Live data from Hacker News

Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

31–40 of 698 posts

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#34
This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop"

Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#36
post #28

As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033

Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#37
People say it's hard to create a forum, but for software projects there's one built right into Github - Github issues. Yet so many times I see Github issues answered with "We answered this in Discord. Go check there." Then there's other projects where they're super anal about opening any Github issue, yet are happy to answer the exact same question in Slack.

Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer questions there, your users will find it.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#38
For knowledge sharing purposes chat is way too ephemeral.

Forums have an ephemerality too as threads get too cluttered or buried under new threads. When an old thread takes too long to find or filter through, new ones are created and then redundancy sucks up everyone's time.

The answer is moderation - preferably with "elected" moderators. The other key is to have a system of escalation of key knowledge to a Wiki, which again needs moderation in the form of reviews to keep the knowledge up to date.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#39
post #27

I loathe Discord for (non-dev but still software-related) community management but we tried launching a forum and realized users don't care and just want Discord or Slack. It's now in the "familiar" zone and registering for a forum sucks. They don't care that it's hard to find answers, or any of the other reasons listed here, many of which were our motivation for starting a forum. We ended up dividing users and now h…

I wonder if this is also part of the preference for Discord, but all of our most active/longtime users tend to prefer DMing us over posting publicly. We should probably discourage that so the community seems more active, but it probably lets them feel like they can speak more freely.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#40
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack or Discord live in the current moment. It is hard to get back into discussion which started a week ago. Channels do not provide much historical value.

It's virtually impossible to do so in Slack, unless someone ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large slacks.

It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being threaded-only and having great UX.
Post reply on HN