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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

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Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#161

Post by culturestate »

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).

> 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

This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility.

1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their account settings, etc.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#162

Post by franga2000 »

jotm wrote: post #92
kmeisthax wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searchable? Yes. Indexable? Absolutely not. Even public servers are only public to human accounts and only server admins are allowed to invite bots. If you try to scrape Discord with a human account you will be banned.

That's AIcist :D But really, you can't tell human accounts from bots.

With a sophisticated enough crawler, sure, but that would require a significant amount of R&D. I don't know of any organization that both has the resources to do that, is willing to break Discord's ToS and make their index public.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#163

Post by datpuz »

I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world.

I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me, or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with features that it takes too much effort to find what you need.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#164

Post by bee_rider »

mjr00 wrote: post #59
aliqot wrote: post #3

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…

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,…

This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that people had to sign up and you could set things so that only friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends network is eventually infiltrated and scraped.

Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense -- the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team, not because they are benevolent.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#165

Post by nemothekid »

abduhl wrote: post #115
nemothekid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. O…

>> If there was another option out there people would use it. This statement seems to not account for lock-in or network effects. Why do people still use Oracle products or Microsoft products like Outlook or Excel? It's certainly a big stretch to say that these things are "the best" (although Excel is, objectively, the best) unless your definition of "the best" is simply "the thing we are currently using because if t…

>Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now

Some of these communities are older than Discord but somehow they were lazy. It simply can't be because Discord/Slack are better tools. The implication that there are communities working on database internals using Discord, but they are too dumb to standup Discourse is astounding.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#166

Post by nemothekid »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #78
nemothekid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. O…

> This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me. It's a really poo…

>I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden.

So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company.

I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason, but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is a better car than the 911.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#167

Post by robotguy »

max51 wrote: post #134
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason. Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-…

>I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. people can be extremely naïve. It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.

>it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live

Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#168

Post by GekkePrutser »

nemothekid wrote: post #166
GekkePrutser wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me. It's a really poo…

> I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company. I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that…

Yes, "better" means different things to different people.

But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a very good car in my eyes.

I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive. They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way with services.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#169

Post by RobotToaster »

shagie wrote: post #49
matkoniecz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)? Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.

Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

Github for some reason disables search engine indexing of wikis, not sure about discussions.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#170

Post by joshstrange »

datpuz wrote: post #163

I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world. I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me, or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with features that it takes too much effort…

I'm the same way. Slack for my day job and multiple Discord servers for my friend groups. I greatly prefer Discord over Slack (replies being one of the things I like most, stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ threads happen Slack).

The only thing I wish Discord supported better are group chats (not on a server). They support them but there is no way to "pin" them to the main sidebar. In general I wish I had more control over the Discord sidebar (show specific channels and/or group chats).

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