[HN Gopher] Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
___________________________________________________________________
Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
Author : ClawsOnPaws
Score : 833 points
Date : 2021-09-16 09:45 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kotaku.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kotaku.com)
| lvspiff wrote:
| My company has started moving people to Teams and Yammer and its
| the most annoying thing ever. Nothing is available anymore as all
| the links are dead because everything is moved. Finding
| information now is a chore because a search for the right
| question returns multiple results rather than a page that once
| contained all the FAQs individually. Getting feedback means
| wading through the noise of multiple posts of "thanks" for some
| reason. Its all very annoying and I yearn for the days of forum
| posts and wikis.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Maybe it's just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming),
| but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it's way better
| to use a system I am already signed up for. I don't want to sign
| up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also
| love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more
| concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton.
| It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then
| leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-
| off forum that I'll never visit again, and then I get bombed with
| emails after I'm done. And when I leave, it's worth noting my
| comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via
| search if they join after I'm gone [1].
|
| I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for
| this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a
| reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other
| side. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| [1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server
| specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > I love when I see forums on Discord
|
| I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think
| there's really two different products.
|
| I don't mind discord for chat, but it's _awful_ as a question
| / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the
| reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy
| people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a
| question, and get an answer.
|
| I'm not calling you lazy BTW.
|
| My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to
| find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with
| simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll
| is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at
| least for me).
|
| That said, I think discord could get better with the new
| threading feature. As people create high quality threads the
| moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even
| create categories and let users create and manage their own
| threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol.
|
| Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the
| biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated
| with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for
| Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase
| than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out
| there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and
| the same questions get asked repeatedly.
| busterarm wrote:
| Discord has recently just started banning political
| undesirables.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| They did that last June in a couple of mass ban waves. Who
| are they going after now?
| busterarm wrote:
| A gaming YouTuber named Spike Viper had his community
| banned because he's working on building a competing service
| to Discord.
|
| TheQuartering was banned yesterday after appearing on a
| stream with Alex Jones.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Discord|Slack, are the best all-around tools if you had to make
| a decision around one tool, and one tool only for a group of
| people. Discord being stronger for games, and Slack having
| insane integration capabilities and enterprise-enterprise
| communications provided the business partners are also on
| Slack, via their own corporation workplace or GRID plan.
|
| However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior
| individually to:
|
| A Wiki (Take your pick)
|
| Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client)
|
| Forums (Take your pick)
|
| Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak)
|
| Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others)
|
| Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick)
|
| Tying this together with a common directory or identity service
| makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities,
| but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see
| many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is
| serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a
| completely open "just join our discord" type community.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I've been building an intuition that we can't just pick. We
| need all of them.
|
| Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki
|
| Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies
|
| Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape?
|
| Which can be summarized as, in how long the information
| lasts:
|
| Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year
|
| Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the
| activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people
| who just want the information. As the right side has higher
| standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On
| things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down
| to a lower level.
|
| What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the
| information that is happening in chats to make its way to
| forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis
| where all experimentation has been refined into just truths.
| All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different
| services all trying to hold their section hostage.
| mch82 wrote:
| I think you're right.
|
| As information moves from idea to discussion to
| documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat
| systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for
| ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept
| stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited
| to be a concise, focused document.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Oh, thank you for giving me (idea, discussion,
| documentation), I love it.
|
| One of the key insights when you view the model this way
| is that people are always trying to avoid "filter
| bubbles", but it's actually totally okay to have filter
| bubbles in the idea stage, which should open up in the
| discussion stage, and should be totally gone by the
| documentation stage.
|
| So one chat community -> one wiki community doesn't make
| sense. You want sub-communities that can come together to
| groom the information as it matures.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I do agree that is the right way to do it.
|
| Unfortunately, for a gaming organization it really brings
| to the fore the need for knowledge management, and
| discipline around what makes its way into the Forum, to a
| Sticky on the Forum, and from there, to the Wiki as
| Doctrine/Policy. Kind of comedy how much this needs to
| resemble RL organizations
| carlgreene wrote:
| Forem[0] is trying to solve this with a browser extension.
| Looking promising!
|
| [0] https://www.forem.com/
| jdoss wrote:
| We (I work for Forem) have an opensource selfhost installer
| [0] so you can have total control over your data and
| community too.
|
| [0] https://github.com/forem/selfhost
| ephbit wrote:
| I get your point. Signing up for yet another forum with
| confirmation email, password and so on ... totally annoying.
|
| Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
|
| If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might
| enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on
| for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
| zeepzeep wrote:
| > I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums
| like the old days.
|
| "Sign in with XYZ" exists on every serious website.
|
| > I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos
| more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a
| ton.
|
| It helped because it's a forum feature, not a chat feature.
|
| > my comments/questions are still on the server for those to
| find via search if they join after I'm gone
|
| Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again
| Zababa wrote:
| > Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again
|
| Which is part of the point anyway, it's "people new to
| tech/young people" culture to never search for things by
| yourself and always ask. That's why so many people use
| discord.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| I find quick answers through web searching literally all the
| time. The walled off nature of discord and similar semi-
| private messaging platforms is a huge downside in
| disseminating information and I don't see how anyone could
| think otherwise.
| xemdetia wrote:
| Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this.
| Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of
| useful discord servers is impossible for information you
| cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you
| don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe
| discussion/subforum area you _actually_ care about and sign
| up and join in then.
| Brave-Steak wrote:
| Discord is an information/knowledge blackhole.
| Information goes in and never comes out. The amount of
| times I've searched for info and found it on some obscure
| forum I've never heard of before is staggering. Like,
| where the fuck would I be without xda-developers and its
| massive font of knowledge spanning back a decade, which
| is organized by device and topic? Like, Discord simply
| _cannot_ replicate that, yet every community is
| defaulting to it.
|
| There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come
| into contact with that have coalesced around Discord
| instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to
| find any information that I need.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Yeah, what we have here is a failure of the post-GenX
| generations to understand how things work, and to not
| consider the ramifications of entrusting years worth of
| discourse to one platform.
|
| Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to
| implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took
| its information to the grave with it.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I'm in the same demographic as you.
|
| The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is
| because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue
| has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite
| hard to follow the intertwined discussions.
|
| You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with
| that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was
| around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related
| projects.
|
| But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions"
| (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have
| them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up
| things.
|
| It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show
| up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives
| to see whether someone already asked it before.
| Inhibit wrote:
| That reminds me of Reddit's endlessly repeated questions.
| Possibly there's a large audience that refuses to look for an
| answer prior to asking a question? Almost an expectation of
| free "service".
|
| That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal
| to research it's free developer tech support.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Well, that would explain why "users" prefer it, but not why
| "developers" prefer it.
|
| I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd
| expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and
| over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite
| that behavior.
| Fogest wrote:
| I see a lot of communities on Discord will use bots that
| recognize keywords from commonly repeated questions. The
| bot then spits out the answer typically associated with
| that question. It seems to be somewhat helpful that way.
|
| I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual
| intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a
| repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned
| answer to that commonly asked question.
|
| Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned
| message from a bot explaining how a user can get that
| info.
