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Discord is a black hole for information

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Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#41

Post by friedturkey »

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 mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common.

The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#42

Post by mabbo »

Discord is a wonderful program for real-time communication and asynchronous conversations. But are either of those use-cases how you want to provide a help system?

Imagine if Stack Overflow was ephemeral. If once you asked a question, the question and answer slowly faded into nothingness for everyone who wasn't actively on the system when it was asked? And anyone who wanted help had to ask again, while the experts rolled their eyes going "Ugh, we answered that like a dozen times already!".

It's a different use-case. It requires a different tool.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#43

Post by cinntaile »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #31
Aerroon wrote: post #17

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.

If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before. These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day. Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only…

This always happens, people don't bother reading old info. Discord simply lowers the barrier to ask questions. It's probably a net positive overall.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#44

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

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…

The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day.

If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.

I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#46

Post by Fnoord »

Ekaros wrote: post #32
tovej wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is almost always logged, and if you need to log things yourself, you can use a bouncer or set up a server.

And if your bouncer or server fails? Where do you get the history then?

You put in a search engine network_name channel_name and hope someone else logged. If its a technical channel, someone almost always did and also did share it.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#48

Post by doublerabbit »

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…

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online.

If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good.

Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling.

And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#49

Post by cyborgx7 »

Discord being a black hole for information is a feature, not a bug. It's for in the moment communication with some asynchronous applicability. But if you use it as your primary source for community-created information, you're using it wrong.

Re: Discord is a black hole for information

#50

Post by binwiederhier »

CyberShadow wrote: post #23
binwiederhier wrote: post #13

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…

Have you tried GitHub Discussions? They even have a Q&A mode for your own mini StackOverflow.

I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion.

Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.

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