign in with Apple to log in to third parties.
Say for example that your “real” iCloud account is muzani at iCloud dot com.
You browse to my hypothetical forum and choose Sign in with Apple. Then Apple lets you choose if you want to use your “real” mail address or if you want to make a new alias specific to this service. You make an alias an it will look something like emperor_virginia.9p at iCloud dot com.
It’s super convenient and easy to use, while at the same time doing a great job of keeping your identities separate between separate services.
HN has a particular culture that dislikes social media and due to the nature of these sites, once a culture is established, it attracts more of the same since everyone upvotes the dominant cultural position. Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. Listen to your users.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
Sure if your customers want to use discord and you're ok with putting your community there, then go for it.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Oops, I didn't consider that it was sarcasm. I thought it was mocking the actual average HN perspective (which I'm dissenting from, challenging that average user to explain themself).
It was not intended to be sarcasm. It was indeed a criticism of the average HN perspective which I find far removed from the perspective of a given user.
I do, but I don't think a lot of people on HN consider them as such, which is a fun jab at the hivemind. You'll see a lot of threads where people deride social media but say "HN is the exception." Maybe that's what you meant by sarcasm, and if so you're on the nose.
I try not to argue against my users for "what is best for them." If they overwhelmingly want Discord, I'll give them Discord. The goal is to be ready to jump ship if need be, and there's a few ways to do that.
Discourse has either integrated logins and OAuth2 third party login. I implemented both.
Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.
And what plans do you or your users have for when Discord enshittifies?
As always: nothing.
When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist.
But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new.
Please read my other replies, although it is fair to ask me this! Like I have noted, I do have some plans to jump ship if it comes to it. I have the vast majority of my user base on a mailing list for announcements (security related and important administrative, not promotional). If push came to shove I’d use it to make an announcement. I always have a backup for discourse immediately, and I have an archive dump of all threads and chat data from discord. I have a plan to make a simple import script for all “forum” threads in discord to discourse and release that at some point for others to use for their communities.
Do not assume the worst of posters, some of us are just as smart as you I promise, it isn’t fair to assume I had no plans :).
There are a lot of contextual questions raised by that though - are the people who interact with the project the community? How many people are being interacted with? What are the goals of said community?
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
It's popular because it's familiar, but also people because are so impatient they want real-time and fast responses to their questions. But then you get a flooded channel of questions being drowned out by memes.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
Is it possible to somehow bridge discord and, say issues on GitHub or another forum so that people can use discord but the information is just pulled from other sources and they're redirected there?
It's kind of incredible that this even needs to be said.
Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord.
It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information.
Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.
There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients
That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
I'm not familiar with the codebase, but from my understanding it saves messages in a database [1], then periodically send out a formatted email to people who subscribed to the thread/group [2]
Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it)
I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts.
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack…
I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”
Sorry but if you think large-scale companies are going to use a platform designed for gaming as their main support channel - no.
We've had one "Enterprise" supplier move from Slack to Discord. Their community manager in this case did not understand my argument of why this is a bad thing and kept pushing it. For example when I said there is no SSO, they said there is (of course not realising WE have to pick up the bill to set that up - also puts the work on CISOs to investigate the tool for larger use).
Now they are on Discord and I will not share any NDA-related material there - nor would our Security and Data Privacy team like us to.
At least they agreed to keep the Slack Connect in this case.
Last I checked there was zero security on embedded images/docs. If you had the URL, you could view the content. That was a big no-no for our team and why discord lasted all of one month for us.
If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active.
The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
New World, an MMORPG game by Amazon Game Studios, have recently shut down their forums and migrated completely to Discord. It has been a complete disaster, including all the forum posts that show up in Google search are now just 404. Reporting bugs is a crap shoot into the void.
Presumably this is a feature, not a bug. The forum posts will age out of the search corpus, and negative feedback - evidence of low quality - will gradually disappear.
I agree that the discord centralization for Q&A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte).
That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.
TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.
Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
All the alternatives have proven that they barely work too.
1. Dedicated forums - have you seen cesspools that are community.microsoft.com or apple support forums? Or few surviving audio forums, with those long taglines? Also searchability of those forums leaves to be desired too, as they rarely get to first page of google.
