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It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.

redundantly 3y ago
This isn't unique to discord, it isn't any different than IRC which has been around for decades.
chrisrogers 3y ago
Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.
- DanAtC 3y ago
  IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    In theory. In practice, like Slack, Discord is unsearchable. As someone rightly said on another thread: Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
    - Euphorbium 3y ago
      Until you train llm on it. Which WILL happen.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        LLMs perform lossy compression on knowledge, so they're not a good replacement for indexing and search. If anything, you want to have the latter, and expose it to LLM as a tool it can use, regardless of whether the LLM was trained/fine-tuned on that same content or not.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    more like a knowledge blackhole.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It's all the worst aspects of IRC in shiny web package.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  but IRC was never controlled by a unique corporation/business. Was community driven
- dfxm12 3y ago
  It's different in that IRC is designed & understood to be short lived real time chat. Who cares if I can't find that type of content via Google? Discord is being used as a permanent info repository, like a replacement for discussion boards, wikis, etc. This is the type of info I want to search for.
- toastercat 3y ago
  I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.
  - beached_whale 3y ago
    being in the irc room and logging it is enough and only requires access to the room.
  - edrxty 3y ago
    Discord knows better, this is by design. Their investors would run screaming if they knew what was in those chat logs. The lack of searchability is their biggest defense against being hauled in front of Congress because the public just isn't aware of how much of the platform is extremism.
    - toastercat 3y ago
      That's too bad, because a lot of open-source projects have moved to Discord, and it's an absolute pain that every time I want to search, I have to 1. login and 2. join yet another Discord server.
      - onedr0p 3y ago
        I find it easy to mute and put the ones I don't frequent often in a folder and only go there when I need to. I only actively visit and contribute to 2 Discord servers but that number might grow if the reddit communities stay dark (and I don't blame them for doing so). I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use. It hurts my brain that CNCF and Kubernetes use this as a platform. At least in Discord I can search thru years of content and discover a discussion instead of asking the same questions over and over.
        toastercat 3y ago
Nakroma 3y ago
This, at least subreddits are relatively stable, public and searchable. There is so much knowledge hidden inside huge chat logs of semi-public Discord servers which might disappear at any minute and is hard to retrieve, unless that server maintains a wiki or something similiar.
- nicce 3y ago
  Maybe for not so long. On mobile you need to close 3 banners and sometimes even log-in to see the content.
- Solvency 3y ago
  So then someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page. Let's say I run a Discord community around some product/service, like a rendering engine like Octane. Two users have a meaningful conversation explaining how to increase light samples. Let's say that information is not documented online. There should be a nice way to summarize + post that onto a website that can be crawled. You could even automate this with GPT. It could constantly scan Discord for back-and-forth context-specific conversations and push summaries from them to a website. Then users could upvote or downvote them into oblivion asynchronously.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page. it's not impossible. And ultimately many discord groups will try to have channels dedicated to keeping a list of guides (usually some google sheets maintained stuff) that are slightly more publicly visible. But it still comes down to the will of the people to maintain that and make is accessible. Main barrier with your approach is that I'm not sure how scrapable discord is. It (to my knowledge) never had an API that did more than let you automate posting and maybe scan recent comments to reply to.
tayo42 3y ago
i keep seeing this sentiment about things moving to discord here, but my experience is i dont see that happening anywhere. i suspect there is some kind of experience bubble you are in. i really never hear about people using discord except for games.
- lambic 3y ago
  It seems to be a favourite thing in the javascript community sadly.
- alfnor 3y ago
  Here are some of the broader non-gaming Discord communities I lurk in: - The Lost Media Wiki - Our Startups - Flashbots - Freqtrade - Defi Dojo - AI Nordics - Homework Help - Science and Technology - Refold Central - Seasteading - Ocean Builders - ASC (Atlantic Sea Colony) - Vital Audio - GPU Audio - MakingHipHop Every single content creator also seems to have a Discord server nowadays.
toastal 3y ago
> which is in my opinion even worse It’s not just your opinion. Discord is a black hole for content. There won’t crawlers for the content in these spaces. I’d like to see more activity in the ActivityPub & modern, self-hosted forum/blog spaces (where Atom feeds can aggregate), but history likes to repeat itself as we move from one closed, proprietary communications service to the next because there’s ‘no cost’ to join.
- TimPC 3y ago
  It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is bad if you want to create content for universal consumption but no one I know is truly using discord for that.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.
    - toastal 3y ago
