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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?

#31

Post by yonixw »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
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…

Is there any tooling that can plug into Discord to make the corpus within Discord more publicly accessible, perhaps on a per server basis? Let folks come together where it is easier for maintainers and participates, and offload the heavy lifting of exposing the knowledge to middleware.

"Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 ( 19 hours ago )

Should've asked for a million dollar...

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

#32

Post by black_puppydog »

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 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.

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

#33

Post by kitsunesoba »

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…

> A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance.

It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.

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

#34

Post by Macha »

Vermyndax wrote: post #22
superkuh wrote: post #16

Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.

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.

IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result.

Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.

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

#36

Post by firesteelrain »

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 user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its Experts Exchange killer website consortium.

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

#37

Post by whalesalad »

I think Discourse is terrible, too. The beauty of reddit/hn is that the more relevant discussions/comments get pushed to the top of a thread. The community constantly shapes the thread such that when you revisit it 5 years later you can quickly glean what is important. A forum is really terrible for that.

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

#38

Post by massysett »

superkuh wrote: post #16

Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.

Ok, what website do I go to to get this Usenet thing?

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

#39

Post by Kye »

michaelmior wrote: post #17
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…

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.

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

#40

Post by Daegalus »

Others have made great points already, but one thing I see mentioned is "I don't want to manage separate logins for all these forums". We need to remember that most people don't use password managers and don't like "logging in" to things. They see it as a hassle.

1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won't bother.

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