Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#191

Post by TylerE » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:28 AM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #155

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Pretty sure you self-wooshed the sarcasm.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#192

Post by sethammons » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:29 AM UTC

Phelinofist wrote: post #158

A 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.

I have never seen a company forum be well adopted. SO and/or reddit clone. 6 engineers out of 100 in the org push for it and have to remind people it exists and people just keep asking questions in slack. People want to talk with people, esp. coworkers.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#193

Post by gizzlon » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #79

Dlang did it right, a mailing list that act like a forum [1] with various instant messaging bots (IRC, Discord, Matrix) I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2] [1] - https://forum.dlang.org/ [2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/

Looks great, and fast too!

How does the integration work? Can you post to the forum, and it's then mailed out.. ?

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#194

Post by arbitrandomuser » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:37 AM UTC

anon____ wrote: post #186

Roark66 wrote: post #104

At least IRC is usually logged. However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc). I hate it when I…

> So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. Maybe that's the goal? To discourage the return of merchandise? They think customers rather write off the loss, than waste half an hour.

Someone should write a browser plugin to automate the chatting with an llm , beat them at their own game .

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#195

Post by sethammons » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:42 AM UTC

phowat wrote: post #40

Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.

As someone who hardly ever attempted to use a mailing list, I preferred forums because I was worried of waisting everyone on the list's time. In fact, the couple times I did use it, people complained about my usage. It felt like shouting for help in a room that may or may not be crowded. A forum felt more like putting a sign up and interested folks could engage though often nobody would. Chat is nice because there is an immediate back and forth and feels more beginner friendly / welcoming. However, chat needs an FAQ section. I think LLMs trained on chat logs may be an interesting tool.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#196

Post by fer » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:44 AM UTC

galkk wrote: post #127

vladvasiliu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then, those same companies, feign having no idea why everybody and their dog orders on Amazon. I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.

Amazon recently started doing the same. The "chat" button disappeared from the help & contact us, and to talk to real person you need to go through bunch of jumps.

I think that's been the case for a while other countries' marketplaces.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#197

Post by herbst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

tamimio wrote: post #187

Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing. So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’…

This. I wouldn't want to risk to depend on software where it's literally impossible to Google issues. That would be self-destructive on a level I don't want.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#198

Post by dx034 » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

dsab wrote: post #182

vladvasiliu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then, those same companies, feign having no idea why everybody and their dog orders on Amazon. I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.

Amazon UI is a joke even compared with such local (Poland wide) shopping sites like allegro.pl

It's not intuitive but hasn't changed in a very long time. It takes me next to no time to create a return label and even for returns after 30 days, navigating to the chat, asking for a label and receiving it rarely takes longer than 5 minutes.

They've never refused a return I asked for which has frequently happened with other shops.

I really want to support local shops, but for any product where I'm not sure if I will have to return it, I usually use Amazon because of their return policy.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#199

Post by herbst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

cultureswitch wrote: post #188

It's kind of incredible that this even needs to be said. Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information. Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.

I wouldn't even go that far.

There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients

That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#200

Post by herbst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 9:55 AM UTC

langsoul-com wrote: post #6

postpawl wrote: post #5

Earlier 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

Discord is slow, weird to setup and a walled garden with zero control about anything.

Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of.

At least in my POV