|
| In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a
| webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can
| link out to support articles.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| To be fair to Reddit reposters, it's on-site search is
| terrible. OK, it's still probably laziness 93% of the time.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has
| already been discussed
|
| That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find
| discussions I _participated_ in. The scenario is that you
| discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not
| quite with the improvements you 're interested in being
| planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has
| changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling
| page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again.
|
| The threading support in discord will be interesting to see.
| I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add
| to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type
| situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same
| questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.
| rijoja wrote:
| no
| bigwavedave wrote:
| I say this as someone who uses discord heavily for a couple of
| hobbies: I truly _detest_ discord search. I 'd be more
| accepting of this trend if search wasn't hobbled; please, for
| the love of zeus, honor the difference between "normal" and
| "normals" in channels about 3d modeling.
| holler wrote:
| > It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then
| leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-
| off forum that I'll never visit again.
|
| Wondering if https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each
| post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a
| login to view on mobile/desktop web.
| darcys22 wrote:
| I actually agree, we use discord for our team and at the start
| i wasn't happy about it. But after a while got used to it and
| now think its great. A lot of people in this thread saying its
| hard to find information in discord and disagreeing but ive
| never had any issues finding stuff with the search function.
|
| I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things
| like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you
| need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how
| a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f
| their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest
| and easiest way
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all
| that information be lost? Can people find that information in
| the Discord by googling now?
| zeku wrote:
| I'm sure even if they fold, the info will be sold to some
| group for ML at the very least.
| jlokier wrote:
| The company I work for is in the process of migrating
| internal chat away from Discord to something else. It's a
| fully remote company, so chat is really important.
|
| I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's
| not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an
| open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the
| company's values, and there is a constant search for better,
| more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google
| services as well.)
|
| I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer
| than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be
| active on it in the old days).
|
| The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with
| publicly archivable channels, would be great.
|
| But the way high quality information is constantly being
| posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching
| within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking
| for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with
| Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the
| company's online materials will never find the content in
| Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by
| far, the highest quality and quantity of information is.
|
| As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we
| expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't
| have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the
| years of high value content people have put into Discord will
| effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when
| they aren't even using it any more.
|
| What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord
| content to be available in other platforms, generally
| searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for
| public channels.
|
| If our Discord content was more openly accessible and
| shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might
| not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose
| their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time
| content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate
| so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.
| vel0city wrote:
| An interesting web-based IRC client I've been looking at
| was The Lounge. You might like it.
|
| https://thelounge.chat/
|
| Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over
| the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make
| money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your
| messages are in a database you control, you can translate
| them to whatever you want.
| cube00 wrote:
| They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out
| today let alone in 20 years
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/community/posts/3600351...
| cosmotron wrote:
| I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not
| in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks
| are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter
| their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord
| themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to
| manage their own support site rather than using Discord
| itself.
|
| Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the
| Support Discord"?
| Fogest wrote:
| Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool
| for support operations of large companies did they? They
| have mostly always focused on a more community focused
| side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features
| is that you can add a University you attend and verify
| your account via your uni email. You then get access to a
| hub that displays all the different Discord servers
| people have marked as being associated with the school.
|
| So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers
| and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a
| forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live"
| kind of setting. I see people in these club discords
| doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all
| the time.
|
| It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a
| lot of people have repurposed it for their own things
| like using it for their companies chats and support. It's
| no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make
| this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really
| focused much on that side of things.
|
| Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of
| tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and
| make it fit other purposes.
|
| Reading another comment about someone whose company used
| this for their internal communication is just crazy.
| While yes it is a good platform they should have known it
| was a poor choice with having their historical chat
| history locked into the platform.
| Jensson wrote:
| If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel
| wrong if the only way to contact support would be via
| discord.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is true of any PHPbb-style forum as well. If the site
| goes offline, there will be no statically generated archive
| available.
| giantrobot wrote:
| At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and
| the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content
| may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their
| data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to
| search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can
| find some nugget of information on a web forum without
| having any prior relationship to that forum.
| Fogest wrote:
| I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually
| like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't
| logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this
| is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it
| more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that
| discussion happened in person you can't really go back on
| it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of
| Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a
| search engine.
|
| I think any important and useful information should be
| stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this
| done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that
| will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and
| that will be linked to when someone asks that common
| question.
|
| Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community
| side of things and I think it does this part pretty well.
| I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game
| servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch
| streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game
| typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord
| now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at
| your University. But in all of these cases I am
| mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search
| is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's
| preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random
| chat messages I send be archived on random sites.
|
| I think the problem is that people are trying to use
| Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So
| it's funny when these people then complain about it.
| pndy wrote:
| Gotta be you, gotta be the personal preferences because I'm not
| that fond of Discord. I'm within same age and similar
| interests.
|
| The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is
| that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a
| cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated
| information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of
| longevity of information on Discord if server beside the
| generic social operation is being used as a way of support for
| the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases
| temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you
| cannot access it again.
|
| The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information
| on these is within the reach of every person by a standard
| search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by
| using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on
| particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there
| are of course downsides like limited access to content
| (register to access links, images) or search engines not being
| able to index all stuff.
|
| I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary
| tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums.
|
| Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an
| content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some
| communities use subs as one of official communication channels
| or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial
| alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official
| strictly moderated forums case).
| ntauthority wrote:
| Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The
| premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere
| would've worked just as well.
| loxias wrote:
| I think you hit the nail on the head. The reasons Discord works
| well for you are unfortunately ... why it won't work for me.
| (I'm a late 30s male, but, I don't play video games. Nothing
| against games or gamers, I'm actually jealous! Just never found
| anything fun since Zelda and Tetris)
|
| I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something
| math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and
| agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I
| am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a
| friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and
| who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find
| information!! I have "account fatigue".
|
| I already have a web browser!
|
| Why should I create an account on some closed source platform
| (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them),
| and learn _yet another_ style of markup and communication and
| lingo...
|
| It's much better for this information to be on a webpage,
| possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a
| subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the
| tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit
| accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I
| leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still
| on the page, _and indexed by a search engine_ for those to find
| after I 'm gone.
|
| Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled
| garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms
| might suck the useful people and information away from areas of
| the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard
| to get.
|
| I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's
| good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side",
| but remember it slices both ways. :)
|
| "Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the
| cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the
| bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence
| in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform
| itself.
|
| A _possibly_ better solution would be something that doesn 't
| put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| Most of the Discords that I have joined aren't game related
| at all.
| anticensor wrote:
| > Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a
| walled garden
|
| Discord chats are persistent.
| ephbit wrote:
| I'll repeat what I wrote a few comments up ..
|
| Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
|
| If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might
| enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing
| on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new
| topic.
| unixhero wrote:
| Discourse or NodeBB is the real future
| [deleted]
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Not gonna happen unless someone makes forum software with better
| UX than Discord's, that is also as easy or easier to maintain /
| administer
|
| So, not gonna happen. Discord has won forums for the foreseeable
| and is well on its way to FAANG tier dominance, impregnability, &
| scale
| croon wrote:
| While I agree with the article that they are not the same, people
| using one thing may not be interested in the other, or at least
| not be aware of it.
|
| I've used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before
| that, and forums alongside it.
|
| Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for
| future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues
| more ephemeral (or fun).
|
| A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would
| go to IRC.
|
| These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any
| discussion on proprietary software/data integrity/ownership etc).
|
| As a product, I really love Discord. I don't want everything to
| end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of
| which is discoverability and persistence.
|
| Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for
| both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat,
| in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better
| served elsewhere.
| ConanRus wrote:
| Forums/Newsgroups is the way
| gamerDude wrote:
| As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a
| forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There
| doesn't seem to be any modern forums that I can just host.
|
| If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A
| web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also
| had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both
| search engines and archives to look back.
|
| But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated
| experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to
| see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a
| conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like
| the early 2000s.
|
| Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never
| really get developed?
