111–120 of 244 posts
I'm not the first to say this, but Discord is essentially IRC. It's great for ephemeral chatting and arguably the best platform for that currently. The content on it is not indexed and not discoverable with web search engines. I have been wondering: is it even possible for a platform to fulfill both needs? For searchable, "forum style" discussions, we already have a large accessible platform: Reddit! I genuinely ask…
You can have both. The forum I use also have a irc-like chat section.
I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism. And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately. I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed. Slack, on t…
Still have to register though and the content is not indexed by a search engine.
I'm starting to think that this is part of the appeal. Having an emotional outburst and power tripping is fun for some people, and Discord provides ample opportunity to do it (+ in real-time)
However, I will admit that I much prefer seeing that a community has a Discord channel over being exclusively located on Github/Gitlab issues.
I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism. And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately. I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed. Slack, on t…
A single example of it being done well doesn't have any bearing on all the issues stemming from the use of Discord as knowledge bases, wikis and documentation. Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?
It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.
I feel like there are two discussions to be had:
(1) Discord as a commercial platform vs. open web; (2) Discord as an IRC-style platform vs. forums.
For me, only (2) is about the point of OP of "dumping knowledge into a black hole". It's a black hole because it's IRC, not because it's commercial.
Stop Using Mastodon.
Yes, please stop using discord. But also maybe stop using discourse. Nothing is more off-putting about an open source project than seeing that discord is the main support forum. I am in the fortunate position of being able to just solve my own problems by myself most of the time, but sometimes it genuinely is helpful to talk to someone about it. If you're an open source project, please use IRC, or matrix if you absol…
By the way, maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with Github Discussions?