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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

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Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#141

Post by StuckDuck »

donkeybeer wrote: post #118
moepstar wrote: post #5

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i would…

And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including your own content you wrote there.

Yep, and that's the story of how I lost years worth of discussions and chats because Discord thought well that linking a phone number doesn't automatically allow you to verify yourself with it.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#142

Post by mjr00 »

bakugo wrote: post #101
mjr00 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say,…

Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.

For something like Discord, I'm eventually going to form human connections with people. I'm not going to post my address and SSN, obviously, but my real name, my occupation, the company I work for? Yeah, that'll probably come up.

To say "just practice good opsec and never tie your name to your real identity" is the same as saying "just don't make friends on Discord" to me. I understand why people would do that, but I really don't like the idea of being a pseudonymous blur on the internet like I am on HN/reddit.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#143

Post by hombre_fatal »

worble wrote: post #87

And then when Discord eventually folds all of this info will be lost, as it's not even easily archivable.

Meh, Internet Archive doesn’t meaningfully archive any dead forum either. It gets one page of one thread here and two pages of this other thread there.

It’s basically unusable except to stimulate some nostalgia. So I don’t think Discord changes much in this regard.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#145

Post by pier25 »

moepstar wrote: post #5

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i would…

> I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord.

They don't. Obviously chats are not knowledge storages but a means for quick communication.

I think chats like Gitter, Slack, and Discord proliferated because the realtime thing makes people feel differently vs async communication.

But, like Discord realized, chats are just terrible tools for communities built around learning and solving problems (like dev communities around a tech project). There's no collective learning anymore, no stored knowledge, etc. And the problem gets worse as a community grows.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#146

Post by judge2020 »

BrainVirus wrote: post #88

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…

> Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful.

Like?

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#147

Post by TheFlyingFish »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #114
TheFlyingFish wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e. everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit communities that are big enough to need different trust levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc. In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your server to Community] if your server…

I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't want a public or large community I'm not supposed to convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread channels for organizing information. They aren't useless for small groups of people, and the same is true for some of the other community-locked features. And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious…

I think we just have a difference of opinion (or a different use case) when it comes to threaded channels. Personally, I don't have any use for them in any of the small Discord groups that I'm in, so I'm perfectly happy with having them classed alongside "Rules channels" and the like. Based on their decision here I suspect that Discord sees it the same way. Obviously, you feel differently.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#148

Post by solveit »

mmcdermott wrote: post #107
culturestate wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).

I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting privacy.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#149

Post by fny »

mediaman wrote: post #128
fny wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHPBB:Reddit::AIM:Discord The name of the app is Discord for crying out loud. Have you seen the kinds of things people are using it for? Discord is *wildly* hackable chat, not forum software. There's tons of crap being slung around on Discord that doesn't deserve to be archived because that's not the purpose. Is IRC indexable or searchable? No. Usenet served that purpose. People hacked in query bots to IRC. At least…

Sure, but the problem is that so many communities are moving discussion around solving domain-specific problems to Discord. And the collective wealth of knowledge - some of which gets accumulated across decades - instead becomes an amnesiac experience where answering one person’s question provides no gain to the next person with the same question in a year’s time. I’m not sure why this move is happening.

Exactly. This is a people problem not a software problem.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#150

Post by gorbypark »

cowtools wrote: post #139
Kye wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.

I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers. While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.

There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.
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