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Maybe forums were already perfect. Sure, design could always be
| updated. However, what's wrong with vBulletin 4 UX? Nothing. It
| works in all conditions.
|
| Not some self-updating battery-draining endless scrolling
| website. Yes, I'm looking at you, Discourse. Not to mention the
| tremendous amount of edge cases where it fails because its
| complexity is simply out of control. For example, it drops
| posts on any kind of connection interruption (tab sleep,
| network down, device sleep, ...) unless you refresh.
| e12e wrote:
| > Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just
| never really get developed?
|
| Not sure. There's the propiatary muut.com (which also maintains
| riot.js), and there's zulip which might be the best Foss
| "modern" forum?
|
| Then there is the hn clones (anarki/news, lobste.rs) and the
| more old school dfeed that runs d-lang forums.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Slack came along and made a lot of money and since then the
| slack-wannabee-guys are making slack clones in an attempt to
| attract investor interest. Meanwhile google demonetizes forums
| , and facebook steals and locks in their users. There are few
| for Don Quixotes who will be interested in making another forum
| platform
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'd like to see Discord do message boards too. Kind of a
| natural outgrowth.
| yboris wrote:
| A _Node_ based forum - _NodeBB_. I 've not tried but this has
| been on my radar for years
|
| https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB
| benrbray wrote:
| > A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a
| new response which really changes the dynamic of a
| conversation.
|
| This is not high on my list of complaints, and I'd even venture
| to say it is an _advantage_. Asynchronous forums like HN /
| StackOverflow attract much higher quality (as in, self-
| contained, thoughtful, informative, and searchable) answers
| than the Discord servers I'm a part of.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I would agree. On a high-traffic discourse-based forum I
| peruse, both the automatically updating thread pages and the
| "soandso is typing..." indicators make for posts that are
| short, IM-like, and generally more combative.
|
| The endless scroll is a problem too. Because nobody wants to
| scroll through n-hundred posts, you also end up with the same
| handful of posts being re-made ad infinitum. Old paged style
| forums suffered from this to some extent but pages being
| bite-sized lended to more people reading the whole thread.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| Discourse is an option for a modern forum like experience.
| lucasverra wrote:
| Growing bubble.io platform (tens of thousands forum members)
| community [0] use this since multiple years. And bubble
| community is one of the key aspects.
|
| [0]: https://forum.bubble.io
| archon810 wrote:
| Wow it's like a straight up shameless Discourse clone.
| truetraveller wrote:
| It is Discourse, hosted by a company called "Bubble".
| Just do a "view source".
| tadfisher wrote:
| The mobile experience is much better though.
| yboris wrote:
| For a PHP based forum, glance at _Flarum_ - I have not tried
| but it 's been on my radar for years.
|
| https://github.com/flarum/flarum
| eslaught wrote:
| What about Discourse? They have an open source, self-hostable
| version:
|
| https://github.com/discourse/discourse
| bogwog wrote:
| A couple of communities I'm a part of have switched over to
| Discourse over the past couple of years, and I hate it.
|
| It's just a mediocre forum, but with "modern web"
| designs/quirks. It does the whole single-page app thing, tons
| of wasted space/terrible information density, every single
| thread is displayed in one giant infinite-scrolling list
| (I've yet to see an instance with proper "subforums", just
| tags/categories), and it barely works without javascript
| (although at least it works).
|
| My favorite modern forum software I've encountered is
| XenForo, although it's neither free nor open source.
| math-dev wrote:
| XenForo is great!
| [deleted]
| mnsc wrote:
| Clicked on the screenshot/showcase of the Atom discussion
| forum and one certificate error and a 301 later I'm at
| Github's discussions. Symptomatic?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| self-hosted is a blessing and a curse. Many people like and
| benefit from it, but also many will not use since they would
| need a host and setting things up. With Discord you just
| click a couple buttons
| kevinwang wrote:
| Ktt2.com (successor to kanyetothe, a huge hip-hop forum) has
| live messages. However from what I've seen it has the drawback
| of encouraging lower-content "chat-like" messages instead of
| the less spammy forum posts of yore.
| pndy wrote:
| No idea what software is running Manjaro Linux, Vivaldi or
| Skyscrapper City forums but these at least from front-end side
| seem to be pretty _modern_ but, from a perspective of someone
| who was _raised_ on MyBB and similar solutions, these are pain
| in the use and awful at displaying the information.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I am on the same spot of running a future Discord community but
| planning of hosting a Discourse instance for archive and
| history of conversations. Discourse has extra batteries
| included and an active community of people developing for
| Discourse.
|
| One key advantage is both can link together:
| https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...
| holler wrote:
| > A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat,
| but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for
| both search engines and archives to look back.
|
| I am building just that at https://sqwok.im & would be
| interested to show it to you.
|
| On Sqwok, each post contains a built-in chat room, is open to
| the public, shareable by url, supports markdown etc, can be
| ephemeral or long lived, and are posted to the user's account
| similar to Twitter.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Aether is doing something pretty cool. Combining chat with
| threads and email lists. All three together.
|
| https://aether.app/
| divan wrote:
| So much this.
|
| I've recently tried Flarum and Discourse, and the biggest issue
| is that PHP and Ruby on Rails are unforgivably slow and
| complex. Granted, Flarum/Discourse are way better than
| PhpBB/NodeBB/etcBB, but after few months I can't update to a
| new version due to a lot of PHP/Ruby complexity/dependencies
| related stuff.
|
| Another thing is that forums eventually become a mess of
| outdated/broken plugins that extend functionality and add
| features. It seems extending functionality is an afterthought
| in most forum engines. As a result I try to avoid to use any
| plugins at all just to keep the site running and not to spend
| sleepless nights upgrading/fixing code.
| Fogest wrote:
| The other issue not addressed here is the security aspect
| too. Via haveibeenpwned so many of the sites I have had data
| breached on are from forums. It seems so many different forum
| softwares that exist also have so many security
| vulnerabilities. And then forum owners often won't upgrade
| their website as often as they should to ensure it is more
| secure as they will have a lot of plugins that likely will
| break.
| KajMagnus wrote:
| > > after few months I can't update to a new version
|
| > forum owners often won't upgrade their website ...
| plugins that likely will break
|
| Maybe then it'd make sense if I mentioned Talkyard
| https://github.com/debiki/talkyard -- it's forum software
| with automatic upgrades. I'm developing it. There's not yet
| any plugin system, instead currently "everything" is built-
| in, and there are (unfortunately) fewer features.
| Fogest wrote:
| What do you plan to do about the plugin problem? A lot of
| forums come to rely on these plugins and often times the
| owners aren't programmers. It means that if they are
| stuck choosing between upgrading the core software and
| keeping a useful plugin they often will choose the
| latter.
|
| Will an automatic upgrade break plugins then? Because I
| can't see that being optimal.
