21–30 of 396 posts
Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea. If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible. Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way. Anything that funnels people…
I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that it's against Slack's ToS.
If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.
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…
What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past…
But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.
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.
What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past…
I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.
I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.
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.
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.