      Except it’s often used in a way that goes beyond chitchat and bouncing ideas. I was pretty active in a programming community a few years ago, and then they decided to move official chat exclusively Discord which I disagree with on principle & was not going to create an account. Some (not all) decisions I would have previously expected to see on the forum got discussed and decided within Discord’s proprietary walls which cut some users out that previously were a part of the discussion.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It often happens unintentionally, and it poisons communities. Back when I was actively participating, and for a time even running our local Hackerspace, I insisted on a hard rule: our IRC channel is non-binding, anything of any relevance must be also discussed on the mailing group, and only decisions made on the mailing group are binding. This rule was keeping the community from going nova - shedding outer layers of occasional participants, and collapsing into a core group of friends that's in constant contact. Even with that rule in place, when I graduated and had to focus more on my work, I realized I'm slowly becoming an outsider to my own community, simply because I'm not able to keep up with the torrent of random conversations on IRC. Back then, there were no LLMs available to summarize the 1000+ messages people sent between 09:00 and 17:00. And even if they were, it wouldn't have helped, because the problem was, people who wrote those messages were bonding together, becoming closer-knit every day, while I was becoming more distant just by missing out on this. It's what eventually made me stop participating - and from what I talked to other people in and around our Hackerspace at the time, I'm not the only one. Which is why I say, chat groups are, by very nature, poisonous to communities - including off-line ones. They need careful managing.
throw7 3y ago
What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- CrimsonCape 3y ago
  Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that? Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity. The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural workflow to create a chat community around themselves that tie-in to their other social media. I like Discord because it solved one of my longstanding complaints with forums: the perpetual forum-dweller who is an otherwise shut-in person who monopolizes the discussion and likely has other flaws that precludes them from being a voice of authority on a subject anywhere but in their little forum space. Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent. And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day. I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a place that's structurally makes a community be run by close-knit group of people with too much free time.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers" oh I certainly have. We call them moderators often, but there are definitely power users who you will see comment on almost every post in a particular group. And since we're on the topic of Reddit here: well, you will definitely see the abyss stare back if you look into how many subs the largest moderators run.
JansjoFromIkea 3y ago
When I was researching some DVD menu stuff a couple of years ago I was able to read through long dead forums from 2002-2005 via google and get almost all of the information I needed from there. When I was trying to resolve an issue with my hacked PS3's BluRay drive a few months ago I was able to deduce the solution from a fairly terribly maintained wiki from 2012. When I was trying to reverse engineer a board game app from 2018 a few months ago I was barely able to find any information because the official Discord banned such discussions and the unofficial Discord didn't seem to exist anymore.
andrewljohnson 3y ago
That reddit used to be an IRC and before that a usenet. The wheel turns.
EMCymatics 3y ago
Fuck Discord
kirso 3y ago
Pretty much this. You can't search discord but its a byproduct of a self-serving goal of the platform. Perhaps we need more projects like Reddit but without the VC money.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Still open to any alternatives. But as we saw from the thread earlier in the week, none of the answers seemed to have achieved that network effect yet. No real point in an indexable community if the community has no knowledge.
  - kirso 3y ago
    True, perhaps its still yet to reoccur in the future. I also didn't find the "decentralized" alternatives appealing.
thefz 3y ago
> It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. To be honest, for the good. Discord search in "discord forums" sucks so bad it's almost unusable. Let's keep using Discord for instant messaging and voice.
bazmattaz 3y ago
I absolutely despise Discord. I understand that it’s essentially a chat room for communities where content is ephemeral, but so many communities use it slightly differently. For example lots of communities use it to provide help to other users but then complain when users ask the same questions over and over. (See Python discord) What I like about Reddit or any forum is the ability to search for a topic or question you need help with and then see people discussing it and resolving it. Forums are a great Archive for discussions like this. Where discord plays a good role is in fleeting chat. Water cooler type chat. Discord is fun if you’re heavily involved in a community, you can spend many hours a day in your favourite discord but for someone like me who just likes to pop in a now and again, it’s borderline useless. I suppose what I’m getting to is that, for me, discord is for low effort throwaway chat, Reddit or HN for that matter is better for discussions that should be read again by interested minds.

redundantly 3y ago

This isn't unique to discord, it isn't any different than IRC which has been around for decades.

chrisrogers 3y ago

Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.