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| Discord: because normies can't handle IRC.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| If only Zulip were search-engine-indexable it would be the
| perfect middleground. Unfortunately it's still a ways away from
| being implemented I think.
| tabbott wrote:
| Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's
| public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive).
| Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and
| Lean Prover, use it.
|
| We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set
| of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without
| creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks;
| we're actively integrating the implementation via
| https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532.
|
| We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native
| implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete.
| samsolomon wrote:
| If you're a manager of a forum and are considering doing this, I
| would encourage you to look at discourse.org. It's mobile
| friendly, looks great and easy to install. They have a one-click
| DO setup, which requires only a little technical knowhow and is
| extremely affordable.
|
| I've managed a community--Product Notes--for several years on the
| platform and it has been fantastic.
| rg111 wrote:
| I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to
| Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of
| features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective.
| This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and
| Discord.
|
| [0]: https://discourse.org/
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I wanted to move to Discourse because it was modern and neat,
| but self-hosting it was just a non-starter. It's got so many
| dependencies, obscure installation and runtime things, and
| importing data from an existing forum - even if you have one -
| took forever. And the result didn't run very fast.
|
| After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum
| data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works.
| And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor,
| vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to
| OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
|
| I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem
| to get much updates / developer activity.
| mceachen wrote:
| I've found that self-hosting the docker version is really
| straightforward. If you're on digital ocean, they even have a
| prefab droplet.
|
| It does run better on droplets that are one up from the
| smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a
| couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory
| constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or
| a single terminal command on the droplet.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Weren't they the ones whining a few years ago about how people
| insisting on using Android phones (as opposed to wonderfully
| performant iPhones) were threatening their plans for a glorious
| JS-only full client-side rendering future?
| arkh wrote:
| The main problem with Discourse is its reliance on javascript.
| For mostly textual content.
| est31 wrote:
| You can turn js off. Discourse is one of the few websites
| that have a better experience with javascript turned off than
| with javascript turned on.
| arkh wrote:
| I guess noscript is a little too aggressive as it gives me
| this on Discourse community forum:
| https://imgur.com/a/6SnyBZC
| est31 wrote:
| Works great for me when I disable js support in
| about:config. Seems some missing CSS to me?
| dqv wrote:
| Whoa you're right. It solves most of the gripes I have with
| Discourse. I wish it had pagination, but this is a huge
| improvement.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Flarum seems better than Discourse.
| barrenko wrote:
| We've reached a new low in modern hell if this is where we're
| going. Old bbs php or what was it's name was way more
| manageable.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm
| all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX
| that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If
| they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse
| made, there could have been a chance.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Forums do indeed have terrible UX... but it says a lot that
| they still compare favourably to what we have today, in
| many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions
| everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes)
| _slightly_ easier to use (once you know how), but with no
| instructions.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| People don't read instructions. If you need instructions
| on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous
| as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| [b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No
| amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like _that_
| out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i] _italic_
| [/i]... had to be told how to do _that_. Does that make
| Hacker News particularly bad?)
|
| "Intuitive" means "behaves how the user expects" - with
| computer things, that usually means "behaves how the user
| is used to". If we focus on making things intuitive so
| they don't need instructions, and then don't provide
| instructions, we're just discriminating against people
| who haven't already got computer experience (preventing
| them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how
| things work).
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _we 're just discriminating against people who haven't
| already got computer experience_
|
| That's why your example of needing tags to bold text is
| an excellent example of shitty UX. A WYSIWYG editor where
| you click the Bold option to enable it, and click it
| again to disable it would be much better.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| But that means hidden state. If I quote somebody, I can
| see how they produced their markup in BBcode, but in
| WYSIWYG I can't see which icon button to press.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Quite funny, because when bbs became the norm, the old
| generation was quite vocal on how bad they are because of
| their flow-style discussions. At that time, Usenet and
| mailing lists were the norm, which had thread-like style,
| like this forum or reddit.
| [deleted]
| baud147258 wrote:
| well, the gaming forums of RockPaperShotguns (video game news
| website), built on Discourse, are set to close next month, so
| it's less a technological choice and more how much the
| maintainer/owner of the forum wants to keep it online
| DanAtC wrote:
| Discourse is horrible: It lazy-loads messages which is a
| nightmare to scroll and search through on mobile.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Excuse me? $100/month and it's a nice alternative? Guess I was
| expecting something open source so was a bit flabbergasted.
| input_sh wrote:
| It is open sourced, that pricing is for them to manage an
| install for you. From the about page:
|
| > We offer official Discourse hosting, or install Discourse
| yourself in the cloud in under 30 minutes.
|
| > Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and
| forever.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Yeah I wonder whether they'd go SSPL if AWS started
| offering hosted Discourse.
| dncornholio wrote:
| I see, makes sense now. Did not find any mention of it
| while scanning the site though. Seemed like it was a paid
| service only.
| hanklazard wrote:
| I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a
| pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I'd
| recommend it if you need this kind of solution.
| innocenat wrote:
| Discourse is open source:
| https://github.com/discourse/discourse
|
| The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can
| install it on your server without problem.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I want to like Discourse, but as a user there's something that
| bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB
| or SMF. I'm legitimately not sure what it is, I just find
| Discourse forums harder to read.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Discourse just feel like someone _just_ heard about Web 2.0
| and decided to re-implement forum software.
|
| I dunno, it's a sort of uncanny valley where some of the
| ideas are good but the whole thing just grates on you.
|
| I've used Flarum as an alternative and been much happier with
| it.
| joeberon wrote:
| I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't
| enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would
| be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that
| happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself
| just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a
| topic that is actually important to me.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| - too much whitespace around text.
|
| - no clear delineators between post and replies, the
| slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me,
| there should be a colour/shading difference to make it
| clearer.
|
| - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much,
| especially on mobile with precious limited screen space
| (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
|
| - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space,
| perhaps hide by default?
| zbrozek wrote:
| Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the
| experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought
| and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so
| much better.
| true_religion wrote:
| I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so
| off putting.
|
| I have the same feeling using it... it's just feels like a
| chore.
|
| Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in
| phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many
| checkboxes that it's a wonder it has any competition.
| dqv wrote:
| It's because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to
| get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use
| pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the
| thread. Infinite scrolling doesn't make sense for
| something where a sense of the whole is important. I get
| that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but
| the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they're
| not linear discussion forums!
