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Stop Using Discord

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Re: Stop Using Discord

#151

Post by Klonoar »

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.

One of the most wildly successful chatting platforms of the modern era is not objectively “abysmal” just because it does things differently than your 30 or so years of understanding.

People on this site really confuse this issue: your dislike of Discord is an ethical one, because it goes against what you believe a chat should be (free/open/whatever). Most people unfortunately just don’t give a shit.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#152

Post by pavel_lishin »

iteygib wrote: post #114

I don't understand the issue here. The author of the post is mad because people have the choice to not publicly discuss things? Why do they owe the author their conversations? Is this AI/data scraping related and the author is mad that they can't get a portion of data out there?

The author is mad - rightfully, in my opinion - that many projects use Discord as a defacto knowledge base/documentation/support hub, instead of setting up something that's much better suited for it.

Of course people can privately discuss things, but if you were asking for help with your car, would you prefer that someone tell you which manual and page to look at to solve your problem, or to invite you to their car club that meets on weekends because Timberly probably knows how to solve that problem, and will probably be there next weekend, unless he's not?

Re: Stop Using Discord

#153

Post by TheRoque »

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I couldn't care less about) don't give them much. So my concern is that someday, as we'll see an update to the EULA stating that all the data stored forever is now sold to OpenAI or something like this.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#154

Post by gostsamo »

RyJones wrote: post #133
gostsamo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm blind and I don't like Discord. They implement accessibility well, but they, Slack, Teams and the like have decided that I need to know the sender and time stamp of every message in the chat. Read to me for every message. Jumping between screen sections is annoying because lists and headings are too nineties and the hell with them. Captchas? Should I mention that for some reason they disliked one of my logins and…

I’m sorry to hear that. I know two of the blind users personally and they are active in discord. I agree on captchas. Rocket.Chat was the previous platform. I will file a bug against discord on the timestamp issue. When I worked for Washington State University, one of our tests pre website update, was the developers had to use a desktop with a screen reader and the display turned off. I think we made great websites f…

Many products would benefit if there is such a friday game in the product team: Achieve story goals without the monitor in fewest possible steps.

PS: Regarding the timestamp issue, maybe I've formulated it incorrectly. Just, when you arrow on a message, it reads sender and timestamp. Some people write bursts of messages so you have a name and timestamp for every few words of the conversation and for many stupid emois.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#155

Post by iforgotpassword »

slimsag wrote: post #136
iforgotpassword wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.

I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord. If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer. Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?

I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google.

I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#156

Post by lairv »

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.

What I like about discord is that, in my experience, it lowers the barrier of entry to get a reply on an issue. On forums or GitHub issues, you usually need to be more formal and thoughtful in your posts, you don't want people on stack overflow to tell you that this is a dumb question, and even then you might wait days or weeks for a response. The instant chat format encourages people to simply reply even in informal ways

Of course, this isn’t always the case, your messages can still go unanswered for days. But in my experience, when I see that a project has a Discord, I now think "Great I might get an answer". And this doesn't dismiss all the cons that others have already mention

Re: Stop Using Discord

#157

Post by 542458 »

bmacho wrote: post #147
542458 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It barely works without JS. Essentially everything other than basic text display is broken, including search, pagination, sorting, etc. that said, I am surprised it works at all given the aforementioned loading throbber before you can see a page.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#158

Post by GrantMoyer »

deafpolygon wrote: post #8

Meanwhile... the mastodon page takes over 3 minutes to load. I don't know of any pre-2010 forums that are still functional and searchable.

The game specific DarkMatters forums has been around for at least 10 years. I personally used it to resolve an issue I was having, when I found a thread[1] by web search. Some nice people helped the OP troubleshoot over almost 2 years until with their help the OP eventually found the issue and explained the fix.

Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum.

[1]: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...

Re: Stop Using Discord

#159

Post by politelemon »

slimsag wrote: post #136
iforgotpassword wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.

I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord. If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer. Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?

I've seen it on numerous game, book, and software related discords. Your experience is alien to mine.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#160

Post by stnmtn »

sneak wrote: post #65

Stop using Discord for “just chatting”, too. It’s not end to end encrypted and Discord and whoever acquires them can read all of your chat logs, including DMs, for AI training or whatever else. Friends don’t talk to friends on surveillance platforms.

Are forums not this way as well?
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