1) It's not worse than IRC or Slack, and in some ways superior since it has a lower barrier of entry (IRC is... IRC, and slack user management/invite system is weird)
2) When was recording of live, synchronous communication ever meant to be a repository of information? Do people complain that audio transcriptions of group discussions are an inadequate replacement for purposely written documentation? There's a reason you take notes during a meeting.
Discord is a black hole for information
51–60 of 396 posts
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#52I periodically see complaints like this posted here. I wonder if I am in an information bubble.
Are HN readers, a more traditional forum, biased against non-traditional fora? If nothing else, it would be hard for to post a link on HN to Discord discussion about the advantages of Discord, where, presumably, such a discussion would most likely transpire.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#53Maybe one day Discord will have a feature to enable indexing of content by external services or to make it public.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#54If it's reliably used as an opportunity to improve documentation, then I can see Discord having a place and forums not being necessary. I wouldn't expect that to happen, though; I know how I feel about documenting even when I'm being paid to do it.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#55As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…
Perhaps Matrix is an option as well.
It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed by search engines if you set the discussions to public
Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split the community.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#56Furthermore, not only it's closed source but you are giving all your conversations and metadata to a private company.
It is a free data host[ag]ing platform run for profit.
Your data is safe and accessible as long as the economic incentives are aligned with that.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#57I agree, but it's not discord's fault.
Discord is great at what it does. I find the same social issues with discord, slack, gitter, irc, matrix.org, etc. Chat may be good for the questioneer, but it's bad for search/retention. I kind of miss the prominence of phpbb.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#58As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…
Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years later.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.
If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before. These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day. Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only…
> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.
You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.
That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#60all they would need to do is add forum support. it’s already sort of there with threads