|
| They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar
| in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way
| to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The
| pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don't
| really have anything succinct I can say about the way the
| pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it's
| disorienting. I really should write about this
| joeberon wrote:
| Yes I definitely think the weird scrolling experience in
| threads is a huge issue for me. I am often in the thread
| and just have no intuitive feeling where I am. I return
| to a previous comment and then I don't remember where I
| was because instinctively on those kinds of linear
| threads I expect to be able to use the scrollbar to gauge
| it. I just haven't been able to adjust in any way to this
| kind of infinite scrolling + weird timeline pseudo-
| scrollbar way of working. It is weird because every
| single weird modern UI has eventually clicked with me in
| some way, but in this case it just hasn't and I've
| basically totally given up on it
| wavyknife wrote:
| Hello! I work for Discourse and while I realize you don't
| really know why you struggle with it, if you do come up
| with any feedback I'd be happy to read it here or on our
| Meta community.
|
| I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many
| people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed
| throughout these comments!
| dbetteridge wrote:
| - too much whitespace around text.
|
| - no clear delineators between post and replies, the
| slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me,
| there should be a colour/shading difference to make it
| clearer.
|
| - peoples profile photos are emphasised too much,
| especially on mobile with precious limited screen space
| (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
|
| - timeline slider seems like another waste of screen
| space, perhaps hide by default?
| Bjartr wrote:
| Here's my feedback based on my experience using it, and
| using try.discourse.org as a specific case to examine.
|
| - You use 73 vertical pixels after every. single. post.
| for just the reaction and permalink buttons. My browser's
| inner height is 947px when maximized, that means if I'm
| seeing the bottom of 4 posts, a full 30% of screen real
| estate for reading posts is dedicated to showing those
| buttons 4 times.
|
| - Similarly, having the username and date sit above
| rather than beside each post, eats even more vertical
| space. I'm on the page because I want to read. the.
| thread., let me!
|
| - If I scroll up too fast from the middle of a thread, I
| end up pulling down the top navbar, which, once the next
| set of posts loads, is immediately hidden again leading
| to the whole page jumping after each upward scroll.
|
| - The first place it puts me is "Latest". I can't speak
| to the distribution of use-cases, but that's never been a
| helpful place to put me when I first land in a discourse.
| If I'm new, I want the lay of the land. And this is more
| true, the more busy the site is. So dropping me in
| "Categories" would be much more useful.
|
| - Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling
| through posts or time? Kind of both?
|
| - A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you
| made the browser think the page was actually the length
| of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser
| scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the
| page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
|
| - Once you scroll the topic list, you lose the header,
| and no longer have a reference for which number is
| "Replies" and which is "Views". You've got tooltips at
| least, but it still lends to the overall sense of
| confusion and not knowing where one is.
|
| - I want to see the name of the original poster of a
| topic in the list view. No being able to hover to find
| out is not sufficient because it's not glanceable.
|
| - In the list view, there is no visual distinction
| between the original poster, frequent posters, and the
| most recent poster. Original poster as first is fine, but
| it took me about 30 seconds bouncing around various icons
| and waiting for the hover to finally figure out that the
| last one is _always_ the most recent poster. I thought
| that maybe for really popular threads it was only showing
| frequent posters.
|
| - It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a
| post in the list that has both a category and tags that
| they are separate things for separate ideas. At least
| bold the category
|
| - You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in
| the topic list despite it being the same search. I find
| it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the
| behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
|
| - try.discourse.org in particular has a category
| "Uncategorized", but there are topics that have no
| category, not even "Uncategorized". Actually I just
| noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list
| and having a color associated with it, topics without a
| category don't get marked as such neither on the list
| page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was
| treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for
| "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
|
| - I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once
| using the tags dropdown navigation
|
| I sincerely hope this helps to improve my own experience
| when using discourse one day, but from what I've seen in
| investigating this, I suspect the level of minimalism in
| place is done on purpose, despite the negative impact on
| discoverability and usability, in which case basically
| everything I said will be dismissed since it's not what
| you're aiming for, or at least you don't think it is.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| I don't know why people are confused about why discourse
| intuitively feels bad. I can expound - and perhaps you
| have a "simple mode" that few people enable...
|
| 1) It takes over browser control. cntl+f and scrolling
| have two levels. The first level that discourse wants
| control of is its own way of searching (which I always
| override by pushing cntl+f again). Same with the scroll
| bar - there is the browsers bar & the thread's bar. Why?
| That's bad UX.
|
| 2) Not content-oriented enough. On a forum content is
| king, not the banners, menus, popups, metadata, etc.
|
| 3) I don't care about tags... Why are you putting social
| media memes into forum UX? It is the forum search
| engine's job to look through the usernames, content, and
| titles of each post and use that stuff to find it... It
| isn't the user's job to provide some very limited amount
| of search terms or whatever for their
| thread/post/subforum.
|
| 4) Dynamically loading content as you scroll down is
| lame. How can I jump to the bottom? How do I know how far
| I need to scroll or how many pages there are?
|
| 5) Is "categories" supposed to be "subforums" or
| "forums"? I suppose I could get used to these little
| things. I'm just taking the official discourse community
| forum in my above examples so far.
| jlokier wrote:
| For me, it's that well organised forums, mailing lists,
| etc have some kind of metaphorically-geographical
| _structure_. On mailing lists there 's also a sense of
| time progression as things like sub-projects and issues
| come up from time to time, having made progress.
|
| Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different
| kinds of knowledge _are_ based on their placement. For
| example in different books, on various bookshelves, on
| different pieces of paper, on different areas of
| whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that
| it is well organised (I 'm messy and this is a problem
| for me), but when it's well organised physically that
| helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind
| benefits from knowing where things are, and that they
| aren't being moved around much by someone else, without
| my knowledge.
|
| Same with data on my computers, organised into
| directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though
| it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is
| some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-
| geographical.
|
| I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience
| _feels_ more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I
| can 't really explain why, as I haven't tried to
| understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as
| you asked for feedback.
|
| Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search
| result or some link. There, I may scroll through the
| answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end
| which shows related discussions. I read some of them
| because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like
| walking an _unstructured knowledge graph_ with no sense
| of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that
| fits my mind 's preference for how it catalogues
| knowlege.
|
| I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't
| bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours
| into that some days, more than some people would say I
| should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way.
| It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the
| same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the
| knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge,
| and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a
| reflection of decades or centuries of organising
| knowledge.
|
| When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to
| topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more
| amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an
| sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly
| exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not
| obvious if that's because there's no more relevant
| knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected
| other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't
| relevant for me.
|
| In this regard, it is a very similar experience to
| Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a
| search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then
| realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random,
| largely unstructured chat about barely related things,
| and then it feels low value.
|
| For me I think these concrete changes might help:
|
| - Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall
| how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like
| being directed through the graph with blinkers on,
| knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics
| to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an
| "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button),
| rank them well, and don't require a login for that to
| work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've
| used the site 100 times already and want to get more
| involved.
|
| - Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into
| a list of topics that may have related information
| (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem
| reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot
| topics.
|
| - Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as
| reading a single topic, then being directed to look at
| related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does
| have some topic structure, but the way I always land on
| discussions via search and take it from there, somehow
| causes me to not notice any page organisation the site
| maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but,
| for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to
| follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really
| _committed_ to browsing more of the site. So perhaps
| change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting
| graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum
| structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good
| forum structure.
| nske wrote:
| I kind of know why I don't like it:
|
| It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app
| than a good-old website.
