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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

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

#371

Post by Ajedi32 »

Zababa wrote: post #96
Oddskar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.

Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.

I've found loading to be extremely fast. Way faster than pagination on most traditional forums, even over a slow mobile connection. On desktop it usually loads faster than I can scroll. Guess it depends on which server you're using?

Example of a long thread, just so we're all on the same page: https://meta.discourse.org/t/trading-buttons-buy-sell-exchan...

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

#372

Post by spurgu »

xpe wrote: post #282
danr4 wrote: 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

Zulip [1] is open source and (IMO) fantastic. [1]: https://github.com/zulip

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're working on creating public chats, readable without logging in, from the browser?

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

#373

Post by lifthrasiir »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #365

I prefer forums due to similar reasons, but I found asking questions as a user on Discord more "successful", so to speaking. On a forum, the chance of your question being totally ignored is much, much higher. Some do have some staffs that seem to be obligated to reply, and they will just.. copy and paste some templates. On Discord, even the devs and staffs are not always there to answer questions, there are often eno…

I totally agree, and I believe that was also the reason why IRC was so successful in F/OSS communities.

Traditional thread-based forums are great for archival but also seem to encourage a full-sized post, which is a conversational barrier by itself and also limits the potential engagement by reducing the number of people willing to reply. It doesn't seem to me that the discouragement of short posts is inherent to forums though, for example traditional South Korean forums had been traditionally evolved from BBS and had a strong dichitomy between posts and comments, so short comments and quick reactions were norms (longer replies are typically posted separately in a post). GitHub issues seem to be somewhere between those different models.

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

#374

Post by ShroudedNight »

fartcannon wrote: post #363
codinghorror wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.

What happened in 2014? I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).

Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.

I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.

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

#375

Post by Taywee »

cma wrote: post #368
tomc1985 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that goes against the current zeitgeist where you absolutely must love everyone (except your political and ideological opponents)... or else!!!

Race-based hatred as been taboo for quite a while, starting big after WWII. It isn't current zeitgeist.

Why are you immediately assuming racism?

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

#376

Post by techsin101 »

mooreds wrote: post #47
techsin101 wrote: post #23

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.

i think what's missing a functionality that would bring up previous conversations around the same topic. I.e. on stackoverflow you have strict no duplicate policy which forces people to add and update already existing topic. For that to happen user need to know question they have already exists, or a discussion. And then they can catch up, add scenarios and contribute to it. not sure how this could be added to slack tho.

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

#377

Post by konfin »

tester756 wrote: post #213
jraph wrote: post #182

Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this. Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable , now and in the future (arch…

>Discord are not cool In fact, it is. It is unparalleled in its segment, that's why I moved from all other VoIPs to it.

I'm old enough to remember people telling me that flash was the future and anyone using HTLM for websites was a loser.

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

#379

Post by hsn915 »

codinghorror wrote: post #302
agumonkey wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.

The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.

Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.

But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.

People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?

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

#380

Post by Gigachad »

Robotbeat wrote: post #355
Gigachad wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most modern apps, this is pretty much just what is on the screen right now + a little on the top and bottom. The elements get removed/reused once they scroll off the page for performance. I only see this as an issue if the site does not reimplement find so that it is able to deal with this.

Why can’t we just use normal forum software from the 2000s, but with security patches?

Because no amount of security patches can fix 00s forum software designed without modern security in mind. And the average user _likes_ Discourse. They don't give two shits that Ctrl + F is hijacked because it does exactly what they want. It finds the text. They don't want excuses like "Oh well it doesn't find that text because you didn't scroll down to load it". They don't want to click through 100 pages of thread.
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