Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 146 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#101

Post by bsder »

mooreds wrote: post #87
marginalia_nu wrote: post #28

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell th…

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google. Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin.

Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them.

A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#102

Post by altairprime »

Discord has a very good anti-abuse system in place that prevents most sockpuppet and spam attacks. The moderation burden on a Discourse is vastly higher than on a Discord as a result, and since most public forums have no paid moderators, the optimization of effort is strongly in favor of Discord over Discourse.

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#104

Post by Klonoar »

tentacleuno wrote: post #6
Klonoar wrote: post #2

> But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine. I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a real loss for the web. However. Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right patterns/etc to hook people. Gotta out-compete it somehow if you wan…

> Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Arguably, it works less than more traditional forums though (a la Reddit). The fact that web search isn't supported means that users will keep asking the same questions. Searching for topics is harder too (as it's a long line of intertwined topics). I moderate a room and see this a lot, so...

I also moderate and run support in a Discord. We see that it's harder/less efficient/etc; you and I also both know full well that users don't think about this at all.

Like, tell me the last time a user who came in for support actually used the search bar. I'll wait, lol...

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#106

Post by spywaregorilla »

carlosjobim wrote: post #83
spywaregorilla wrote: post #19

Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer. Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better f…

The democratization of the internet with smart phones have had the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the internet with questions that are easily answered by looking just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer, when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?"…

cynical and incorrect take imo. also, people are very appreciative on discords generally

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#107

Post by michaelmior »

Kye wrote: post #39
michaelmior wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.

Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.

The network effect is amplified significantly however by the popularity of those companies. You're much less likely to hear about an individual Reddit community by word of mouth. However, once you're aware of Reddit, it's much easier to discover subreddits that suit your interest. The same isn't true of Discord.

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#108

Post by Hermitian909 »

mooreds wrote: post #87
marginalia_nu wrote: post #28

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell th…

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google. Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.

Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#109

Post by wyclif »

Kye wrote: post #39
michaelmior wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.

Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.

Absolutely the same experience for me with Google search, Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord etc. Word of mouth or getting invites from friends.

Re: Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

#110

Post by wyclif »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #8

Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that. It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum. It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.

IRC had "one account, infinite communities" too.
Post reply on HN