|
| It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite
| scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy
| internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search
| function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and
| fanciness.
|
| Its setup is also more convoluted than I like.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| Exactly
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Bloat is the problem with discourse, also I heard hard to
| install on server side (RoR)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Discourse can also be accessed as a mailing list (for those
| lamenting its use of JS, etc.). Not sure if it requires any
| different setup, but that's how I interact with the Nix
| Discourse, for example.
| leke wrote:
| Discord has its uses, but forums should be moving to Reddit.
| danaris wrote:
| I run a small, free browser-based persistent strategy RPG. We've
| had a forum for about a decade, and for a time, it was extremely
| popular.
|
| A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining
| significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the
| game, and people started joining immediately.
|
| It's been nearly a year now since there was more than a single
| forum post per month.
|
| If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they
| are--or where they _want_ to be. I 'm not at all thrilled with
| the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is
| now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper
| monetization, but I _am_ thrilled with how much people love
| interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don 't
| have a realistic alternative to offer them.
| ch33zer wrote:
| Is discord indexed by Google? I don't think it is. If this is the
| direction we're going anyways then at least having the ability to
| find discord messages from a search would be beneficial. I know
| that in recent years my primary interaction with forums has been
| as a result of searching for things either videogame or Linux
| related. Losing that info into an unindexed service is indeed a
| loss
| rchaud wrote:
| No, search engines can't crawl pages behind a login wall.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Is there an open source old.reddit-alike forum available
| anywhere? I find Reddit much easier to read and digest than
| Discourse.
| [deleted]
| zksmk wrote:
| https://tildes.net (source: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes,
| github mirror: https://github.com/spectria/tildes, Python back-
| end, made by dude who worked on old reddit)
|
| https://lobste.rs (source:
| https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters, Ruby back-end)
|
| https://lemmy.ml (source: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy ,
| Rust back-end, federated, in-development but usable)
|
| https://postmill.xyz (source:
| https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill, PHP back-end)
|
| There's also https://github.com/notabugio/notabug a P2P fork of
| old reddit UI (that used to be open source itself, old version:
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit), and there's
| https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost, I just found it searching
| for this stuff, those are the ones I know of.
| marapuru wrote:
| It's a real shame. The most thoughtful discussions usually take
| place on forums. Chat has this feel to it where it's better to
| reply fast and short instead of taking a bit longer but providing
| an elaborate reply.
|
| I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like
| vBulleting or phpBB have had it's fair share of security issues.
| Let alone the costs for a small community forum.
|
| However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as
| opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the
| different topics that are discussed in the same channel.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Chat has this feel to it where it 's better to reply fast
| and short_
|
| It's not just a feel. Discord's maximum message length limit is
| minuscule compared to many forums.
| marapuru wrote:
| I didn't even realize there was a character limit. A quick
| search shows me that it is 2000 characters. Which is not
| _that_ bad, since most forum posts will likely be something
| shorter. But the entire UX surrounding it is all about quick
| responses (hit enter to send etc).
| slothtrop wrote:
| Tangentially, what would it take for forums to get a resurgence?
| Pseudo-centralization / connection through forum-software?
| Clearly a lot of users prefer the long-form format.
|
| My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of
| new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is
| a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion
| with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to
| there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people's attention
| rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a
| ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied
| expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other
| difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator,
| it's a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and
| content every instant.
| lazyjones wrote:
| I would love to have pre-spam Usenet back, or threaded forums
| like they used to make them before everyone used the BB-style
| flat forums. But I can understand companies not wanting to bother
| with this kind of software, moderation, data retention and
| privacy laws etc. ...
| FractalHQ wrote:
| I'm going to be downvoted for this, but I love discord for
| communities. GitHub issues for tracking long-standing bugs or
| feature requests, and discord for more granular, spontaneous
| support queries is great. The new Threads feature is nice, the
| amount of control and automation with channels and bots opens up
| endless possibilities. Not to mention the search is powerful and
| blazing fast. Forums feel sluggish and dated in comparison. I
| spend an hour or more providing support in the Svelte discord,
| and I love it.
| rickstanley wrote:
| I almost never use discord, not that I want to avoid it, but
| because my daily use of software doesn't require it.
|
| Gaming, I usually use Steam's built-in voice chat and/or rooms,
| and search for community forums within the game's page without
| hassle.
|
| For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don't have
| the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the
| group calls and screen share.
|
| When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions
| or create an issue.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and
| Twitter. I don't use either and being disconnected from
| information about my government because of that is really shitty.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and
| Twitter.
|
| I'm fine with that, since they are popular platforms, the
| problem is when Twitter or Facebook are used EXCLUSIVELY for
| communication, this is insane. Governments should have RSS
| channels or forums maintained by governments themselves as a
| redundancy.
|
| Another thing is all these businesses that have delegated their
| entire customer service to... Twitter and Facebook. My ISP did
| this recently, you can't even call them anymore or email them,
| they don't have a public phone number or phone line, you must
| go through Twitter for support, this is INSANE. I immediately
| cancelled my plan with them as soon as I found out.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I am really not fine if you need to have a Facebook or
| Twitter account to follow. Add Facebook blocks any RSS
| attempt to grab post from their pages. Facebook is GeoCities
| with restrictions.
| amattn wrote:
| Show HN: https://kbclip.com
|
| I don't think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or
| slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and
| most frequent conversations to the web.
|
| The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.
| impostervt wrote:
| My friends and I started a website devoted to a multiplayer game
| back in college at the turn of the century. It had a forum that
| was heavily used. Somehow, 20+ years later, it's still going. 14
| million posts and 196 people online now. And the game series has
| been dead for over a decade. I moved on a long, long time ago,
| but many people remain. There's a community there that just keeps
| going, despite the original purpose being long gone. I don't
| think that would happen with Discord.
| thomashop wrote:
| I don't know if one can easily say what would or wouldn't have
| happened if you had chosen a different platform. There are a
| lot of communities based on irc that have existed forever.
| aweiland wrote:
| This site also had a companion IRC server.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| They d have been acquired by google and shut down 3 years
| later. The ones that have escaped that fate are self-hosted
| forums and , oddly, blogspot
| aweiland wrote:
| I know this forum! It was one of the largest installations of
| vBulletin for a time.
| impostervt wrote:
| ...and 20 years later I run into one of the guys who helped
| run it. ha!
| jrm4 wrote:
| Honestly, it feels like the best use of time would be to
| _aggressively_ port as much Discord functionality as possible to,
| e.g. Matrix.
|
| You can count me in as an old head who loves (because it works SO
| WELL) and hates (because it's so locked down) Discord.
| carlgreene wrote:
| My biggest problem with the transition to Discord and FB groups
| is the lack of search engine indexing.
|
| There is SO much valuable information locked in the communities
| that is near impossible to search for even WITHIN their platform.
| sneak wrote:
| Discord is not end to end encrypted, so Discord can see, mine,
| and sell off your private DM chat contents.
|
| Don't type anything into discord you wouldn't print out and mail
| to Microsoft Legal. (And don't install the client, it is
| spyware.)
