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Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

Semaphor wrote: post #43
black_puppydog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by Semaphor »

canadianfella wrote: post #94
Semaphor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

Missing?

*modding

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

#123

Post by Hermitian909 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #114
Hermitian909 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality. The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people a…

> What you described is a culture of fear

No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.

It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).

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

#124

Post by paulmd »

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…

Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too.

The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything.

This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too.

I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.

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

#125

Post by seoulmetro »

cowsup wrote: post #10

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…

Discord is a shockingly terrible place for information to exist and be helpful to others. The search for messages is very useless, the history management is slow, painful and prone to scrubbing.

Anyone who knows the values of past forums and thinks Discord is in any way an equivalent hasn't used both properly before.

Discord is easier to moderate the same way a chatroom is easier to moderate than a bulletin board at any scale.

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

#126

Post by bradgranath »

The problem with fleeing one VC funded startup for another VC funded startup has nothing to do with the technology.

We're talking about a BBS. We solved the tech problem forty years ago.

Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit?

If Reddit didn't need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn't pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.

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

#127

Post by jraph »

paulmd wrote: post #124
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…

Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too. The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything. This also ge…

But please don't make me create a Google, Facebook or Microsoft that all come with arbitrary ToS, auth schemes, tracking, blocking that would cause me to lose access to the forum and absence of support. Please accept custom OpenID providers.

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

#128

Post by bradgranath »

keerthiko wrote: post #18
cowsup wrote: post #10

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…

Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the communit…

"Longevity"

LOL

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

#129

Post by Talanes »

cowsup wrote: post #10

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…

>Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.

Depends on the community. In a gaming community, for instance, having low barrier information means you're not stuck explaining things yourself to people who aren't in the same discords as you.

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