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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#341

Post by russjr08 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #289
remram wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will still see the "server you're both in" and the game your currently playing, etc. Not good for work servers.

Wait. "Work servers"? People use Discord for work chat?

Yeah, the company I work for actually has a public Discord server for providing support (and hosting our "community" - with some exclusions due to privacy concerns).

Because of that all of our internal staff discussions takes place in Discord, in channels that can only be seen by the "Staff" role (though modded Discord clients can show these channels' names - because channel listing, both voice and text based, seems to have been relegated to client-side so the server just sends ALL channel names, but not the actual contents unless you have the role since that is checked server-side).

While we do have a system that management based staff are invited to (I won't name it because NDA, but it's incredibly easy to guess), but it is only used in case there's a *massive* Discord outage and the staff end up in an extended communications "blackout" because of the outage - however it has _never_ actually been used, at least in the time I've been part of it.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#342

Post by notreallyserio »

saurik wrote: post #316
thfuran wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting. That seems more than a bit ridiculous.

FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: i…

It sounds like serverless is something you'd really be in to!

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#343

Post by russjr08 »

remram wrote: post #156
Accacin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc. I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.

I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with th…

> I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.

As far as I'm aware, Discord usually only hands out bans for this when you use an alt-account to ban evade. Though I can certainly understand not wanting to risk it if you use it for work (I'm affected by this as well).

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#344

Post by circularfoyers »

rK5Q58 wrote: post #239
albio wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.

I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.

> Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.[1]

This is why it's users refer to them as servers.

[1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#345

Post by OOPMan »

simias wrote: post #26
opdahl wrote: post #7

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'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…

I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers.

I'm only really super active on two or three of them though.

You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get.

I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#346

Post by russjr08 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #216
pmoriarty wrote: post #181

My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling logs. There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file. That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in. Discord's…

I don't know a way to export logs, but I am in some Discord channels which have a bot joined to connect them to an IRC channel in a 2-way echo. The IRC side of that could be logging everything from that channel with standard IRC logs. > "The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images and voice chat. " Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python markdown syntax; replying…

> replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.

I actually really despise this feature, because it pings the user you're replying to by default and you have to explicitly turn it off as a user sending the message. "Server" admins cannot change the functionality around.

From a personal standpoint it's not generally a problem, but my company uses Discord as a support platform so we (the staff) end up constantly getting pinged when we do not want to, especially when it's for a message that we may have posted in our general "community area" a few hours ago, and someone has just now decided to reply with "lol" and it generates a ping for it.

Pinging should be opt-in not opt-out, just like when replying to someone before hand, you explicitly needed to make a conscious choice to ping them.

Even worse, when the feature was first released, literally editing your message (even if you explicitly turned off the ping) caused it to ping the other user.

It's actually against our rules to ping support staff in ticket channels (primarily because someone will either ping everyone with the staff role upon two seconds after the ticket opens - or ping a staff member to "bump" their ticket), but its not like we can realistically enforce that for reply-generated pings due to the fact that most of the time its accidental (we do ask them to turn off the ping after the first time - and a good chunk of the time people "forget" to still do so, whether intentionally or unintentionally). /endrant

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#347

Post by russjr08 »

genewitch wrote: post #113
kitkat_new wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix chats can be indexed by google and other search engines if set to public.

the ones on my homeserver aren't, and searching for the domain of the homeserver shows that users are in rooms on other homeservers/networks.

Under "Room Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Who can ready history?" do you have "Anyone" set? I believe this controls whether it can be indexed or not, as if you have it on any of the "Members only" settings, their bot needs to be in the room for it to see history.

Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to administrating a Matrix server so I could be wrong, but the logic seems to make sense with my suggestion.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#348

Post by [deleted] »

sylware wrote: post #178

elephant in the room: discord is another set of closed network protocols with a lot of centralized/multicast/relay servers. And it is free as in free beer: the discord ppl were granted tons of money. Where those tons of money do come from? From the usual blackrock and vanguard funds or their proxies? This is probably public information, but I have not looked into that. If I want to interact with ppl on discord server…

[deleted]

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#349

Post by charcircuit »

password4321 wrote: post #174

I use Discord in the browser. There is no way I'm aware of to tell which 'server' the notification sound came from, making the sound a completely useless annoyance.

It should tell you in the notification that will also show up along with the channel name, person, and message.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#350

Post by ayushnix »

urthor wrote: post #331
ayushnix wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform. It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against app…

Machine specs? I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users. Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging. Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you. > A Discord community that I moderate > The influx of large…

> Machine specs?

A ThinkPad with Ryzen 3500U, 16G RAM and NVMe SSD.

> I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.

Sorry, Discord is nowhere near the concept of being lightweight. I use both web based and desktop IRC clients and none of them make my laptop sound like it's about to be launched into outer space. Sure, they may not have all the features that Discord offers but both of them let me talk to thousands of users, which is what I expect.

Again, third party clients would definitely help here but Discord is hostile towards them. Spotify is a good example in this case. Their website is just as sluggish but at least I can use several desktop and terminal clients and not worry about buying a better laptop or more RAM.

> This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.

I'm more suprised and disappointed with Discord than this behaviour by people on the Internet. Their rules say that they don't allow spam and raiding servers and even when we provide detailed screenshots of people talking about raiding us and leaving spam on our servers, they don't bother the least bit about taking any sort of action. The only response that we got from them, just once, after sending them multiple reports was "ban them". No shit, I didn't know I could do that, thanks Discord.

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