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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?

#131

Post by AstralStorm »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #123
TeMPOraL wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Technically there always have been platforms that let you run a hosted forum maintained by others on someone else's host. These were typically paid.

But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.

It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.

The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.

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

#132

Post by dusted »

I'm not arguing for Discord, but I can see why it "won".. It's centralized, which, philosophically, is terrible, but practically is awesome; Nobody wants to maintain more logins/identities than they want to, most want one, few wants a few, even less wants many. If I'm "on Discord" I can join so many different servers, without ever having to register another account, AND have this one single program keep track of all that goes on within those communities, that is a giant pull for me.

There's a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don't need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to "catch up" via a side-channel.

It's just too convenient.

Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.

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

#134

Post by johnnyanmac »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #123
TeMPOraL wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

>Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.

I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.

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

#136

Post by antifa »

dsir wrote: post #42
keerthiko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the commun…

I couldn't identify the wiki aspect (implied by reddit), however looks awesome so far.

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

#137

Post by red-iron-pine »

musicale wrote: post #89
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…

I really don't want to join another Discord server. Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)

> I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.

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

#138

Post by superkuh »

SuperShibe wrote: post #74
Vermyndax wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving to yet another corporate-controlled entity.

Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?

It did back in the 2000s when it was popular. But even then it wasn't hard to use clientside filters/killfiles to get rid of spam. 15 years of being dead have resulted in usenet having a pretty good signal to noise ratio. If it becomes popular enough to have that problem again I'll be happy.

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

#139

Post by awithrow »

Buttons840 wrote: post #79

The barrier to first participation is so much lower on Discord. > i need help lol That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.

Eternal September was a problem in old chat rooms and IRC servers too. Discord isn't unique here.

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

#140

Post by zelifcam »

Why? Because some of those children who supported the platform while playing games with friends are now adults and putting their projects behind it. I am so disappointed Discord took off. What an absolute privacy nightmare of a site. It boggles my mind people are working on projects with open source components/ideas and then forcing people to sell their soul just to read a CHANGELOG or find some simple instructions.

I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.

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