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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?

#91

Post by musicale »

re-thc wrote: post #3

Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn't really work. Slack was popular before Discord. I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve. More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.

Forums don't seem to work well for Q&A.

Technical systems that we need help with are always complete garbage, users are clueless/eternal September, spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and providing high-quality answers for free.

Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over, previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible.

Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site' posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-driven oversight, etc..

The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell.

But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.

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

#92

Post by 7speter »

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…

Ironically enough, subreddit sidebars were almost always a great place to find highly relevant and useful discords, forums and blogs.

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

#93

Post by 7speter »

LordKeren wrote: post #7

Many Reddit moderators are interested in Pc Gaming, and Discord is ubiquitous in that space. It’s free, infinite scaling, and there is a big overlap in the user bases. > But discord is far from a real knowledge base I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.

>Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.

Maybe to subreddit moderators but to reddit admins and executives and stakeholders, they see it as a major plus that reddit is an ever growing and indexed knowledge base.

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

#94

Post by canadianfella »

Semaphor wrote: post #43
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.

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

Missing?

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

#95

Post by tikkun »

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #66
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…

Agreed, I think Discord is substantially worse. I do think it's the best of a bad set of alternatives, though.

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

#96

Post by 7speter »

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…

People still tell you to use the search function on discords, and there aren’t even searchable topic names or the option to use google’s algorithm to power the searches.

Also, the great fun of llms is going on youtube and watching content creators accuse other content creators of cheating and using llms to write their scripts, even if they may just be using it as a research tool to round up preliminary information.

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

#97

Post by timbit42 »

massysett wrote: post #38
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?

Google used to have Google Groups which was the Usenet groups but web-based.

Usenet was created before the web was created so you can use a newsgroups app to access it if you don't want to use Google Groups.

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

#98

Post by timbit42 »

frou_dh wrote: post #5

According to you it's overwhelming and "not a real KB", but many will consider it a more natural UI for conversing than a web forum. That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a proper KB.

And then it goes into a black hole and no one else will ever benefit from that knowledge. It's a major reduction in the utility of the internet.

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

#99

Post by bee_rider »

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…

At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.

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

#100

Post by timbit42 »

acedTrex wrote: post #46

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

Assuming the same number of users, I don't see why it would be any slower than Reddit. That's not a problem of forums but of the number of users.

My biggest complaint with forums is the lack of reply indentation.

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