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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#171

Post by password4321 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #58
binwiederhier wrote: post #13

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…

Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find iss…

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this though.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#172

Post by gs17 »

morceauxdebois wrote: post #40
Ekaros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if your bouncer or server fails? Where do you get the history then?

What if the discord servers fail and your history is lost?

Or if Discord decides storing unlimited history isn't something they want to provide to everyone for free anymore.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#173

Post by dvnguyen »

Shameless plug: I’m building a QA web app where you can easily create a QA server for your projects, and users can join your server with a click. Basically a stackexchange with Discord onboarding UX. Shoot me an email if you’re interested. My email is on my profile.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#175

Post by mmis1000 »

adam12 wrote: post #118
neutronicus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are nice on Discord. Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to drive people off the deep end.

My experience is exactly opposite. People seem to go to war when they know that the conversation will just be lost over time.

The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7.

On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes forever.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#176

Post by iqanq »

xigoi wrote: post #168
remram wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What personal information? All you need is a screen name. I don't think Discord even requires an email to join a server (if guests are enabled).

It's nonfree software, so you can only assume that it's spying on you.

I don't care if Discord sees my ip/email, but I really, really don't want other users to see them.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#177

Post by mmis1000 »

simias wrote: post #30
qayxc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues. Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on. Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.

I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic. Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.

I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#178

Post by sylware »

elephant in the room: discord is another set of closed network protocols with a lot of centralized/multicast/relay servers. And it is free as in free beer: the discord ppl were granted tons of money. Where those tons of money do come from? From the usual blackrock and vanguard funds or their proxies? This is probably public information, but I have not looked into that. If I want to interact with ppl on discord servers: either I have to build a google(blink/geecko)/apple(webkit) browser (which I don't and won't), or use their linux proprietary "app" which expects a massive distro with tons of big deps. The steam client is very far from expecting as much from a distro than this app, and they are both, roughly speaking, packaged/librar-ized google blink engines (libcef). Why something that much toxic for internet can "succeed" (or make a lot of noise): it is insanely easy to use, provides full voice/video calls and more, and is free as in free beer (yeah... massive free bandwidth at a worldwide scale!!).

How to do the same with "open and sane protocols" and not force ppl to use a google/apple based browser? Well it is super ez: 1 - get massive amount (I guess at least as much as the discord guys) of funding to make all the servers and bandwidth free as in free beer, worldwide. 2 - if you get 1, we'll talk about 2...

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#179

Post by mmis1000 »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #39
qayxc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues. Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on. Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.

Discord also has a search feature, and it works across channels.

That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#180

Post by e2le »

Ekaros wrote: post #25

Discord is the modern IRC. And at least you can see history there, unlike with IRC where it is just gone if your client fails.

At least with IRC, many would run bots which made channel logs available somewhere that could be indexed by a search engine. Doing the same with Discord will earn you a TOS ban.
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