Technology

I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?

Yeah. I've come to believe the problem isn't Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers "!faq" and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.

A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.

Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.

Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.

Essentially, there's a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn't ask questions the 'right way' or even ask the 'right questions', you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can't answer a question, then it's the fault of the asker and not their own.

Why go through the effort if that's how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it's more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.

Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it's also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything 'just' their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)

The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can't index it from the outside, and Discord's search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.

And that won't stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn't you see it? It's right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!

"Just search!" I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.

Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they're not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn't the "blink and you'll miss it" live chat client that it once was.

I thought that Slack was what that use case is for. It's an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. I didn't realize folks were using discord for productivity use cases.