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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#101

Post by dgellow »

Discord is so overwhelming. I tried a few month ago to join programming related servers, and holy shit, what a stressful experience! I’m not that old school but compared to forums it is just so hard to follow what is happening with all those notifications and discussions happening at the same time.

After muting all servers and channels, and only joining small-ish communities things started to become better but I cannot imagine keeping the client open and try to follow what is happening, it feels like a full time job.

Of course I may be using the tool incorrectly, people seem to appreciate IRC and I never understood what was attractive about it, outside of small groups.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#102

Post by pas »

tluyben2 wrote: post #58
binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…

Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find iss…

But that IRC archive was written by a bot, not the server(s). Adding a bot to Discord is just as easy.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#103

Post by pmontra »

opdahl wrote: post #7

What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past…

> and therefore never need to look back at it

Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#104

Post by canyonero »

I agree with this statement and am disheartened that the solution for communities (in particular developer communities) that is now winning is Discord. This is however not a new problem. Both Slack and Twitter are also black holes of information by design. Lots of interesting conversation, but nearly impossible to discover externally.

I think community maintainers are choosing it because it has the best moderation tools and community management tools compared to the alternatives.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#105

Post by ec109685 »

gjvc wrote: post #91
nootropicat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero. Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other p…

I’m old too and use slack without any notifications or sound. I just am in a habit of checking it frequently during the day.

I too have never been able to get into Discord, nor ever been able to participate in multiple slack organizations effectively.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#106

Post by guilherme-puida »

etripe wrote: post #92
zppln wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.

Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.

Trying to find a specific post on a subreddit is a nightmare. The built in search functionality is horrible.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#107

Post by cuteboy19 »

kitkat_new wrote: post #62
willjp wrote: post #57

I agree, but it's not discord's fault. Discord is great at what it does. I find the same social issues with discord, slack, gitter, irc, matrix.org, etc. Chat may be good for the questioneer, but it's bad for search/retention. I kind of miss the prominence of phpbb.

Matrix chats can be indexed by google and other search engines if set to public.

I have never seen a matrix result show up in google though.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#108

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

doublerabbit wrote: post #48
simias wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other…

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online. If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good. Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away,…

Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#109

Post by hedgewitch »

binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…

> There are a few things that are repeated questions

I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails.

It's an issue with the people, not the format.

EDIT:

> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.

Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent.

For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever."

Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#110

Post by kreetx »

The UI of Discord is really fast, plus it does voice and video. The problem with all the other chats is that they look (relatively) ugly, including knockout and zulip.

Perhaps if Discord had an option to expose chat histories as regular crawlable web then this problem would go away.

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