Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord’s doors.
I fucking hate Discord. It’s a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can’t google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can’t grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.
Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently “migrated” their Github discussions to Discord… I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!
Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.
The fuckers deleted the discussions!
This is a very Facebook-like thing to do. They are openly hostile towards everyone, including their users and advertisers. Shit stain of a company that constantly makes the worst decisions.
It’s because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.
Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it’s relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.
It makes sense, but it’s sad nonetheless.
The problem is discoverability. And that’s where I don’t get why anyone in their right mind would use Discord for stuff like that.
Say, you have Github, a forum or even a subreddit for your project.
Somebody asks a question, you answer it.
Somebody else has the same question. Either they are intelligent enough to find it themselves or they ask and you just link your old answer. Done.
On Discord, it’s basically impossible to find an answer that is more than two screens full of posts ago. So you have to keep answering the very same questions all the time.
That’s the exact point. It’s not only that you can’t google shit, even within Discord itself it’s incredibly hard to find the relevant information. BTW, did I already say that I fucking hate Discord?
I’m starting to get the feeling that you don’t approve of Discord.
It’s great for real time discussion. It’s terrible for anything else.
It’s IRC, not a forum.
Fuck Discord! They’re named after an argument because their very existence is offensive.
I love discord… For my group of friends and communicating with other developers (internal project communication, not user communication.) It’s ass for literally everything else.
Live chat is a good choice for friend and making urgent decisions in software. I’ve been watching projects more and more use it for their discussions, issue trackers, and Q&A solutions and it just makes me sad. Live chat isn’t good for anything that will need to be revisited in the future. But still I see more and more communities moving to live chat solutions for their whole community.
And that’s not to get into any of the problems with Discord specifically. I don’t love giving control over community hosting to any individual company. We’ve already seen the results several times. Google groups? Facebook groups? Reddit subreddits? All have demonstrated the problems with hosting your communities on a singular platform. Google groups is straight up gone. Facebook groups require you to sell a small part of your soul to participate. Reddit has been outright abusive towards their user base lately. Discord is vulnerable to all these problems
Which might be seen as a positive by some people (not me).
It encourages social interaction. Every answered question becomes a valid option to ask again just a short time later. And to answer again.
It also takes the burden to search from those who have questions. Just keep the chat flowing.
Maybe it’s a bit like asking people on the street for directions, instead of using your phone. Less efficient and accurate, but you might get a smile in the process.
Or you might get a “Just use your phone, you idiot. I’ve been answering the same question all day.”
This is at least what happens a lot on these discord channels…
Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don’t require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.
All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.
I use it, but it’s basically “Free Ventrilo but not as shit.” I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.
I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible…
…but I also agree with everything you say here
Now that it has threads and features for communities I think it’s pretty decent.
The search tool works pretty well that’s usually what I use, or just check the pinned messages that links you to a GitHub or something with a FAQ
I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.
It wastes everyone’s time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don’t have instant access to answers
Why would any sane developer want to use this system to “document” their project? Written docs have worked well for a million years and there’s no need to change them.
You can even include them in your version control system and allow others to suggest changes
And you can include separate ones right there in the root folder where the script lives. README.md renders out beautifully on GitHub.
What printer is this so I can avoid it?
Poor bastard. I feel you. 💐
Also “I’m so sick of this question” well then put the answer somewhere that’s indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.
There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.
No, I don’t want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.
Yeah I can’t stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub
No. Microsoft, the for-profit, publicly-traded, US-based megacorporation, controls that platform, who can use it, what can be put on it, what the ToS are. You can consider open options like Codeberg, et al. as at least you remove all the for-profit & social media trash, but if you want to be in control of your community, you almost have to self host & a self-hosted project should be viewed as more viable.
Put it somewhere reliable that can easily be copied and indexed
That’s basically what I was getting at.
In the C&C community, all the old fan sites and forums died, and all the knowledge is hidden in discord servers that are terrible to search.
But only one step in the right direction. Releasing it from the clutches of one US corporation but trusting it in another isn’t quite good enough. For instance, say you upload the data as files in a Microsoft GitHub Git repository… well, you can’t use search without being autheniticated on that closed Git forge which will require an account & ToS agreements just to search the reposotiry without downloading it & for similar reasons search indexing won’t be good either.
Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platformRequests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶
I mean, it’s not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.
