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Discord is a black hole for information

knockout.chat

91–100 of 396 posts

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#91
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other…

Quoted post unavailable.

Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero.

Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other people physically around the user, by breaking their concentration / getting their attention.

Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and having to be that guy who goes around asking people to silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user.

Another point for working from home is that one cannot easily distract others.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#92
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day. If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't…

A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.

Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Very insulting response. Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age.

Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age.

Amen. It seems "user-centred" design is a long-forgotten philosophy, having been steamrollered by "attention engineering".

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#97

Discord "won me" over the voice chat. It's just so easy to use and setup for people. I know it's a hard pill to swallow on HN but NOT everyone wants and/or can run their own TS/Mumble/Ventrilo server. That's the number 1 reason Discord became popular in gaming groups. Want voice chat for your WoW raid? 2 clicks. Going to play CSOG with your friends? Here is the voice chat channel. Discord is not perfect for sure (the…

mmm I don't know, I've found myself needing to reload Discord multiple times. For voice chat with my friends I use Jitsi, it works way better.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#98
post #38

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.

Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/

It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#99
I am constantly infuriated by companies who sell actual products but leave user support up to some crowdsourced endless scrolling nightmare. Even if they do have a forum the topics (if they exist) will be so broad that everything gets jumbled in together. The search function is often sub par and kind of useless for new users who may not know the exact keywords they are looking for and apart from a little gamification (points or titles) you have no idea which is an authoritative answer or who actually knows what they're talking about. Ask any technical question anywhere on one of these and you're bound to get someone telling you to reinstall your operating system/reset your device to factory settings no matter how minor the actual fix is.

Give me a well-maintained wiki any day.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#100
post #45
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.

Discord search is unfortunately garbage in my experience, so it's almost like not having history.

What's your issue with it? I'm surprised how well it works, how you can search for something and quickly jump to the context.
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