If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
Experience also taught me this.
Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
151–160 of 355 posts
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#152If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
Can you give a real life example of this?
I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active.
The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better? Sure, for you maybe. Overwhelmingly the word I'd use to describe Discord's interface is "one". There is one interface. It's an interface that most people seem to like, but we've lost an important freedom there. It's against the EULA to modify your client or use an alternative one. If with IRC one can have any interface, I would not call Discord's better.
Maybe it changed, but how do you share a screenshot on IRC?
Some modern clients (or clients-as-services) build in image/file sharing.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords. That's actually m…
This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.
> nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down
some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#155I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
HN has a particular culture that dislikes social media and due to the nature of these sites, once a culture is established, it attracts more of the same since everyone upvotes the dominant cultural position. Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. Listen to your users. My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and…
> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#156One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy )
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se. What ultimately convinced us banning was appropri…
Good call.
A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#157One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy )
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se. What ultimately convinced us banning was appropri…
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#158A bit unrelated, but does someone use a forum at work?
I think in times of remote work that could a better alternative to Teams discussions about features or bugs (especially from other teams/departments) + the better search.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
Nobody wants to do that self hosting for a Q&A forum for a side project. Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition
I'd rather self-host a forum.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se. What ultimately convinced us banning was appropri…
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.". That rule has been used a few time…
Oh, why didn't it strike me to put that rule in writing.
Some users waste hours and hours of moderator time per week and it would be nice to have a written rule to point to for a timeout