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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#71

Post by nootropicat »

I think this is a weird consequence of social media - a local maximum.

- facebook, digg/reddit and twitter kill independent forums. They are 'good enough' mostly for friction reasons that people slowly move there. I think the twitter part is unappreciated - in the past when you had one simple issue, you had to register to communicate it. Now people are likely to tag the profile on twitter with their problem. Sometimes these people remained, now that user acquisition channel is lost.

- they suck at creating communities (I think intentionally), so people don't contribute as much.

- discord is a chat app with flawless ui. As a chat app it's great at building communities due to frequent interactions and instant feedback. This means most active people do everything there, same people who would have 1000+ posts on old style forums.

The tl;dr is that forums are best at preserving information for outside access, but are inferior in making new people join and contribute, which means they are never going to proliferate again. The old optimal balance of chat vs forum is never going to return.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#72

Post by born-jre »

binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As 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…

i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#73

Post by neutronicus »

opdahl wrote: post #7

What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past…

I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are nice on Discord.

Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to drive people off the deep end.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#74

Post by megapolitics »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #31
Aerroon wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits, which are usually touted as superior alternatives to Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found a solution to a problem predating Discord.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#75

Post by Arathorn »

Something we're trying to do about this on the Matrix side is MSC2716 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc271...) - the ability to import archives of existing content into Matrix, and thus 'lock it open' and decentralise it for posterity: as long as one of the servers participating in that room stays alive (and the room is set up with infinite data retention, obviously) then the conversation will live on forever. (That MSC is also well worth a look for those interested in how Matrix works under the hood; MSC2716 was a surprisingly tricky problem to solve but it's basically finished now!).

Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards. After all, information longs to be free :)

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#76

Post by nextlevelwizard »

rcarmo wrote: post #38
binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As 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…

Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way better experience.

aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who joins needs to create new account per instance

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#77

Post by aliswe »

tovej wrote: post #29
Ekaros wrote: post #25

Discord is the modern IRC. And at least you can see history there, unlike with IRC where it is just gone if your client fails.

IRC is almost always logged, and if you need to log things yourself, you can use a bouncer or set up a server.

no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.

Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects, like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems, audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?) scheme...

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#78

Post by nextlevelwizard »

throwaway3snao wrote: post #61
binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As 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…

> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your data and metadata forever.

Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit will get leaked anyway

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#79

Post by karlicoss »

I'm a strong believer in Zulip with respect to a perfect mix between instant messaging and actually retaining information

- functionality for a public export (can also restrict to specific channels), .e.g. https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/

- in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that would make it possible to index without setting up a separate archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172

- messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)

- you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you clicked on search result, you lose the context about the remaining results

- you can login with Github (so no need to register for many people, at least for programming-related projects)

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#80

Post by born-jre »

tluyben2 wrote: post #27

I posted an Ask HN:[0] about this a few days ago but somehow it did not turn up in Ask HN. Probably my mistake. Still, this is a bad issue imho. I like discord and use it a lot, but I would just, at least for the open source projects I follow and work with , that everything is dumped in HTML so that it's indexed. When working on tech it's so valuable to be able to find architectural choices and solutions to problems…

i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.
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