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

Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

posthog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 223 posts

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#181

Post by Forgeties79 »

jelling wrote: post #135
flohofwoe wrote: post #126

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord? Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.

I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.

Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#183

Post by sublinear »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #97
sublinear wrote: post #9

From the article: > Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS. Wanted to leave a link here for the impatient https://strapi.io/

Why would they create their own? That just feels like wasted resources, given that forum software is a solved platform.

> forum software is a solved platform

It was never solved. Forum software just stagnated with its poor backend and frontend solutions that everyone tolerated until the social media platforms we know today took off.

Now that even the most unsophisticated user has become intolerant of the noise on there, forums are coming back.

But, you can't expect people to go back to the same problems they left behind over a decade ago. Just about any modern CMS is a dramatic improvement over the crappy database schemas, dead languages, ugly, inflexible, and slow server-side rendered HTML, etc. Just about any frontend a college student whips up would have modern features people actually want to use and be far easier to maintain. What was "solved" is the realization that forums are just another CRUD app. The specific implementation is irrelevant as long as it is architected as such.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#184

Post by sublinear »

alberth wrote: post #164
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they create their own? That just feels like wasted resources, given that forum software is a solved platform.

Agreed. Also, Strapi has one of those odd licenses where everything is MIT expect what’s in /ee directory https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE

"Open Core Model"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

Enterprise edition features require a license file, so that directory would be empty and is not needed to use the community edition.

Most people do not need the enterprise edition and despite what some think, a CMS is fairly trivial to write from scratch anyway. That's why there are so many out there. It's a lazy business model. The general idea is more valuable than the actual code. People who pay for a CMS or start out with an open-core product will eventually have to shift priorities towards protecting what they've built otherwise when they scale up. Cheaper to migrate to your own thing than pay a license in the long term. It's more of a business decision than a technical one to do the cost-benefit analysis. The data, community, brand, etc. are so much more valuable than the platform making vendor lock-in almost impossible unless you're stacked to the ceiling with idiots who can't code at all. That's their customer: entities who want a website or app and don't need to think about the long-term cost yet or ever.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#186

Post by barefootsanders »

ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

I've had trouble w/ the same thing and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.

I'm actually about to release an app that can automatically convert slack threads into knowledge base articles.

Would love to share it w/ anyone who's interested to get some feedback.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#187

Post by Doxin »

jayflux wrote: post #107
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7. Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that. Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix). It’s also not searchable on Google eith…

> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online

As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there.

Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that goes away as soon as you open the tab. No need to scroll up to where you got mentioned if you don't want to.

The ephemeral nature of IRC makes it a surprisingly relaxed experience.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#188

Post by knubie »

jayflux wrote: post #107
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7. Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that. Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix). It’s also not searchable on Google eith…

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#189

Post by astrange »

chrisin2d wrote: post #37
opportune wrote: post #22

Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.

I'm impressed by how much sheer ~style~ PostHog is rocking, from the Ursula von Der Leyen privacy notice to hedgehog Godzilla hero video on their home page.

That's a bad sign since it implies they know what their own name means rather than it being some kind of weird coincidence.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#190

Post by renewiltord »

CM30 wrote: post #113
ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines. If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information…

It’s not going to happen. You can’t put ads on them anymore. Means someone has to just run a loss-running enterprise for you. Few will do that.
Post reply on HN