Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

It's popular because it's familiar, but also people because are so impatient they want real-time and fast responses to their questions. But then you get a flooded channel of questions being drowned out by memes.

So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.

You don't have to log in or even have a GitHub account to search through issues. Hell, in many cases you don't even need to be searching on GitHub to find the relevant issue since they're indexed by search engines. Neither of these are an option with Discord.

For years, it still has this issue: Discord notifies with sound, but when I open the app, I don't know where the notification is from.

What a product management...

I suppose this can be at least partially explained by typical modern attitude "What is the most recent is most important. What have been long ago can be ignored". Let me give you examples:

- Chats in modern IM applications like Telegram or WhatsApp are sorted by the time of the most recent message in chats. Yeah, there are various workarounds like folders and pinning, but the default approach is "sort by time"

- The default for modern monitoring, Prometheus, does not bother with storing aggregated information for the long time. And mostly people are OK with this. Compare with old school RRD which retained aggregated data for a year by default.

- The common UI for photo gallery on mobile devices is the timeline. Other options like grouping by GPS location or folders are not easily accessible and feel like an extra not very polished feature.

And in a way this is a reasonable strategy to cope with too much data, too many things demanding our attention.

Now let's get back to issues vs discord. In the point of view that I have just described there is no need for search and discovery. If the issue happens frequently it is frequently mentioned and grabs attention and therefore get fixed eventually. Something that happens infrequently does not matter anyway. Eternal storage feels like a burden. Every issue that have been posted just keeps begging for attention and does not sink in the depth of time!

But even if I can understand this point of view I am an old-school guy and can not accept it.

I find blocks are almost necessary for me to be able to stand to use Mastodon.

There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.

One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.

So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.

You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.