Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord is a black hole for information

knockout.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 396 posts

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#141

Post by dijonman2 »

ec109685 wrote: post #105
gjvc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I’m old too and use slack without any notifications or sound. I just am in a habit of checking it frequently during the day. I too have never been able to get into Discord, nor ever been able to participate in multiple slack organizations effectively.

Amen. I have all sounds and notifications disabled on all devices.

I own the device. The device doesn’t own me.

What pisses me off about slack is it’s actively user hostile. With notifications off it won’t let me mute channels.

I’d like to meet the asshole from their product team who designed that.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#142

Post by charcircuit »

kristjank wrote: post #115
unpopularopp wrote: post #37

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…

You can get just as good voice chat on Signal, and it is miles easier to use than Discord, especially for people familiar with WhatsApp, Viber and other privacy invaders. And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets glorified over work just as well over [matrix]

>and it is miles easier to use than Discord

No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an app, not do they need to make an account.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#143

Post by justinwp »

My developer relations team uses Discord. For us, it is more about strategy and design questions that are often tied to the customer's particular use case. If there are common themes or challenges, we will turn it into a blog post, video, docs, etc to capture it.

Other discussions such as "why doesn't this code work?" or "this behavior seems unexpected" we redirect to StackOverflow and GitHub. Discord also serves as an activity hub for us as we have channels with automated feeds from blogs, youtube, stackoverflow, github, twitter, etc all located in a single location.

This pattern seems to be working for us.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#145

Post by searchableguy »

niblettc wrote: post #120

There’s a huge opening in the market between slack and discord for community conversation and organization. My startup is working on this right now with a web3 implementation.

I would love to connect and learn more. Email is in my profile.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#146

Post by pessimizer »

doublerabbit wrote: post #48
simias wrote: 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…

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online. If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good. Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away,…

Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#147

Post by nextlevelwizard »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #133
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

discourse is open source, you can put it on a raspberry pi

Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice, but then again you didn't know that when you started. Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course you need to setup the software and learn how it works and keep it up to day forever.

Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#148

Post by rchaud »

I agree 100% with the article. To community organizers: for the love of all that is holy, set up a proper message board with threaded discussions. Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?

Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-purpose channel, conversations die off as the subject of discussion is constantly changing. If I wasn't online at the time, I can't bring up the same topic the next morning, because it's been discussed already.

Compare this to something like the forums on rateyourmusic.com. There are long-standing conversations about specific topics that are years old. Everything is easily searchable, and can be refined to searching inside topics. On profile pages for artists and albums, you can see links to discussions related to that artist or album. This is elegant design that's extremely user friendly. The polar opposite of that is a Discord server with with 5-6 extremely broad channels, and a never-ended series of ellipses notifying you that someone is about to post another message that will soon be lost to the void.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#149

Post by guywhocodes »

eternityforest wrote: post #6

Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea. If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible. Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way. Anything that funnels people…

I've been working with this idea for a while, that it's immutable pagination that makes any written work worthwhile. With it we can spatially reason about it and we commit its location to memory. You can never do that with an infinite scroll.

Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use slack for example.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#150

Post by nextlevelwizard »

hedgewitch wrote: post #114
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are going to want to pay to host a forum.

And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already familiar with setting up servers, handling access, setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you evening or two just to get going and after that it requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these custom forums actually have backups in case something goes wrong?
Post reply on HN