| slightwinder wrote:
| As useful as discord is for its primary purpose, it's probably
| also one of the worst development for communities in the last
| decades. Discord is a chat, not a forum, nor a wiki. It's just
| not meant to make knowledge accessible. And even proper
| discussion are barely possible after a certain group size.
|
| But on the other side, it's a very well protected walled garden,
| and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the
| world there quite well. Not really sure whether it's good to have
| so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public
| attention.
| steffen84 wrote:
| I am a member in a tabletop gaming club, and no one wants to be
| responsible if some new European internet law is broken. So our
| forum was closed an we have our private community on discord.
| dijit wrote:
| Your tabletop gaming club is not the target of GDPR unless
| you're _very_ sloppy with user data or you're selling user
| data.
|
| All forums, even 20 year old ones, allow you to easily comply
| with GDPR data requests and deletions without additional
| tooling from the admin panels: because good moderation tools
| used to be a thing that didn't need legal enforcement.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Guilded is a Discord alternative with extra channel types as
| forums.
| jedberg wrote:
| I bought a product that had moved their support to Discord. Their
| Discord requires that you verify your phone number. I tried to do
| so but Discord told me my number, which I've had for 22 years, is
| not valid. I contacted support and their solution was:
|
| "Just find a friend who hasn't used discord and use their
| number".
|
| Why do people trust this company with anything important?
| fouric wrote:
| I would be very interested to know what company this is so that
| I can never buy anything from them.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Discord is where communities go to die.
| xlii wrote:
| I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.
|
| Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems
| like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
|
| Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the
| Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but
| with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all
| the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to
| search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing
| _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format
| that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of
| opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't
| present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low
| impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening
| hours.
|
| And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have
| more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly
| winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are
| perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It
| might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on
| StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only
| e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some
| organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could
| send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless
| users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones
| /s
|
| Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts, both
| on technical and policy fronts, have provided many blockages to
| their successful use. Not to mention that a lot of hosting
| providers are totally clueless as to the existence of
| discussion mailing lists.
|
| Source: I help run some discussion mailing lists.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The problem with mailing lists is that anti-spam efforts,
| both on technical and policy fronts, have provided many
| blockages to their successful use._
|
| The real problem with mailing lists are businesses who have a
| vested interest in permitting spam to be delivered to users'
| inboxes.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Are you saying that voluntarily joined e-lists that reflect
| posts from each member to all members, as a means of
| discussion, are spam?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I don't so much mind (yet) slack replacing IRC. I use slack at
| work already. So more slack channels is an easy extension of
| that communication space. Collaborating with Kotlin or Elixir
| folks in their excellent slack channels feels like a modernized
| variant of the IRC communications I used to have with Python
| and Smalltalk.
|
| Like you, I much prefer mailing lists over any sort of web
| forum (discord included). I hate Swift's forums. I like the
| Python mailing list. One idea the reasons is that in the
| mailing list, I get to pick my tool (my mail client), and you
| can pick yours. We're leveraging an already strong
| communication ecosystem of tools.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think there are a bunch of issues with using mailing lists
| this way, but they are fixable:
|
| 1. Moderation tools on mailing lists are extremely
| rudimentary. A healthy community _needs_ moderation of some
| sort.
|
| 2. A lot of tooling is necessary to make a good mailing list
| experience. I would expect an inclusive community mailing
| list to have a web interface for posting and searching, and a
| separate interface for searching.
|
| 3. There's no documentation on setting up email clients to
| use mailing lists and it isn't a trivial/intuitive process.
| The email spam problem has made the registration process non-
| intuitive and often drops emails to/from the list.
|
| 4. There's very little documentation on setting up your email
| client to use a list properly. What are best practices for
| organizing your inbox around a mailing list? How do you reply
| to a list? How do you quote a previous response?
|
| 5. There's no easy basic flow for folks to get started with.
| The power of more "modern" approaches is that the default web
| interface is highly opinionated. This makes it easy to join
| and easy to participate. When there's no basic flow to use,
| folks never get to the basics before they get to a point of
| wanting to customize their flow.
|
| I think a blessed mailing list flow using a webmail client, a
| web newsgroup/BBS interface (which doesn't exist now sadly),
| or a blessed email client workflow would go a long way to
| making mailing lists accessible. Unfortunately because
| mailing lists are only popular among tech people these days,
| I doubt you'll see much work on this.
| baxuz wrote:
| No please. Trying to read up on FFmpeg issues or join a
| conversation is a nightmare.
| twic wrote:
| Mailing lists? Bring back usenet!
|
| In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i
| have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal
| NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of
| email with a format more suited to active multi-party
| discussion.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great
| place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical
| topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the
| beginning most people using it were from the academia. At
| some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely
| broke that paradigm.
|
| Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary
| groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because
| the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
| Multicomp wrote:
| > At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies
| completely broke that paradigm.
|
| That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has
| never been the same, or so I am told.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Kids these days have no respect for saving bandwidth with
| their inane top posting.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yeah, when AOL allowed Usenet access.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only
| known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products,
| Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-
| quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like
| Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do
| top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal
| and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations"
| and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely
| different thing to what those users were using back then.
|
| Mailing lists work because they work best with old-
| fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It
| requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g.
| how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But
| people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult,
| especially when it comes to IT.
|
| More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette
| (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any
| interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays
| people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are
| used to operating in a playpen where they can test the
| boundaries with no consequences, like children.
|
| Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of
| distilling what it means to have discourse into a few
| easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of
| it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and
| "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more
| expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact,
| by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour
| of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow,
| repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for
| mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep
| and enlightening discussion and debate.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Is it possible for me to use a mailing list if I want to
| send HTML mail because it's more expressive and allows
| the client to rewrap emails to the width of the _reader
| 's_ screen? What if I want my 1:1 emails and
| forum/mailing-list broadcasts to be sent to separate
| _user interfaces_ , rather than using a client-side
| filter to separate them after the fact? (I'm fine with
| top-quoting specific lines out of long messages, but
| would rather have threading capabilities when I'm
| replying to an entire message, so readers won't have to
| scroll past a second copy of the message.)
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > I want to send HTML mail because it's more expressive
|
| For thousands of years prior to the invention of HTML
| email, back unto the ages of cuneiform on clay, people
| managed to express themselves. Entire competing schools
| of rhetoric developed to teach people how best to express
| themselves, long before any form of electronic mail
| existed. Some of those schools focused on eloquence and
| interest, others on brevity and clarity, and those were
| both possible with plain text written by reed pens and
| ink on papyrus. I wonder whether relying on HTML for
| one's expression is really better than cultivating a
| writing style that suffices to convey one's thoughts
| independently of the medium used.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > I'm fine with top-quoting specific lines out of long
| messages, but would rather have threading capabilities
| when I'm replying to an entire message, so readers won't
| have to scroll past a second copy of the message.
|
| That's great because mail readers have supported
| threading for decades. It's pretty essential for using a
| mailing list.
|
| Most mail readers support it, but not Microsoft ones.
| Somehow they managed to ruin this simple feature. This
| caused Google to reinvent it in the early 2000s and
| announce it like it was an innovation of their own.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| The reason I brought it up is because when I read mailing
| list archives, I see both threading, and certain messages
| which top-quote previous messages multiple layers deep.