DanAtC 3y ago
IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  In theory. In practice, like Slack, Discord is unsearchable. As someone rightly said on another thread: Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
  - Euphorbium 3y ago
    Until you train llm on it. Which WILL happen.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      LLMs perform lossy compression on knowledge, so they're not a good replacement for indexing and search. If anything, you want to have the latter, and expose it to LLM as a tool it can use, regardless of whether the LLM was trained/fine-tuned on that same content or not.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  more like a knowledge blackhole.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
It's all the worst aspects of IRC in shiny web package.
Zardoz84 3y ago
but IRC was never controlled by a unique corporation/business. Was community driven
dfxm12 3y ago
It's different in that IRC is designed & understood to be short lived real time chat. Who cares if I can't find that type of content via Google? Discord is being used as a permanent info repository, like a replacement for discussion boards, wikis, etc. This is the type of info I want to search for.
toastercat 3y ago
I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.
- beached_whale 3y ago
  being in the irc room and logging it is enough and only requires access to the room.
- edrxty 3y ago
  Discord knows better, this is by design. Their investors would run screaming if they knew what was in those chat logs. The lack of searchability is their biggest defense against being hauled in front of Congress because the public just isn't aware of how much of the platform is extremism.
  - toastercat 3y ago
    That's too bad, because a lot of open-source projects have moved to Discord, and it's an absolute pain that every time I want to search, I have to 1. login and 2. join yet another Discord server.
    - onedr0p 3y ago
      I find it easy to mute and put the ones I don't frequent often in a folder and only go there when I need to. I only actively visit and contribute to 2 Discord servers but that number might grow if the reddit communities stay dark (and I don't blame them for doing so). I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use. It hurts my brain that CNCF and Kubernetes use this as a platform. At least in Discord I can search thru years of content and discover a discussion instead of asking the same questions over and over.
      - toastercat 3y ago

Nakroma 3y ago

This, at least subreddits are relatively stable, public and searchable. There is so much knowledge hidden inside huge chat logs of semi-public Discord servers which might disappear at any minute and is hard to retrieve, unless that server maintains a wiki or something similiar.

nicce 3y ago
Maybe for not so long. On mobile you need to close 3 banners and sometimes even log-in to see the content.
Solvency 3y ago
So then someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page. Let's say I run a Discord community around some product/service, like a rendering engine like Octane. Two users have a meaningful conversation explaining how to increase light samples. Let's say that information is not documented online. There should be a nice way to summarize + post that onto a website that can be crawled. You could even automate this with GPT. It could constantly scan Discord for back-and-forth context-specific conversations and push summaries from them to a website. Then users could upvote or downvote them into oblivion asynchronously.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page. it's not impossible. And ultimately many discord groups will try to have channels dedicated to keeping a list of guides (usually some google sheets maintained stuff) that are slightly more publicly visible. But it still comes down to the will of the people to maintain that and make is accessible. Main barrier with your approach is that I'm not sure how scrapable discord is. It (to my knowledge) never had an API that did more than let you automate posting and maybe scan recent comments to reply to.

tayo42 3y ago

i keep seeing this sentiment about things moving to discord here, but my experience is i dont see that happening anywhere. i suspect there is some kind of experience bubble you are in. i really never hear about people using discord except for games.

lambic 3y ago
It seems to be a favourite thing in the javascript community sadly.
alfnor 3y ago
Here are some of the broader non-gaming Discord communities I lurk in: - The Lost Media Wiki - Our Startups - Flashbots - Freqtrade - Defi Dojo - AI Nordics - Homework Help - Science and Technology - Refold Central - Seasteading - Ocean Builders - ASC (Atlantic Sea Colony) - Vital Audio - GPU Audio - MakingHipHop Every single content creator also seems to have a Discord server nowadays.

toastal 3y ago

> which is in my opinion even worse It’s not just your opinion. Discord is a black hole for content. There won’t crawlers for the content in these spaces. I’d like to see more activity in the ActivityPub & modern, self-hosted forum/blog spaces (where Atom feeds can aggregate), but history likes to repeat itself as we move from one closed, proprietary communications service to the next because there’s ‘no cost’ to join.

