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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#311

Post by charcircuit »

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…

>Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.

You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord. Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private conversation with your buddies.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#312

Post by charcircuit »

donkarma wrote: post #157
charcircuit wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

you need to use app to voice chat on discord, and need an account to use anything on discord

The app is only needed for a couple features of voice chat like push to talk when Discord is in the background unfocused.

Server owners are able to configure a verification level. When on the lowest verification level (which is the default setting when making a server) new users without a discord account can join by simply typing the nickname they would like to use.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#314

Post by donmcronald »

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.

The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker. So I'm left skimming an entire channel that includes 50 other things that I don't care about at the moment.

The sheer volume can be overwhelming too. I went on the Zenith (VR MMO) Discord the day after release to ask a question and I found it to be useless. The channel was moving so fast that 2 min after I asked my question I couldn't even find it and had to search for it. There's no way to follow something going that fast (at least for me) and a lot of the chatter is tangential, so in addition to being poorly organized the signal to noise ratio is low.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#315

Post by burnished »

night862 wrote: post #274
bozhark wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it. We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.

This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are. "Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."

That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#316

Post by saurik »

thfuran wrote: post #245
saurik wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyon…

>The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting. That seems more than a bit ridiculous.

FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#317

Post by johnny22 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #31
Aerroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.

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…

i wish i could enable that for IRC reasonably without running my own bots and such.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#318

Post by magicalhippo »

remram wrote: post #160
magicalhippo wrote: post #59

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…

You mean: is has history on the server ?

Discord has history on the server, unlike IRC. This makes a huge difference when joining a new channel.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#319

Post by magicalhippo »

timmattison wrote: post #265
beebeepka wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.

Exactly, and it won't search for stuff that was written when your client, or the bot, wasn't running.

Sure, you could set up bouncers and whatnot. But it's a barrier that Discord doesn't have.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#320

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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