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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

41–50 of 698 posts

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

#41
I’ve tried to use forums so many times but I just can’t use them effectively. I don’t want to create accounts and get the notification settings correct so I don’t have to log in to see replies to my messages without getting spammed.

The only forum I’ve had success with as a user is Reddit. It isn’t the best forum software in the world but it is miles better than the usual php bulletin boards.

Having run a forum before, it’s so much work to keep anything secure and spam-free. I had to geo-ip block all of France and Russia just to stay above water. I gave up.

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

#42
post #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...

> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site,

Simple fix: add login with google/github.

Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great.

Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.

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

#43

I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because: - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.…

If you're putting PII on a random forum, that's your problem, respectfully. I have a specific email account for "random forums" and don't put real info in my account.

I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam posts.

You can set up email notifications to thread replies in most forum software, so you don't have to actively check if you don't want to.

Finally, I reject the notion that you can effectively search through years and years of discord or slack chat for topics related to your question. The nature of creating a thread differentiates itself from a "random" post. Perhaps if Discord/Slack's UI prompted a person to label a post "conversation starter" or "thread starter" then it would be better organized.

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

#45
post #42
post #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...

> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, Simple fix: add login with google/github. Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great. Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.

I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my google account.

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

#47

better idea, an easier way to convert certain conversations into forum post.

I built a zap to store off slack conversations to google sheets (for a slack I joined a few years ago, where I would also notify the user I was going to do this).

But yes, an automated solution would be great.

Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good post than when I just toss out a slack q.

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

#48
post #7

The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant chunk. Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication. I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge b…

>Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Basecamp?

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

#49
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

I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...

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

#50
I like the idea of Discord in general. It certainly does have uses like making voice communication more accessible.

But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any discoverability.

One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure.

This is why tagging is so much better.

Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type? You see how quickly it breaks down.

Discord channels are a hierarchy.

So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and someone might only be interested in those posts.

Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on different parts of the screen.

I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example, to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it seems?).

So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or you're going to have a bad time.

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