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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?

#81

Post by halfdan »

SirMaster wrote: post #80

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.

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

That wasn’t what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time chat where there’s no easy way to search through history.

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

#82

Post by culopatin »

SirMaster wrote: post #80

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.

The question was about replacing a Reddit subforum with a chat, not a discord chat with a forum. Reddit is a slow async platform, forums are too, I don’t see what part of the things you mention makes Discord a no brainer.

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

#83

Post by carlosjobim »

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 democratization of the internet with smart phones have had the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the internet with questions that are easily answered by looking just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer, when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?"

Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted? 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close the tab and get on with their life.

Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very soon.

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

#86

Post by SkyPuncher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #53
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 ev…

> 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.

I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're interesting) (2) forget about them forever.

Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals from other sites or happy accidents. I rarely join a community simply to lurk on it.

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

#87

Post by mooreds »

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…

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google.

Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

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

#88

Post by egypturnash »

People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the updates and maintenance.

Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.

Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.

Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?

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

#89

Post by musicale »

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 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.)

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

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

> 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. I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're interesting) (2) forget about them forever. Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals from other sites or happy accidents.…

I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to name or even describe it.

Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage with any chat-based communities, because from experience I know that

- I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a time,

- If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing or caring about, and

- It stopped being sustainable around the time I started working full-time in the earnest.

I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield no insight, and the problem still remains something I need to solve - only then I'll bother with Slack/Discord, as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the question several times until I do it in the right timezone so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just from thinking about it.

And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people. Also, when in the process I read something interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that same place a week or month later, and still find that thing I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing or broken search.

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