2. Stackoverflow quality has degraded severely in recent years. Both from perspectives of someone who wants to ask a question and someone who wants to answer it. Niche stackoverflows are still fine, but general programming ones are just shit, full of obsolete/old accepted answers that nobody cares to update to current year status
3. Get it done. It is obviously to be better healthy and rich than sick and poor
I grown into contrary view. Discords are fine. Based on my personal experience, at least the ones where I tried to find some help (QMK, Bambulab, bunch of gaming ones). The fact that same question is being asked again and again is fine. Somebody will answer it. Or not, and then the search for an answer will continue.
They significantly reduce friction to answer for somebody who is open to help. See example about stackoverflow above. I just left it, as I don't want to deal with mods there.
I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects".
I'm appalled by the number of people answering this comment very negatively / quickly dismissing the self hosting option with a hostile tone.
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.
> Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable
I greatly prefer forums to ephemeral IRC or walled-garden Discord/Slack/etc. However I don't like the moderation time commitment, especially with in a climate of aggressive spambots and twitter-style idiocy at scale.
I also like blog comments, but those seem to have largely split into spam-filled cesspools on one hand and "comments are now closed" (after 10ms) on the other. HN is something of an exception, but I'm sure it requires aggressive and time-consuming moderation.
Constant security threats also make self-hosting an ongoing maintenance headache even if it's in the cloud.
If you don't care about the project, why even open up a Discord server you will never look at? The point with open forums is to get feedback and provide customer support
Yeah, the solution to using a Discord is host random shit yourself that someone _might_ maybe need. That's a hard pass. The very reason why I am on Discord is that I don't need to host my own shit. Been there, done that, I have better things to do.
People forget that there is a fashion and demographic element in these choices that can overwhelm rational argumemts about functionality et al.
Discord had certain features that struck a chord with a generation of gaming communities, thats more or less all there is to it. Now people will pick it just to be trendy and in tune with the times.
Personally I find its manipulative, over-emojed UI distasteful and it is hopeless for knowledge management.
I think there is a culture shift. When I was young all events would be on Facebook. For better or worse that created a source of truth (worse being that obviously we were forcing guests onto a platform that we shouldn't be forcing them on) and a whole structure that kept track of things for you.
Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often left out!)
I have an impression that there is a whole new generation of people who _don't_ want to post on or interact with a forum/bulletin board style of interface, but want to be part of a "living" and instant group.
I'm not part of any chat group where this is really working, but every meetup I go to, people are asking "which chat group should I join?" or "why don't I create a whatsapp/discord for this meetup?"
Attention spans have shrunk all across society. But it seems worse with the younger folks because they don't remember that it wasn't always like this. I don't think they are affected to a greater degree. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that resisting it might be a worthwhile effort.
If it was, you’d want the events to be tracked by an app for all invitees.
In my mind we’ve regressed and returned to asking the invited to keep track of where and when, when there was a brief decade where an app did it for you.
This isn't new though. Before Slack and Discord we were using IRC for this. Facebook serves a different need, and for me, was never the default place for event information. Up until the last 5-10 years we were always using email mailing lists, web forums, usenet, or IRC.
Late to discussion but we are building around this due to same pain points: https://www.den-hq.com/
It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far:
- Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears
- Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community
- Developer communities are an outlier here
- People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord
I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.
I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool.
I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc.
Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
I ran phpBB for a while just for myself, partly out of nostalgia for the online forum days.
I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it.
However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy.
After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now.
Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
Yeah, nothing like finding some old dusty phpBB that has been completely over run with bots spamming NSFW stuff. 5/5 much better than Discord. Very industrious.
Because if you go that route then you are saddled with a full linux VPS that you must install things on.
For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
If you ever need to extract important information buried somewhere in a Discord server, I am having luck with Discord History Tracker [1] (browser-only version). It lets you download all messages in a json file, which then you can read with [2] (works offline too).
I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired).
hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.
self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip.
I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints".
It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
If the wrapper is an extremely ergonomic Discord bot (which is probably what the other commenters are imagining or would settle on if they tried to implement it) then it might work but it still seems like a worse solution with a lot of extra overhead compared to software that already does what it's meant to (and crucially, can't do what it isn't meant to).
Discord is a trade-off. Don't apply on the wrong problem.
