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Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

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Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#291

Post by _aavaa_ »

bartread wrote: post #219
david-gpu wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely answering questions in a public discoverable website reaches more customers than a discord server. The utility provided is not the same.

I can see a trade off here: effectively we're talking about different strategies for reducing the amount of noise. With GitHub you reduce the noise because people who know how to use Google will find the relevant issue and either contribute to it or find an answer to their question. OTOH everyone else submits issues with no regard to what's already in the issues list. With Discord you do it by putting an auth wall in…

Is it possible to get the creation of new github issues behind some sort of signup? In the same way that randos can't merge PRs.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#292

Post by matheusmoreira »

trvz wrote: post #202
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #167

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On d…

> If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. Have you ever seen the GitHub issues of a halfway popular repo? Once a project is big enough to attract all the low quality users, the same question/problem will be asked/reported over and over again. The maintainers will have to deal with a mess either way. They might as well choose…

Maybe identifying duplicate issues could be a good use case for AI. Stackoverflow does this when you try to ask a question.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#293

Post by kynetic »

another_story wrote: post #134
BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.

You're allowed bots, so why can't we archive it and make it more easily searchable? Those programming channels with QA style threaded answers would be great to log and make searchable. Is it against Discord's ToS or something?

Its not, but its an extra step that most people won't do.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#294

Post by matheusmoreira »

echelon wrote: post #165
csnover wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.

This is the difference between banning in the aughts versus now. Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made. In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we dis…

Nah. Power tripping moderators were always the norm in forums. It's HN that's kind of unusual because of dang.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#295

Post by yomlica8 »

nerdponx wrote: post #50
muzani wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a bias too. I really dislike Discord. I'm on too many discords. It's just one of those network effect things that I wish wasn't everywhere. I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this. I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they…

> I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more. That's what made Reddit so popular.

Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#296

Post by naniwaduni »

yomlica8 wrote: post #295
nerdponx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more. That's what made Reddit so popular.

Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.

Reddit definitely demands an email to register. It's unclear to me whether they verify it (I didn't bother to check), but it's the first thing they ask for.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#297

Post by nerdponx »

naniwaduni wrote: post #296
yomlica8 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.

Reddit definitely demands an email to register. It's unclear to me whether they verify it (I didn't bother to check), but it's the first thing they ask for.

You used to be able to just leave that field empty, not sure if that's true anymore.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#298

Post by naniwaduni »

herbst wrote: post #200
langsoul-com wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to do that self hosting for a Q&A forum for a side project. Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition

Discord is slow, weird to setup and a walled garden with zero control about anything. Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of. At least in my POV

Sounds like your POV doesn't contain many people!

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#299

Post by inetknght »

treyd wrote: post #284
pc86 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer. Nobody said Discord solved that problem, only that GitHub hasn't either.

Probably would be a problem that using LLMs to suggest related issues would help with.

If only GitHub (Microsoft) had a LLM product they could use when someone is writing an issue or pull request...

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#300

Post by starttoaster »

bathtub365 wrote: post #276
lagniappe wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people rarely search previous issues.

This is obviously false since there are several people in this discussion who have mentioned they search previous issues

Maybe the people of HN are just a small minority of users that contribute GitHub Issues on popular public repositories and not very well representative of the whole? Have you maintained a popular repository on GitHub? I can vouch for tons of spam/duplicate Issues.
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