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

301–310 of 396 posts

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#301

Post by wyclif »

urthor wrote: post #297
wyclif wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.

Out of curiosity, why? Seems fairly simple to perform simple keyword searching, just like Slack.

Sure, you can keyword search easily enough, but the information you might be looking for is sometimes scattered over dozens of channels.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#302

Post by tester756 »

Hayarotle wrote: post #134
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…

The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a wiki). Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord…

>shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed,

How would that even work?

google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it and have to scroll forever?

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#303

Post by mr_beans »

simias wrote: post #26
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'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…

100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate with the public. Abysmal!

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#304

Post by urthor »

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…

> There is a strong culture of keeping topics focused

I think you're mistaking the type of content on Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their platforms.

Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of academic citations.

GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe.

They both have the same property: end users displaying individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments.

People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work.

And that's okay, we all do.

Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use. It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search, grep, or any other search bar I've encountered.

Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord than picking up regex and grep ever was.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#305

Post by kachurovskiy »

urthor wrote: post #295

Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information. Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication. Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those. The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue i…

GitHub works great for me - with Discussions tab being very useful e.g. https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/

Also helps that you can publish and serve static HTML/JS files in the same place. With video support added in markdown I have little else to wish for.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#307

Post by ayushnix »

urthor wrote: post #295

Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information. Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication. Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those. The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue i…

> The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.

It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to create third party clients.

Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.

Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#308

Post by yucky »

zer0-c00l wrote: post #230
etripe wrote: 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.

Moderation being left to unpaid community members is a sign that Reddit DOES take moderation seriously

Not when you consider the type of people that unpaid moderation attracts. Reddit is broken.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#309

Post by [deleted] »

urthor wrote: post #295

Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information. Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication. Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those. The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue i…

[deleted]

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#310

Post by charcircuit »

theshrike79 wrote: post #289
remram wrote: 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.

Wait. "Work servers"? People use Discord for work chat?

Yes, most of my work conversations happen on discord servers. Discord provides a better chat service than slack, so I don't see how it would be unusual for people to use Discord over slack.
Post reply on HN