Some pros, I'll pick three. (1) I think the appeal for something like Discord becomes more obvious when documentation feels like a moving target. For example, as a long time back-end developer, I have never disliked StackOveflow more than when I decided to learn front-end JavaScript. Every answer seemed attached to an expiration date. Anything older than 2 years and I'd wonder is this still in effect? I actually wished that JS would have its own special SO where answers can be sorted by "number of votes this year" or a "deprecated" flag. (2) The immediacy of chat, you ask and don't have to wait half a day for someone to notice. (3) No search. It could just be an impression, but my search experience seems to just increasingly suck. Engines seem to struggle to find relevant bits, particularly if the tech is fairly recent and results are flooded with meaningless articles, that just echo the same "Hello, world" from the official documentation. With Discord, I don't have to sort through the junk.
Now the cons.
The chat format for support certainly has its highlights, but you don't have to wear blinders about its downsides. If you allow for time to improve information, information accrues interest. Chat doesn't allow for time. And Discord doesn't particularly care about the quality of information. Discord cares about (authenticated) users showing up on the platform now, now, now. The problems highlighted with the chat format (as it's implemented on Discord), are very focused (though they have ramifications): archiving and searching capabilities are subpar. You show up on some chat channel and ask a question. You get the benefit of immediate advice, by the most authoritative voice that happens to be present. It may be good advice or it may be moot. You just have to take it at face value. On StackOverflow that advice would go unchallenged for a few months, but allow for time and you allow for scrutiny. Eventually, if there's contention, there will be a discussion. Answers are commented upon, improved, deprecated. You can simply show up years later and benefit from the maturation of the different perspectives that contributed to crystallize our current best understanding of the issue.
Obviously, YMMV. Still, don't apply on the wrong problem.
> my search experience seems to just increasingly suck
SO's search engine always sucked. Whenever I cannot find the answer that I was looking for immediately, I use google with the site:staoverflow.com parameter. This always gave me much better results than the SO search itself.
I too have noticed this. I put it down to a generation that has grown up where their entire existence is recorded and critiqued 24x7. Discord offers them a sandbox to express themselves and if they need to, they can delete their account. Effectively anonymizing their indiscretions, mistakes or honest opinions they no longer hold.
The younger generations live a hellish existence where they are locked in time unable to grow as humans, perpetually judged by the mistakes of their younger selves.
Doesn't change the fact that discord support sucks though for all the reasons mentioned this these threads.
Last time a gripe about discord being bad for documention was posted, someone linked Answer Overflow (https://www.answeroverflow.com/) as a possible solution. Still requires people to use discords threaded feature and doesn't capture chats, but helps with atleast having the questiond indexed in google and not sitting behind a walled garden
I went to Discord for a project one day, and they had started using some sort of forum thing in Discord itself, which is atrocious.
I can tolerate Discord when it's real-time help, but this new forum-like feature is the worst of both worlds: You don't get real-time, and you don't get searchability/Googleability/the ability for people to get help without a login.
Just terrible. I really hope this doesn't catch on.
another "dark web" I discovered few month ago is facebook. until then I was thinking that FB was just a social network for connecting people or companies but there are a crazy amount of forum-like groups with a lot of subscribers, and it's almost as invisible and unarchivable than discord
Use Discord for nothing... Whenever I try Discord, I never return to any of the channels I'm in. It doesn't feel like a community or anything I can refer back to. Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting. The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated. I would take a forum message board any day.
Hard disagree. Discord is great place for non-tehnical-project communities
"Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting"
Yeah, cause you went to unactive servers. It would be like coming to Hackernews, opening first link in newly submitted, and complaining that no one is here.
Just go to active servers. Servers I frequent are very active.
"The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated"
Another hard disagree. UI is one of my favourite things about Discord. It feels very well designed and it even works very well on mobile. I'm quite impressed by this aspect
Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.
As someone who hardly ever attempted to use a mailing list, I preferred forums because I was worried of waisting everyone on the list's time. In fact, the couple times I did use it, people complained about my usage. It felt like shouting for help in a room that may or may not be crowded. A forum felt more like putting a sign up and interested folks could engage though often nobody would. Chat is nice because there is an immediate back and forth and feels more beginner friendly / welcoming. However, chat needs an FAQ section. I think LLMs trained on chat logs may be an interesting tool.
> Linen is a search-engine friendly community platform. We offer two way integrations with existing Slack/Discord communities and make those conversations Google-searchable.
This should be obvious - a chatroom is no substitute for a forum. It doesn't help that IM services like Whatsapp/Telegram are also trying to muscle into what should be a forum with their groups and communities features.
This depends entirely on volume IMO. We [1] use Discord for this, and its great, but we don't have a large message volume. Discord seems way better than Slack for this use case as there's a single login which is built around connecting to multiple servers, unlike Slack.
