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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

discord.com

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Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#111

Post by cyral »

BrainVirus wrote: post #88

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…

> but then scrubbed every mention of games

There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#112

Post by grishka »

debacle wrote: post #72

Is Discord the "federated social media" that everyone has been looking for? How are they going to monetize?

No, it's as centralized as they ever come. The "servers" are a misnomer, really. That's what they call communities/workspaces for some reason. If you want federated social media, you're looking for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects. I'm also building my own one.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#113

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

bakugo wrote: post #101
mjr00 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.

> 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-related posts.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#114

Post by pteraspidomorph »

TheFlyingFish wrote: post #96
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode? Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.

My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e. everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit communities that are big enough to need different trust levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc. In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your server to Community] if your server…

I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't want a public or large community I'm not supposed to convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread channels for organizing information. They aren't useless for small groups of people, and the same is true for some of the other community-locked features.

And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious nonsense attached:

> Scan media content from all members: this will scan all media sent in the server and delete any content that contains explicit content

I don't trust an automated algorithm to make moderation decisions for me.

> Rules or Guidelines Channel

Useless in a private community.

> Discord may check the contents of your server to make sure it’s safe!

I don't need a paternalistic american tech company invisibly making judgement calls on what my private community does or doesn't do.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#115

Post by abduhl »

nemothekid wrote: post #53
whateveracct wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real. Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.

> 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 there were something better we'd be using that." This seems a bit circular to me.

Why do people use Discord (or Slack) for housing information instead of bringing it into a self-hosted forum or internal database? Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now and the massive inefficiencies are distributed over time and a number of users. It's a tragedy of the commons.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#116

Post by recursivedoubts »

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,…

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have some bad news for you.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#117

Post by plorkyeran »

SomeBoolshit wrote: post #104
gwillen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let you still see history from when you joined; it just lets you see whatever bits of history your client has cached, which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop) or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make much sense. I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but it's not what D…

So it's really just IRC mode?

No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just switching between channels on the same server doesn't reliably retain chat history, so it basically just doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#118

Post by donkeybeer »

moepstar wrote: post #5

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i would…

And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including your own content you wrote there.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#120

Post by beebeepka »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #116
mjr00 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. I have some bad news for you.

Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?
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