Live data from Hacker News

Discord is a black hole for information

knockout.chat

231–240 of 396 posts

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data.

TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow. I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what t…

This is like idling on IRC.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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.

With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#234
We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like the same reason teams use Slack for the perceived relatively friction-free ability to post, despite its equivalent issues for business communication.

It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.

It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#235
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I am also old but unable to relate at all because I don't think I've ever worked without headphones. Home or at the office.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

> 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. With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer

Nothing stopping any client from having logs. mirc and xchat have had them for decades. Yes, they are local but do exist and serve their purpose

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#237
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trying to find a specific post on a subreddit is a nightmare. The built in search functionality is horrible.

I would disagree, searching for a topic or question on any search engine and appending 'reddit' gets me reddit discussions that are frequently relevant to my question (game tips, bugs encountered in some software, often real user reviews for products, etc).

Reddit's redesign is annoying and their own search isn't great but the alternative sources for a lot of communal information is completely inaccessible. I cannot search Google for Discord conversations and get information about my Lenovo laptop's rear thunderbolt port misbehaving, even though I witnessed that conversation take place multiple times on the unofficial Legion Discord community. If you're not on Discord and sort of active in a community it might as well not exist.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#238
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…

In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people. Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord…

That’s basically how I use. Just as a replacement for Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games. It’s rather good for this use case. I think there’s maybe 10 people on our server, and I’m pretty happy with the UX.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#239
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" ... I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.

Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.

I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#240
post #164
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will still see the "server you're both in" and the game your currently playing, etc. Not good for work servers.

Although you can disable automatically setting your status to whichever game you are playing though.

You can disable it globally, for all servers, yes
Post reply on HN