2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience.
3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
> This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in.
Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
I normally don't reply to stuff like this because you are clearly arguing in bad faith. I just wanted to point out you either have failed to read my comment in context, are intentionally mischaracterizing what I said. Going from what I said to "write a custom client for Discord from scratch" has to be a joke. Also that TOS violation thing is simply not true. You are well within your rights to download the history of your own discord server.....
> I normally don't reply to stuff like this because you are clearly arguing in bad faith.
I’m not sure why you’d feel the need to come back and do a victory lap. You’ve thoroughly debunked the idea that the Discord search UX is less than stellar by pointing out that you personally built and maintain your own search UX based off of API that is both universally understood and governed by a TOS that none could possibly misinterpret.
That's kinda funny. I assume when discord wouldn't have banned all the wonderful lightweight alternative clients that existed they would only get a small portion of the hate today
What are you talking about? You can't write a custom client and the official one is closed source. Scraping chat history is also against the TOS and get get you blocked.
That’s even better. Why would anyone post on a forum when learning the minutiae of the Discord API and its strict TOS conditions in order to implement functionality that’s broken in the client while avoiding getting banned is an option? It’s a dead simple solution!
plus the main advantage of discord is you can easily knock up a free Q&A bot that answers all the questions people ask because they didnt rtfm or search the forums.
A bit unrelated, but does someone use a forum at work?
I think in times of remote work that could a better alternative to Teams discussions about features or bugs (especially from other teams/departments) + the better search.
I have never seen a company forum be well adopted. SO and/or reddit clone. 6 engineers out of 100 in the org push for it and have to remind people it exists and people just keep asking questions in slack. People want to talk with people, esp. coworkers.
Discord is best suited for out-of-band, ephemeral, semi-synchronous discussions.
It's more useful to have permanent, searchable forums so that answers can benefit more people. (1:N instead of 1:1.) Discourse is one possible solution.
Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.
I suspect people are using it partly to deliver a more regular and visible heartbeat.
Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues.
GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison.
Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message.
Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion.
As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
I'm in a few FOSS chats, and I tend to find there's a lot of people who a) need an answer right now and b) need relevant information pried out of them with a crowbar.
And then they'll DM you if you look helpful.
I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.
Agree on the downsides, although communities are a great way to exchange and discuss a project.
Instead, why don‘t we just keep the benefits of discord and build tools around it to manage its knowledge?
We can publish it, we can use it for AI assistant, basically anything is possible.
Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better.
* The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages
* Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads
* Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity
* There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags
* There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results
* Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies.
I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.
I don't have much of a choice, it's what users want and it gives me the biggest footprint. It's about being pragmatic rather than being religious for me.
This article looks like it was written by ChatGPT tbh. The arguments are kinda weak, borderline nonsensical.
> Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages.
Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is "Chaos Discord"? Pretty sure it should says "Chaos - Discord..."
It also concedes that they made threads a thing, so the point is moot. This is followed up with
> TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk.
Again there is no separation between the title and the content. And actually Discord search in my experience is really good. They can filter by media, link, text, user, and more. And this INCLUDES in threads. In comparison, have you tried searching through FAQs using Algolia or BBPost forum search in general? Those are truly awful.
> The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions.
Notice the continued formatting failure, a failure of copy-pasting from ChatGPT and not separating the title from the content!
This point is about all the restrictions and actions needed, but fails to address that users are already logged in and often have Discord open, and instead comes with some ? nonsensical example of installing a js library?
And finally
> Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug?
This is interesting but, how you can really tell it's ChatGPT is that the examples it provides as solutions below ALSO suffer this problem. Here are the options provided in the article.
> Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse.
Again I'm pretty sure the search is worse, and it literally doesn't solve any of the other problems.
> Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit
Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product. And again, WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?
> Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system
Actually not a bad idea if your audience is technical, but again WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?
Finally, nothing is more obvious than when ChatGPT says its signature "REMEMBER, BLAHBLAHBLAH", and lo and behold:
> Remember, Discord is great & all but as a Q&A forum ...
Personally, I'm 90% sure this is a ChatGPT generated low quality article. Even though it sparked some discussion here, I'm flagging this article, and I did not enjoy the article for the content.
> Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product.
How so? Just add a tag for your software and tell your users to write questions to Stackoverflow tagged accordingly. Then just put a watch on that tag. Almost zero setup effort. At least that is what I am planning to do. Am I missing something?
I'm building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0]
Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity's sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.
