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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?

#71

Post by bitshiftfaced »

Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional forums. It's less friction when you don't have to sign up. If you already have an account, you need only subscribe to the channel/subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in turn makes your platform more relevant.

The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.

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

#72

Post by Kye »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
Kye wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way to find these things before The Great Consolidation. They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and hop on.

That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star Trek subs: https://startrek.website/c/daystrominstitute

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

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

Kye wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way to find these things before The Great Consolidation. They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and hop on. That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star Trek subs: https://startr…

Exactly. The current trends make a lot of places suddenly out of reach for passer-bys.

Thanks for posting the link. I am aware of the current location of /r/DaystromInstitute, and registered on that Lemmy instance already - but to reinforce my point, I actually learned about it thanks to someone posting that link on HN a few days ago, randomly, in the middle of the Reddit blackout discussion thread. Much like you posting it here, which will hopefully help some other interested people find it.

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

#74

Post by SuperShibe »

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.

Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?

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

#76

Post by rcxdude »

keerthiko wrote: post #18
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…

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…

Communities rarely want to maximize growth: at most, they want a slow and steady growth, and at least they may wish to shrink. You'll find most long-lived communities that actually still have a sense of identity and norms have some form of barrier to entry: whether that be obscurity, extremely aggressive moderation, a strong set of norms which are actively policed by members, or a culture sufficiently toxic (at least superficially) to keep most people away. Often a combination of all of the above. I think for most moderately sized communities too much growth is more of a problem than too little.

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

#77

Post by anononaut »

whalesalad wrote: post #37

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.

It doesn't work so well with controversial subjects, even here. Instead, only the more popular ideas, often the same, get pushed to the top. In retrospect, I view this more negatively than not.

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

#78

Post by loa_in_ »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #33
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.

The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social software can be

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

#79

Post by Buttons840 »

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.

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

#80

Post by SirMaster »

Simple, because Discord is real-time chat.

Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new messages etc.

And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users.

I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.

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