As much as I like this project. Discord is as absolute disaster. The only reason communities move there is because it's free.
Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
51–60 of 99 posts
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#52This is awesome and timely!
I’ve been wanting to set something like this up for the nullbits server for a while. When I picked discord instead of a forum, I wasn’t counting on the growth we saw. There’s a lot of friction for new folks who aren’t yet on discord, and there’s a lot of knowledge in the server that’s locked behind discord.
Just set everything up! My only feedback is that enabling indexing for all of our text channels took a while doing them all individually, but that’s kind of on me for not enabling forums for help requests until now.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#53As much as I like this project. Discord is as absolute disaster. The only reason communities move there is because it's free.
Slack just lets everyone do it.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#54This is awesome and timely! I’ve been wanting to set something like this up for the nullbits server for a while. When I picked discord instead of a forum, I wasn’t counting on the growth we saw. There’s a lot of friction for new folks who aren’t yet on discord, and there’s a lot of knowledge in the server that’s locked behind discord. Just set everything up! My only feedback is that enabling indexing for all of our t…
Welcome to the Answer Overflow community! I agree it'd be good to have a quicker way to setup multiple channels - to be honest it's kind of far in the backlog as it's pretty rare a server has many, but the UX could be improved there
If you have any other feedback, please send it to me on Discord so I make sure I see it - thanks!
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
Interesting comment. I would think Reddit is similar in terms of content, yet “site:reddit.com ” is common as a general search pattern (pre-blackout)
Discord is made for realtime chat and instant messaging. People don't put a lot of thought process in the vast majority of what they write. The format of ressit encourages a bit of a slower conversation and therefore more thought through comments. You barely even have time to edit a message before it's already irrelevant in discord.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#56Um, why Google? So your indexes can be polluted with their shitty advertising? Why not expose your index as a service? I mean really, WTF not?
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
I would argue it makes no sense to index the vast majority of content without good search . If your search is good enough, you can index everything and then surface only the good stuff at query time.
Indexing trillions of messages is outrageous.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's beyond ironic that Discord called itself that, being the successor to OpenFeint and its privacy lawsuit scandal, and being proprietary. Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.
Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive. Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, i…
The solution to the growth problem is incubating complementary products.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#59While I see the value here, I don't really think most Discord communities are appropriate to be indexed. It breaks the whole cozy web aspect of it. [1] [1] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
The "cozy web" is out of control these days. A lot of social utility is lost by default because everyone uses Whatsapp and Discord and other such information black holes, places where knowledge goes to die. It's OK if you're using these to chat with your family or friends, but it's kind of... less OK, when every open source project these days, including major programming languages, tells you to join their Slack or Di…
I agree, but the old web did have some information black holes, like IRC, unarchived mailing lists, junky forums, and more I probably can't remember
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#60Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with? I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
Discord does have search, but I really hope they do not improve it.
The lack of good search really prevents the hostility towards new users that you often see on Reddit/forums where every question is instantly answered by a one liner "use the search" reply.
Discord communities are some of the most friendly and welcoming communities I have ever encountered on the internet. I think a large part of it is the chat nature and inability to easily pull up old comments.