[deleted]
Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
161–170 of 355 posts
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze. TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
>So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze.
The same could happen with amy Discord. No users means no users, no matter if it's Discord or Reddit
But I can find and read a subreddit via search engine without joining anything.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
Can you give a real life example of this? I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active. The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
>The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
The same will happen with Discord's successor, but the Discord data will most likely be lost at that time.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#164One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy )
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se. What ultimately convinced us banning was appropri…
I swing the banhammer early and often without remorse.
If you don't learn after being reminded, there is no use keeping you around.
1 bad person can ruin it for everyone else - not having that.
I believe in second chances but not in online communities.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with banning someone you've asked repeated to change their behaviour while interacting in a space that you host? Nothing!
Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.
This is the difference between banning in the aughts versus now.
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#166At least IRC is usually logged. However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc). I hate it when I…
And then, those same companies, feign having no idea why everybody and their dog orders on Amazon. I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.
Amazon is absolute garbage, no idea why people praise it so much.
Scams all around and garbage products - ill take a bad return policy any day over that.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#167I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#168I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
There are a lot of contextual questions raised by that though - are the people who interact with the project the community? How many people are being interacted with? What are the goals of said community?
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#169[deleted]
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#170I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
Is it possible to somehow bridge discord and, say issues on GitHub or another forum so that people can use discord but the information is just pulled from other sources and they're redirected there?