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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#331

Post by urthor »

ayushnix wrote: post #307
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 app…

Machine specs?

I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.

Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging.

Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you.

> A Discord community that I moderate

> 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.

This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#332

Post by urthor »

charcircuit wrote: post #311
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.

Large private communities are just as valid a form of communication.

Corporate intranets for example, are exactly this. Nobody wants those to be publicly indexable.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#333

Post by urthor »

gwern wrote: post #329
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 problem with Discord is it fails to provide any way at all to move from chat to forum, or perhaps a better phrase would be "plazas and warrens" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... . Discord nails the 'fast' part but there's no way for good stuff to 'percolate up' into slower long-term mediums ( https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design ). Usenet had FAQs, IRCs had associ…

> IRCs had associated mailing lists & bugtrackers

That's kind of the thing.

I don't see Reddit's Wikis, IRC Mailing lists, Usenet FAQs as "integrated" into the core experience particularly well.

Reddit Wikis are just a parallel communication channel vended by the same company. If I was going to do user journey analysis, from the core user experience of "Reddit threads" to Reddit wikis... it's not there.

Famously, nobody ever reads the Reddit sidebar/FAQs.

Someone has to essentially manually copy and update content in a wiki/FAQ. Which has gone from Web 2.0 esque content creation, to a very "Web 1.0-esque" approach.

Ultimately I feel like people are just demanding from Discord, something that IRC style communication has never provided. The closest we've ever gotten that I've seen is Slack search.

"Quick and easy to write" is honestly just perpendicular to "quick and high quality" to read.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#334

Post by aasasd »

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…

> Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists.

However, email has one property that basically all chat platforms lack: each mail is presented as a standalone unit of correspondence with its own metadata, from the start. Just like with forum posts, you spend some minutes writing it, then send it off and wait for a reply—not continuously mash the keyboard, sending your thoughts nearly raw one after another. Streams-of-consciousness that are chats, are not suited to be indexed and presented as separate and complete pieces of info, at all.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#335

Post by guywhocodes »

ffhhj wrote: post #261
guywhocodes wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Timestamp instead of page number?

The problem with growing content is that either the location changes because you either see newest first or you autos roll down to the latest on entry.

Navigation through a time based ToC seems like a compromise but not one I love

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#336

Post by addandsubtract »

voussoir wrote: post #254
zppln wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.

After years and years of making bad changes to the site, they recently did one thing right: they removed or greatly extended the period that you can reply to and upvote posts. It used to be that after 6 months everything was "archived", but now I see an open comment field on posts that are ten years old. I've already gotten one or two comment replies to some years-old comments of mine, and I was able to help answer t…

I think this depends and varies from subreddit to subreddit. Some archive posts after a couple of months, while some are still open after years.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#337

Post by ipaddr »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #278
night862 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in. They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay. As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phen…

In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.

Slack works better for finding information as bad as it is at that.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#338

Post by ipaddr »

night862 wrote: post #275
zer0-c00l wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this judiciously

Consider the recent studies that show that people's attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under their bed, even if its turned off. Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.

I would never bring my phone to the grocery store. It feels good leaving in a place to get recharged where it can't be lost.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#339

Post by samb1729 »

madars wrote: post #214

The worst part about Discord is that it is against their ToS to use third-party clients (and there are reports of people's accounts being banned for them making the black hole effect worse). In particular, you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen: >All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in yo…

> you can't have a client that has [...] better information density on the screen

A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#340

Post by ipaddr »

remram wrote: post #158
charcircuit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without nitro you can still nickname yourself.

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

Wouldn't you use your work account? A separate account just for work?
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