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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?

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and effort streamlining onboarding.

There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.

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

#62

Post by TeMPOraL »

spullara wrote: post #26
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.

Scaling by making a huge numbers of copies. Basically a blockchain and similarly efficient.

If we're ranking needless waste, this is not worse than modern websites delivering JS over CDNs. In theory this should be a net win - everyone having all the scripts cached locally, or on a nearby static host. In practice, with CI/CD being the norm, you have to reload all the JS every other refresh, because someone changed something - and so do all the CDNs and all other users.

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

#63

Post by black_puppydog »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #50
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.

In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter. Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.

> they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)

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

#64

Post by not_alexb »

ianburrell wrote: post #60
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.

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.

I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.

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

#65

Post by barbariangrunge »

Personally, I’m not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All the packages I’ve tried weren’t what I wanted: missing features, clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain for something I should be using a package for. And I’m not sure how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people might post

There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit/discord accounts though

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

#66

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

tikkun wrote: post #20

The meta-answer is that: Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use. If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly). With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not go…

I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't feel real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the character of groups that try to migrate. I don't say it'll be objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind of participation.

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

#67

Post by soared »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #65

Personally, I’m not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All the packages I’ve tried weren’t what I wanted: missing features, clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain for something I should be using a package for. And I’m not sure how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people might post There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not t…

^ likely the best answer. Forums are difficult to manage whereas on Reddit and discord any user can click one button and have their own community. No user management, etc etc

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

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

acedTrex wrote: post #46

I dont like having technical discussions over forums, its far to slow

Funny, I have the opposite - I hate technical discussions over chat, because they move way too damned fast, and I just can't keep track of them and remain focused on anything else - like, say, my job.

Perhaps the difference is that I don't typically start technical discussions - instead, I search for prior ones, which 99% of times solves my problem faster than any chat would.

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

#69

Post by dkga »

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.

Mostly by direct interest. For example, all Discord communities I participate are related to open source projects I follow.
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