It’s still a shit ruling. Back in the day they just blocked all .io sites so you couldn’t play agar.io and so on. But all the IT sites we used were also blocked by that. So we had to go and ask the guy for every single one until he grew sick of it and opened it again
That’s like not letting Muslims on a plane because some are terrorists. What a lazy approach.
That’s true, but we had a work server there for voice chat
Wow. I’d be self hosting mumble for that. Or using Teams.
Teams was crap at the time on our laptops.
I would’ve preferred a company wide IRC chat, but whatever.
Not wrong lol, it’s a gamer chat. It tried to rebrand as a regular chat app, but the entire gamer aesthetic says otherwise.
Better than being blocked as tasteless. Encountered that one the other day.
I’m 50 and I have a 23 year old “RTFM” t-shirt.
This context needs to be on the shirt.
Kids these days:
StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice… Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there’s still someone who hasn’t gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.
Always has been. Old forums were full of this.
Yeah, StackExchange solved this problem. Concrete example, moving from ubuntuforums.org to AskUbuntu.com was a life changer. The time to find correct solutions dropped through the floor.
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Sounds like my situation. Running a program, it has an error and crashes. Support page says ask in discord. I do. Crickets. I ask again a day later. I get told off bc I asked once already and the devs know. I ask how I’m supposed to know that since literally no one replied to me. I was further chastised that I should know that they know. I gave up.
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I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.
This year has been dramatic. I’ve seen a big increase of users with quality content doing deletes in protest of Reddit. And the shift to sites like Lemmy that are not as favored by search engines.
Reddit should have gone the other direction, become a non-profit, eliminate advertising, go back to open sourcing the code like they used to, and run on donations. Cut their staff of people that had anything to do with advertising and trying to market the platform.
One wouldn’t be too wrong to point at similarities between cancer and Discord in how it quickly takes over different systems (e.g. issue tracking, discussions, Q&A, documentation) and replaces them with a single non-functional thing (chat).
But, to play the devil’s advocate, Discord seems to have some kind of a forum functionality, however I’ve never encountered those Forum Channels myself.
I’ve only seen it so far in the discord group for the city building game Cities: Skylines. And it’s still a mess.
Agreed. Trying to find answers for questions probably already asked on Discord is impossible.
And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it’s not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.
Looking at you, Our Summer Car -_-
So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it’s just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I’m really interested in and I can’t say it doesn’t work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??deleted by creator
That’s a very interesting observation, I have to admit that even I sometimes am too lazy to read documentation from top to bottom and prefer asking a question to someone that already knows. Though I think it can also be attributed to how good a certain text is structured, quality of documentation should account not only for completeness, but also for laying out the information to be easy to parse and highlight the most important parts, which is maybe why I feel “documentation fatigue” in some cases
For open source, I almost always found IRC was a black hole of information. All kinds of developers discussing things that never made it to search engines. It’s a long tradition.
As a dev, far easier to answer questions about my code than write up documentation, so makes total sense to me
With discord at least you can usually search chat history for your question and find someone else asking it in the past
I wonder… Might be able to write a language model based crawler that goes through a discord server and pulls out all the useful information to generate documentation or at least a FAQ
I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers
And the people asking basic questions probably don’t want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.
And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it’s going. Further people who aren’t deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.
I see a lot of things that have a discord community.
Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?
Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.
I don’t care for the real-time communication aspect of it. In fact i find it unusable.
Am I supposed to just sit there and read random conversation and wait for a point to jump in?
Seems like it takes too much effort.
I mean, that is what IRC chat rooms were back in the day. Or any public chatroom from the 90s.
Realtime communication has its part. We use Slack at work all the time. But searching Slack is a horrible way of replacing missing documentation.
Especially when there’s multiple subjects being discussed on the same channel
easy to use
Doubt
Please provide your phone number to enter the room
Try Nitro!
It’s free*, insanely easy to set up, you don’t have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there’s a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.
Basically the same reasons subreddits supplanted forums.
Lots of users gush over Discord for some reason. My impression is that more technically minded people don’t really like it, but your average user uses it for almost everything and encourages more services they like to use it. Hence why many reddit subs moved to Discord - the mods didn’t necessarily prefer it, but they were sent an overwhelming number of requests from their users.
Thanks for the heads up, i guess I just a bit too old to have been part of the discord group.
In the country where I live, it’s all Facebook messenger. It’s a shame as o think a number of people don’t really care for it, but everyone and every business uses it so we are kind stuck.
Yeah I mean I don’t understand it either. Telegram is bad enough for me, can’t be assed with Discord.
