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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#181

Post by pmoriarty »

My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling logs.

There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file.

That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in.

Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.

By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.

I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done completely offline.

If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're interested in out of it.

The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can sometimes be useful) and voice chat.

Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for me than IRC.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#182

Post by zhte415 »

friedturkey wrote: post #41
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 mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common. The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better…

USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one.

Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#183

Post by doublerabbit »

remram wrote: post #165
xigoi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's better to leak over other personal information? Use Jitsi or something.

What personal information? All you need is a screen name. I don't think Discord even requires an email to join a server (if guests are enabled).

You do require email and mobile authentication text message on sign up.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#184

Post by joshspankit »

I would argue that all timeline-based communication tools are black holes for information.

How much knowledge has been lost to IRC channels, chat conversations, forum threads, and so-on?

Yes, many of us have gotten good (or even excellent) at parsing through threads to find the nuggets of information that lead us to the understanding we seek, but it’s clearly not the environment that information wants in order to thrive.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#185

Post by voidfunc »

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]

Signal is a pile of crap. Seriously I am in a small chat with four other people and sometimes it just doesn’t sync messages and when it does my phone turns into a vibrating sex toy for 20 minutes.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#186

Post by tasha0663 »

3OCSzk wrote: post #125
kristjank wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

It might be easier but I'm not leaking my phone number just to have voice chat with internet friends

Giving out a phone number to make a phone call. The horror :)

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#187

Post by iceflinger »

pmoriarty wrote: post #181

My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling logs. There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file. That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in. Discord's…

I remember their official twitter responding to someone that exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump

But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#188

Post by VladimirGolovin »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #76
rcarmo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can host it for free if you set it up yourself, on your own server.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#189

Post by slightwinder »

zppln wrote: post #81
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #44

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.

Still far better than discord or twitter, at least for text/pictures. Audio/Video-channels on discord can be nice, though.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#190

Post by jeroenhd »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #98
rcarmo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is composer a problem for shared hosts?

Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.

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