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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

#171

Post by madeofpalk »

culturestate wrote: post #161
mmcdermott wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).

> Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility. 1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their accou…

Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#172

Post by gregwebs »

This seems closer to the Zulip model of chat, which I have always been a huge fan of (but forced to use Slack instead). I see open source projects using Discord. I ask a question and then it doesn't get answered and is lost in the chat. When a project uses forums via Discourse, information is much better organized.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#173

Post by abduhl »

nemothekid wrote: post #165
abduhl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If there was another option out there people would use it. This statement seems to not account for lock-in or network effects. Why do people still use Oracle products or Microsoft products like Outlook or Excel? It's certainly a big stretch to say that these things are "the best" (although Excel is, objectively, the best) unless your definition of "the best" is simply "the thing we are currently using because if t…

> Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now Some of these communities are older than Discord but somehow they were lazy. It simply can't be because Discord/Slack are better tools. The implication that there are communities working on database internals using Discord, but they are too dumb to standup Discourse is astounding.

"When they started" has nothing to do with the company's founding but when they started using Discord for this particular purpose. Consider on-prem versus cloud and not switching between them when it makes financial sense because of lock-in and inertial resistance.

Another example: I used to use a wristwatch rather than my phone's clock (this is pre-smart watch) even though just using my phone would have been more efficient. Why did I do this? Because of habitual lock-in. How did I break out of it? I eventually realized how expensive it was to maintain my watch and that there was another option that I already had that did everything my watch did. In your world and under your definition of "the best" then my wristwatch was "the best" solution for telling time despite it obviously not being the most economical or efficient. Until it wasn't, and then my phone somehow became "the best" tool for telling time in your world.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#174

Post by haunter »

jmyeet wrote: post #126

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 anyw…

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

- Easy to use multiplatform free voice chat. That was the original biggest selling point. Yes not everyone wants to selfhost or pay for something a dedicated server, basically killed Teamspeak, Mumble etc and such

- UX which is still better than any combination of alternatives. Yes people want rich media chat, voice, private messages etc.

- It just works. As I said above there might be individual better options but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

It's not perfect at all but does its job and what I want.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#176

Post by matkoniecz »

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/

> it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose

And Discord "server" can be setup within several seconds via GUI.

Sadly, only for tiny minority really aware of vendor lock-in it will be preferable to setup Discourse.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#177

Post by matkoniecz »

shagie wrote: post #49
matkoniecz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)? Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.

Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds or thousands posts each day.

Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place.

And it is still proprietary lock-in.

But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not asking phone number for read only access.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#178

Post by ccleve »

I wonder that Discord doesn't use Discord for their own support forums:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us

An example:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/532642...

This looks a lot like Zendesk.

Maybe they finally realize that long-term knowledge retention is a good thing.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#179

Post by matkoniecz »

pier25 wrote: post #125
babypuncher wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Aggressive muting of channels and servers.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#180

Post by matkoniecz »

RobotToaster wrote: post #175

What I don't get is why so many open source projects choose to use a closed source walled garden as their primary means of communication, it seems entirely counterethical to OSS.

It has really well designed UI and UX and for now is not intensively monetizing.

(not saying that it is a good thing but Discourse, Telegram are awful, forums are horrible to maintain and so on)

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