Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Using Discord

malenfant.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 244 posts

Re: Stop Using Discord

#141

Post by iteygib »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #70

This. "Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me. Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative. Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now…

"Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all."

Who cares? Why do you want to record every single thing forever? Do you write down every single thing when you converse with someone in real life?

And you really can't figure out how to use Discord, when a 14-year old apparently can? Maybe it's time to retire.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#142

Post by wavyknife »

542458 wrote: post #25
mikl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in…

> which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist

You can host it yourself for much less than $50/mo, some people run small instances on a raspberry pi (I work for Discourse)

Re: Stop Using Discord

#143

Post by least »

kwanbix wrote: post #59
NeutralForest wrote: post #37

I feel like we have this discussion every month, one way or another. People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord. Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the…

I have been using computers for 40 years and I cannot see a single feature of discord that I cannot have on a forum or even reddit. In fact, the UX of Discord is abismal.

Forums sometimes do have (crappy) live chat experiences. Their main selling point is that they have easily searchable, indexable, and navigable threads that are usually pretty well organized into distinct topics.

The UX on Discord is excellent. That's why so many people, including nerds that used to happily use IRC and Mumble, use it. It's easy to create your own server, administer it with granular permissions, and to invite your friends to it. You can instantly start voice and video calls with screen sharing, for free. It's also a live chat with excellent formatting capabilities and has multiline support, unlike IRC (unless this has changed recently?), which makes it much better suited for technical questions involving code. Oh, it also has actual code formatting built in so it's actually legible (though this remains a feature underutilized).

The problem with discord is it's just not visible outside of discord, it can't be indexed, archived and searched through other means, and is vulnerable to the whims of the server owner. It's also not very good at being a forum replacement because its threading capabilities and UI wasn't designed for that purpose, so it feels bolted on (because it is).

Re: Stop Using Discord

#144

Post by viraptor »

azangru wrote: post #132

Has anyone remarked on the irony that this appeal to stop using discord, because it isn't searchable from the outside, is published on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside? I tried to google for things I had earlier seen on Mastodon, but was never able to find the relevant post again. Even modern-day Twitter, which is impossible to just browse these days, is more googlable.

> on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside?

By default. You can turn on indexing for your account if you want to.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#145

Post by edwcross »

I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord").

Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS.

The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#147

Post by bmacho »

542458 wrote: post #25
mikl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in…

Discourse works without javascript. AFAIK it even has email support as well (I don't know how that works).

Re: Stop Using Discord

#148

Post by mtndew4brkfst »

opensource4ever wrote: post #84
Springtime wrote: post #54

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in natu…

matrix.org allows 100 mb attachment. It is federated, which means you can move your data to your server if you like later. There are many clients and server implementations now and it is e2ee.

I dip my toes in regularly for the last two years. Every time I do, Matrix has been an extremely janky experience with negligible command of good UX principles. It's awful, and I'm only trying to use two devices.

If folks want to convince less ideologically motivated people to switch and support The Cause it still needs so much TLC. It's barely competing on table stakes features for a chat platform.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#149

Post by edwcross »

edwcross wrote: post #145

I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord"). Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS. The compl…

By the way, when I actually joined the "real" NixOS Discord, and asked a few questions but got no answers, I realized it was better to be on my own. I don't know if there was much useful information inside it, but I can see how it can help kill an open-source sofware community: you either arrived early and had the time to digest the information, or you end up having a very bad experience trying to search for the information, trying to understand how the community works, which channels are useful and which are not... so you choose between being the chatty noob who annoys everyone, or the silent lurker who spends hours looking for information or waiting for a reply.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#150

Post by ziml77 »

I love Discord... for chat. I refuse to join servers for projects that are using it in place of a forum.

I want to be able to browse the existing information without needing to announce that I'm looking (people joining a server may be announced in a specific channel and you are added to the user list) and without implicitly signing up for notifications (you get the chat notifications unless you make sure to mute the server and suppress @mentions). I want to be able to search for information without trudging through loads of BS chatter and interleaved conversations.

Traditional forum software is great for this. Please use it!

Post reply on HN