TimPC 3y ago
It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is bad if you want to create content for universal consumption but no one I know is truly using discord for that.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.
  - toastal 3y ago
    Except it’s often used in a way that goes beyond chitchat and bouncing ideas. I was pretty active in a programming community a few years ago, and then they decided to move official chat exclusively Discord which I disagree with on principle & was not going to create an account. Some (not all) decisions I would have previously expected to see on the forum got discussed and decided within Discord’s proprietary walls which cut some users out that previously were a part of the discussion.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      It often happens unintentionally, and it poisons communities. Back when I was actively participating, and for a time even running our local Hackerspace, I insisted on a hard rule: our IRC channel is non-binding, anything of any relevance must be also discussed on the mailing group, and only decisions made on the mailing group are binding. This rule was keeping the community from going nova - shedding outer layers of occasional participants, and collapsing into a core group of friends that's in constant contact. Even with that rule in place, when I graduated and had to focus more on my work, I realized I'm slowly becoming an outsider to my own community, simply because I'm not able to keep up with the torrent of random conversations on IRC. Back then, there were no LLMs available to summarize the 1000+ messages people sent between 09:00 and 17:00. And even if they were, it wouldn't have helped, because the problem was, people who wrote those messages were bonding together, becoming closer-knit every day, while I was becoming more distant just by missing out on this. It's what eventually made me stop participating - and from what I talked to other people in and around our Hackerspace at the time, I'm not the only one. Which is why I say, chat groups are, by very nature, poisonous to communities - including off-line ones. They need careful managing.

throw7 3y ago

What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CrimsonCape 3y ago
Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that? Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity. The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural workflow to create a chat community around themselves that tie-in to their other social media. I like Discord because it solved one of my longstanding complaints with forums: the perpetual forum-dweller who is an otherwise shut-in person who monopolizes the discussion and likely has other flaws that precludes them from being a voice of authority on a subject anywhere but in their little forum space. Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent. And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day. I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a place that's structurally makes a community be run by close-knit group of people with too much free time.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers" oh I certainly have. We call them moderators often, but there are definitely power users who you will see comment on almost every post in a particular group. And since we're on the topic of Reddit here: well, you will definitely see the abyss stare back if you look into how many subs the largest moderators run.

JansjoFromIkea 3y ago

When I was researching some DVD menu stuff a couple of years ago I was able to read through long dead forums from 2002-2005 via google and get almost all of the information I needed from there. When I was trying to resolve an issue with my hacked PS3's BluRay drive a few months ago I was able to deduce the solution from a fairly terribly maintained wiki from 2012. When I was trying to reverse engineer a board game app from 2018 a few months ago I was barely able to find any information because the official Discord banned such discussions and the unofficial Discord didn't seem to exist anymore.

andrewljohnson 3y ago

That reddit used to be an IRC and before that a usenet. The wheel turns.

EMCymatics 3y ago

Fuck Discord

kirso 3y ago

Pretty much this. You can't search discord but its a byproduct of a self-serving goal of the platform. Perhaps we need more projects like Reddit but without the VC money.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Still open to any alternatives. But as we saw from the thread earlier in the week, none of the answers seemed to have achieved that network effect yet. No real point in an indexable community if the community has no knowledge.
- kirso 3y ago
  True, perhaps its still yet to reoccur in the future. I also didn't find the "decentralized" alternatives appealing.

thefz 3y ago

> It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. To be honest, for the good. Discord search in "discord forums" sucks so bad it's almost unusable. Let's keep using Discord for instant messaging and voice.

bazmattaz 3y ago

I absolutely despise Discord. I understand that it’s essentially a chat room for communities where content is ephemeral, but so many communities use it slightly differently. For example lots of communities use it to provide help to other users but then complain when users ask the same questions over and over. (See Python discord) What I like about Reddit or any forum is the ability to search for a topic or question you need help with and then see people discussing it and resolving it. Forums are a great Archive for discussions like this. Where discord plays a good role is in fleeting chat. Water cooler type chat. Discord is fun if you’re heavily involved in a community, you can spend many hours a day in your favourite discord but for someone like me who just likes to pop in a now and again, it’s borderline useless. I suppose what I’m getting to is that, for me, discord is for low effort throwaway chat, Reddit or HN for that matter is better for discussions that should be read again by interested minds.