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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#271

Post by slx26 »

rchaud wrote: post #148

I agree 100% with the article. To community organizers: for the love of all that is holy, set up a proper message board with threaded discussions. Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit? Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-purpose channel, conversations die off as the…

>> Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?

It helps create a sense of community very quickly, and it helps keep it alive.

Honestly, trying to judge Discord for its ability to structure information is simply missing its point. I dislike many things about Discord, but projecting my needs or preferences onto it and saying it's bad based on that alone is quite shortsighted.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#273

Post by night862 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #257
zozbot234 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).

I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.

I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.

They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay.

As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service.

Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all?

Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#274

Post by night862 »

bozhark wrote: post #266
simias wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. 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…

LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it. We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.

This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are.

"Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#275

Post by night862 »

zer0-c00l wrote: post #229
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow. I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what t…

you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this judiciously

Consider the recent studies that show that people's attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under their bed, even if its turned off.

Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#276

Post by redwall_hp »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #231
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD…

Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data. TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.

This is the incessant cycle I've been seeing a lot of for the past ten years:

1. Depend on proprietary service that silos data

2. Service changes price or shuts down or does something unpopular

3. People migrate to a new product baiting people with a free offering

4. Go to 1

We never should have left self-hosted bulletin boards and IRC. Hosting is cheaper and better than ever.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#277

Post by redwall_hp »

0x_rs wrote: post #83

I hate the discordification of communities. A lot of them did not survive the modern era and moved en masse there, but the experience is miserable, and they're usually moderated in a manner that doesn't spur discussion ("move to this section for X topic", et cetera, that's just one I see often). Finding content? You have to use some weird bot or the awful search function worthy of a high school assignment website pro…

That's actually my number one issue with Discord: the stratification of discussion. With IRC, your "community" is a singular channel where everyone congregates and talks. It can be chaotic, and maybe you only check in and catch up so often, but it's all in one place.

Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super specific topics. So you're not only spreading discussion over tons of channels where things will be evenly quiet and unnoticed, but you now have to go and laboriously check each of them to find new stuff. Or mute half of them you don't care about so you're not constantly being spammed with unread indicators. This also creates the "internet cop" problem, where whoever created the community (or someone they added as a moderator) feels the need to constantly yell at people for having organic discussions instead of searching for the specific channel approved for topic #365.

Basically, the whole thing seems to discourage discussion more than foster it, because people simply don't work that way. That sort of structure works for forums, but not for something happening in real time.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#278

Post by kitsunesoba »

night862 wrote: post #273
kitsunesoba wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.

I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in. They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay. As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phen…

In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#279

Post by micromacrofoot »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #244
micromacrofoot wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data. TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.

I know how to run pi, but that doesn't mean it makes sense for everyone else or even most of the people. Say you have some open source project and there is a need to have some form of communication. You can either jump through the hoops to host your own forum that you need to host and monitor. Now you are spending time you could be using to work on your project on sysadmin stuff. So either you pay for it, which feels…

a project other people use? they can google answers or use forum search… I’m not at their beck and call to answer questions in chat

different people will like different things, but chat is transient

an hour a month on server maintenance isn’t going to make or break anyone’s project, but if you don’t like tinkering with things there’s nothing wrong with that

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#280

Post by lux »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #241
lux wrote: post #234

We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like the same reason teams use Slack for the pe…

> It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating. If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be selling a product. If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an…

You're totally right and of course we help away. Reducing the steps to be able to ask a question is also a better user experience, hence ditching the forum. Give users what they want, including timely responses.

But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the friction.

I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually improving documentation as common questions emerge and a "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response, which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the development of new tutorials, etc.

Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved replies and voted :)

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600483...

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