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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?

#141

Post by tentacleuno »

Klonoar wrote: post #104
tentacleuno wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Oh 100% this. To play Devil's Advocate though, I run a Matrix room too and the search functionality on that is a lot worse than Discord (it takes around a minute to actually find something), so most users end up asking again because it's easier (...for them, of course).

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

#142

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.

Finding Reddit and Twitter by word of mouth is very different from finding a specific subreddit or Twitter account by word of mouth. AFAIK, Discord as a platform doesn't support internal discoverability in the same way as Reddit and Twitter.

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

#143

Post by xigoi »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #137
musicale wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a proprietary platform that bans third-party clients and its official client is bloated Electron garbage.

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

#144

Post by paulmd »

jraph wrote: post #127
paulmd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If spammers can just create their own provider, that would kind of remove the point of having IDPs act as a spam gate.

That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.

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

#146

Post by stevenicr »

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…

Interesting. Planning to keep the code private or offering to others as well? I've been wanting to try something like this.
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