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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?

#51

Post by ixwt »

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.

Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features. The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols have more complexity built into them because that's what the average user expects.

But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.

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

#53

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers. Many of them remain lurkers. Surely someone run a study on this, but at least in my personal experience on HN and some more discussion-oriented subreddits, the most interesting/valuable submissions are often one-offs done by users who otherwise don't submit or even comment much.

Also: moving the community from an open discussion board to a closed chat strongly favors the most active participants - i.e. those who are dedicated enough or otherwise have nothing better to do with their days than to actively participate. It's not a problem if the "community" is just a bunch of friends and regulars shitposting. It starts to be a problem when large open source projects move from open boards to closed chats, as they effectively shut off anyone who has a day job, kids, or... well anything else to do, tech or otherwise.

Also: lack of (or bad) indexing and search affects not just outsiders, but community members themselves: it's not just that some rando can't find the fruits of your discussion via Google search - it's also you who can't find it one month later.

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

#54

Post by Zak »

Solvency wrote: post #12

Everyone here ignores Discourse because it's not "cool". Some might complain about its UX issues. Yet those same people are tolerating the mountain of issues with Lemmy or Mastodon because they are approaching "cool" status.

I think people are more tolerant of issues with Lemmy and Mastodon because federation is a major benefit that inherently adds some UX complexity.

I think Discourse is fine for what it is, but it's less OK to be a siloed forum in 2023 than it was in 2013. Yes, I'm aware federated forums are just reinventing Usenet, but there was a good idea there we lost sight of in the web era.

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

#55

Post by dv_dt »

black_puppydog wrote: post #32
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.

Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.

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

#56

Post by braza »

(Marginally related): the thing that holds me to move to discord it’s because their “conversational” nature instead to be an idea board.

At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.

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

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on, say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute, is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community personally by existing community member, who themselves were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind of "word of mouth".

Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to be an outsider looking to learn something or start to participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby groups moving to Discord - or worse, Whatsapp groups - there's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the thing it's worth it.

This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.

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

#58

Post by JCharante »

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…

You're assuming people who find reddit results in google only use it as a knowledge base and are only lurkers.

I'd say it's the opposite. Every new message is not new, valuable information. 99% of users are saying useless stuff and people interacting daily are only saying useless stuff that doesn't matter. People using reddit as a knowledge base do still contribute and someone engaged in that subject matter by googling it is more likely to be interested in that subject matter and participate in the community that they've found. Communities are killing their discoverability and turning into a closed-off echo chamber and keeping only their useless users.

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

#60

Post by ianburrell »

black_puppydog wrote: post #32
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.

My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts.

The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.

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