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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

cyral wrote: post #111
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?

[deleted]

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#122

Post by pier25 »

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…

> You don't use it because "you don't have a choice"

I do.

There are many dev communities like Svelte which use Discord so I'm forced to use it although I kinda hate it too.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#123

Post by grishka »

entropie wrote: post #109
grishka wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Discord has really poor UX compared to other IM services I use, like Telegram. Notification settings are so complex that it takes trial, error, and missed important messages to end up with a sensible configuration (no broadcast mentions in any shape or form, no badges unless I'm mentioned by my own username or there's a reply to my message). Every little piece of its UI is custom-built and routinely defies my ex…

Discords notifications are actually are nightmare. I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out (since like 2 month) where it comes from. And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of. Overall its usability is okay for me, but there are really some big quirks.

> I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out

Maybe it's a friend request?

> And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of.

This is the most annoying thing. I think it means you have "some" unread messages. A single message in any of the 100s of channels in a dozen "servers" you're in will trigger that with default notification settings.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#124

Post by tyrfing »

whateveracct wrote: post #15
xena wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.

It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)

It took over like wildfire because it had 10x better UX than any combination of alternatives - and you definitely needed a combination to match the features. Start with the fact that it's not just chat, but also video, voice, and includes things like multimedia uploads that are a modern baseline, but still absent from many other services.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#125

Post by pier25 »

babypuncher wrote: post #75
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…

Discord has a low barrier to entry and continued use. With a single account, I can join a dozen communities and easily stay up to date with them, and get an instant notification on my phone or desktop when someone answers a question I asked in any of them. To do the same with a dozen phpbb communities, I need to create a dozen accounts and track each site individually.

> easily stay up to date with them

How do you stay up to date when there are thousands and thousands of messages generated per day or even per hour?

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#126

Post by jmyeet »

Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights:

- Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;

- Multiple places where you set settings;

- You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity?

- Searching and indexing. Nuff said;

- Discord gives you a collection of essentially walled gardens. Personally I find this to be a subpar experience;

- You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also;

- Discord seems to be built for people who are terminally online on that server. People who see every chat message. If you're not in that category all you see is a hot mess with no direction;

- Direct messages are another hot mess. Finding particular DMs or people can be a challenge. It's also used for spam and scams where servers haven't locked down the ability to DM other people on that server;

- Discovery of servers is awful. You're relying on other sources for this in its entirety.

So now we're having another communication model: forums. Great. Forums don't work for finding information. There's a reason why the likes of Reddit or even Stack Overflow supplanted forums: you can bubble up good comments or answers and skip all the noise that inevitably pollutes forums (eg "first!", "you shouldn't do X").

At least Discord has some authentication mechanisms to tie in with other platforms and the ability to make bots (note: I've never actually made one so I have no idea how easy or hard this is).

Still, it's another embedded Chrome Electron bloatware nightmare.

I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm sure I'm missing something.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#127

Post by recursivedoubts »

beebeepka wrote: post #120
recursivedoubts wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

people don't think it be like it is, but it do

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#128

Post by mediaman »

fny wrote: post #80
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…

PHPBB:Reddit::AIM:Discord The name of the app is Discord for crying out loud. Have you seen the kinds of things people are using it for? Discord is *wildly* hackable chat, not forum software. There's tons of crap being slung around on Discord that doesn't deserve to be archived because that's not the purpose. Is IRC indexable or searchable? No. Usenet served that purpose. People hacked in query bots to IRC. At least…

Sure, but the problem is that so many communities are moving discussion around solving domain-specific problems to Discord. And the collective wealth of knowledge - some of which gets accumulated across decades - instead becomes an amnesiac experience where answering one person’s question provides no gain to the next person with the same question in a year’s time.

I’m not sure why this move is happening.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#129

Post by nullwarp »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #64

I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in. I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't sufficient. Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and that's it.

Oh so much this. I find discord utterly impossible to use and keep up with. I'm in 8 servers, each one has a bunch of channels. I have no clue what's going on. Every time I log in I have to click through 8 servers and like 150 different channels.

I've just given up and I'll just never use it again. Absolute dumpster fire.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#130

Post by joemi »

judge2020 wrote: post #57
matkoniecz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for server admins that want a modern-looking design and it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If the admins have the cash, discourse does offer hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1]. 0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing 1: https://community.cloudflare.com/

I'll take a Discourse forum over a Discord any day (though I haven't tried Discord's new forum feature). Discourse is an evolution of a forum, while (until now maybe) Discord is an evolution of IRC. Huge difference.
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