Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web

I came on-line at the tail end of it, when the denizens of the old were trying to find their footing in the new. IRC, mailing groups, early phpBB boards. This means I could've missed some stronger forms of gatekeeping, but the ones I do remember were all what I'd consider pretty good and desirable: it was gatekeeping based on knowledge, or interest in getting one. That is, all natural gates where the act of crossing them ensured you also could enjoy and contribute to the commons. And, importantly, they were mostly gating only write access, not read access.

The overall feel was, the gatekeeping served to bounce off trolls (before that name was common), and to redirect clueless newbies onto a path where they could either go away, or stay, learn a little bit, and then arrive at the gates again, only to find them wide open. Contrast that with the "cozy web", where the gatekeeping just tries to protect the community from the entire outside world. That's a huge change in overall feel - friendly and inviting vs. apprehensive and afraid. Viewing people as potential friends by default, vs. viewing them as potential enemies.

> and making fun of the normies ("I may be a nerd but look at Bill Gates, one day I'll be your boss.")

RE that, I may be biased, but I find it fully justified. It's not like nerds won this in any way - STEM interests, mastery of skills and concept outside of normie culture approved list (i.e. arts and performances - sports of every kind, playing or singing music, painting, writing, etc.), intellectually deep fiction, and clear thinking in general are still frowned upon and actively discouraged by the society.

While the "revenge of the nerds" memes, "Jocks being bosses in high school, nerds being bosses at work" was a good joke / dream to discharge some frustrations over, it didn't materialize either. On the contrary - if you look carefully, most of the successful bosses are high-school jocks too, and I'm talking in fields like finance and tech too. That's because entrepreneurship and playing on the market is a jock's game, not nerd's game. You win it by looking good, talking smooth, and not caring much about the accuracy of what you say - not by knowing a lot, having strong mental models, and treating truth as valuable for its own sake.

> It was a culture I really didn't enjoy and I mostly stayed out of because everyone seemed so interested in exclusivity.

Unless you're talking about those much earlier communities, way before Eternal September, I have a different view. Exclusivity can be good, and back in the IRC/early phpBB era, most exclusivity was of this kind - that is, anyone was welcome, they just had to show minimum effort up front. Contrast that with today's "cozy web", where everything is exclusive by default, and the exclusivity is of the bad kind: secret clubs to which you get invited by existing members and/or both write and read access are behind gates that require great and ongoing investment of time and effort (i.e. keeping up with the flow of the live chat).

Maybe it's the nerd in me showing, but the cozy web is way too personal in this sense.

There are several issues with surfacing search results from Discord as mentioned before in the thread, and even if all of them are resolved the biggest one remains relevance.

Unless a general purpose web search engine introduces a special Discord 'tab', like Images/News/Videos already exist, there is no way for a search engine to assign relevance to anything said on Discord because there is no authority or link graph based credibility for any message. In other words a mention of 'blue widgets' on Discord is competing with milions of web pages mentioning 'blue widgets' which all have some kind of built in relevance. If the idea is that this will be achieved through people linking to an aggregrator like this website, then perhaps, but the approach does suffer from the chickien and the egg problem.

That depends a lot on the channel. Some channels are exclusively monthly public announcements, of new version of software, or bugs, or announcements of conferences for example. Or job opportunities with instructions on how to apply.

Some channels contain a high level of knowledge in the same way as a forum, knowledge you won't find posted again, perhaps because the person who posted it no longer works at the company. Some channels are used for work purposes, similar to Slack and MS Teams, and contain async information across timezones about product development, or bug-investigations updates, or design discussions, which are more real-time but valuable to be able to find again. Some channels contain the information needed to enter and participate in multi-month long competitions. The information is not posted anywhere else, even though that would be useful and well suited to a blog or issue tracker.

Some places are using Discord not because it's their favourite thing, but because many other companies and projects in the same field are now using Discord, so it's become expected by users (like Twitter). After all nobody wants to install yet another application, but if everyone in a field already uses Discord for work, then that's what you have to use as well.

My first year of Discord was entirely because it was required by my job, as it was the way everyone communicated at that company.

The point is it was the only way everyone communicated at that company aside from a negligible number of emails (maybe 10 emails in a year), and some Telegram channels with outside parties. So nearly every formal announcement and work-related message, as well as real-time chat went through the company's internal Discord server. When I occasionally searched the company dev channels I found a treasure trove of relevant technical knowledge I couldn't find anywhere else. Knowledge I couldn't get in a reasonable time by asking current people. But being Discord search rather than a web page, it was really hard to keep track of things found, and that knowledge was effectively lost.

At my current job we use Teams the same way the last company used Discord. Teams is worse.

Correct. However, some things should be preserved forever and accessible. It's really nice to be able to put a piece of scientific jargon, or a text of an error message, into a search box, and get back links and references to material you can peruse at your own pace and discretion - as opposed to having to join a closed community and keep asking people, hoping someone who knows the answer and is willing to help spots the message before it disappears in the flood of ongoing conversations, and monitoring said flood so that you catch the answer in time to ask follow-up questions, etc.

Point being: different needs require different tools. Current trend is doing everything in closed, ephemeral groups.

> No one are automatically entitled to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline, although a community may chose to make it available.

That's the difference between the "cozy web" and the web 10-15 years ago. The communities used to grant everyone the right "to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline" by default; in fact it was weird to gatekeep things that could be useful to others - the only thing that was gatekept was "write access", and it was done based on attitude, not on someone's ability to do networking and invest large amount of time on an ongoing basis.

Of all groups, it's both ironic and sad to see this happening to open source projects in particular. Those projects owe their very existence - and people participating in them owe their skills - to that open, indexed, no-strings-attached knowledge-sharing culture.