| Deeply nested top-quoting is inconvenient for me to
| mentally parse.
| ornornor wrote:
| > if I want to send HTML mail because it's more
| expressive and allows the client to rewrap emails to the
| width of the reader's screen?
|
| I'm almost certain thunderbird soft wraps plaintext
| emails when composing rather than inserting actual line
| breaks for that reason.
|
| Besides, shorter lines are easier to read and parse; I'd
| take an 80 columns width text anytime over a 120+ cols,
| like more and more people tend to use.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette
| (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any
| interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays
| people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are
| used to operating in a playpen where they can test the
| boundaries with no consequences, like children
|
| I think netiquette breaks down the moment you have a
| diverse group of participants. (Early Usenet) and
| (Fidonet) were comprised of very knowledgeable
| participants of very similar cultural milleus. Usenet was
| mostly scholarly, young, white, and male (the standard
| demographic of academics at the time, I'm not trying to
| insinuate anything more than that), and Fidonet was more
| diverse because it was less tied to academia but was also
| very specific. That's not to say something like
| netiquette couldn't be enforced, but I also think it's
| correlation and not causation that early Usenet and
| Fidonet had meaningful conversations; I've been in
| Discord/Matrix rooms with mostly highly educated people
| with similar outlooks on life and they rarely require
| moderation, even with varying strong opinions.
|
| > Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of
| distilling what it means to have discourse into a few
| easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of
| it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis"
| and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more
| expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact,
| by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in
| favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get
| shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges.
| Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure.
| Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
|
| This just comes off as angry and elitist. Discords are
| there for regular people to engage in conversations. I
| don't think putting up these barriers to engagement is
| relevant for anything other than selecting for technical
| trivia or ability. If you want to actually select for a
| good community, I agree that moderation is important, but
| not using technical barriers. I'm glad the internet is
| such that nowadays I'm not just talking to some other
| person who is interested in heavy metal, anime, gaming,
| and programming (as it was until the late-90s for the
| most part).
| speed_spread wrote:
| I find plain mailing lists to be less search-friendly.
| They're fine if you're an active participant but IMO need
| to be complemented with a proper web facade for passive
| consultation of past issues, design decisions, etc.
| layer8 wrote:
| The traditional way as a mailing list subscriber is to
| automatically filter incoming messages of each mailing
| list into a dedicated folder, which builds you an archive
| from when you first joined. In addition, mailing list
| servers (at least used to) provide zip archives of
| messages by month/year in mbox format that you can import
| into your local folder. When that wasn't available, I
| sometimes asked long-time subscribers for a copy of their
| archive. The benefit is that you are not dependent on
| whatever search tooling the list server provides, but can
| use the email client of your choice, and you still have
| the archive in case the list server shuts down.
| minusf wrote:
| really depends on the mailing list software.
| unfortunately there is basically google grouops and/or
| mailman2/mailman3. for self hosting there isn't even a
| choice at all: mailing lists suffer even more from what
| forums suffer as well: little software choice that ticks
| all the boxes for different people with different needs.
|
| however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is
| of course that you have the mails locally for the lists
| where you are subscribed to...
|
| i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide
| search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and
| it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full
| text.
|
| with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and
| searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum
| thread...
| ColinWright wrote:
| As others have said, it was the "Eternal September":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the
| enculturation process failed.
| wyager wrote:
| I think the enculturation model is incomplete; I think
| another big aspect of it is that the system's capacity as
| an IQ filter diminishes. It's easy to get 100 people
| together that are mostly >2stddev, but it's basically
| impossible to get 10,000 people together that are mostly
| >2stddev. The same process has occurred on many websites.
| I don't think the culture necessarily changes as much as
| the userbase just gets dumber.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| IQ doesn't have the relevance you think it does, it's
| basically an thinly veiled excuse to be an elitist jerk.
|
| Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how
| fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who
| started before you but who moves slower can still be far
| beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would
| never discover because you with your high IQ decided it
| was dumb.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| Axiom 1: Knowledgeable and mature people are repulsed by
| windbags and vicious people.
|
| Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious
| people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.
|
| Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.
|
| Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone
| people.
|
| Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will
| be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet
| baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged
| people will be pounding on the gates of any community.
|
| Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping
| and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and
| mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave
| the community.
|
| Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the
| people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or
| one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and
| moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of
| knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their
| own community and leaving. A hole will form in the
| fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving
| out everyone mature and knowledgeable.
|
| Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is
| open to new users will eventually collapse into the
| internet baseline.
|
| Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and
| currently part of an open online community you love, you
| too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy
| it while it lasts.
|
| Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature
| people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because
| of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of
| the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the
| towel, we're done.
| lizknope wrote:
| Yeah. I got on the Internet in August 1991.
|
| People introduced me to Usenet and told me to lurk on any
| group for a few weeks to see how people communicate
| before jumping in.
|
| I remember coming back to school in the fall of 1993 and
| there were all these new people on the forums asking dumb
| questions. People would reply "Read the FAQ!" and they
| would just ignore it and ask questions already answered
| in the FAQ
|
| I remember people making filters and kill files for
| anything ending in @aol.com
| shuntress wrote:
| My problem with using email for communicating with strangers
| is that my email address feels like it must be a closely
| guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only
| when there is no other option.
|
| If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or
| (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I
| would be much more likely to use email for regular
| communication outside of work.
| layer8 wrote:
| Buy a domain, use different email addresses for different
| mailing lists, automatically filter into different folders
| by To address and list headers.
|
| From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with
| addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to
| get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
|
| Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS
| projects have no problems with mailing lists.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Yeah, I do it like this. Every shopping site has its own
| domain... shopping.amazon@example.com,
| shopping.walmart@example.com etc.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a
| six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I
| get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a
| V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last
| week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation
| Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account
| someone on Brazil created with my email even though they
| can't have ever possible validated the email.
| taeric wrote:
| I don't guard mine, but I also don't have a normal name
| address. Hard to overstate how much that has been a
| benefit for me.
| irrational wrote:
| My wife gets emails all the time meant for a particular
| woman in a different state with the same name as her. For
| some reason, this other woman consistently uses my wife's
| email address. We know where and when her kids go to
| ballet classes, how much she pays, when she gets Botox,
| and how much she pays, invoices from her therapist, etc.
| How does she never notice that none of these emails are
| going to her and correct the email address she has given
| out?
|
| I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know
| everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys
| from harbor freight.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| This happened to me with someone's bank account and they
| didn't have confirmation so I kept getting emails with
| pii after that, including the recovery phone number,
| address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
| josephg wrote:
| Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed
| me all the login details for someone's internet banking
| account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email
| address for their customer. They said if I wanted to
| change the email address on the account I'd need to go
| into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and
| forth before they finally just disabled internet banking
| again for that account.
|
| But that was way too much effort. I don't bother now. My
| Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets
| the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery
| notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all
| sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account
| years ago and moved on.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I have a first initial last name email from the early
| days of gmail. The amount of PII and private
| conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the
| other side of the country tried to email himself his
| business loan application... twice.
| asdff wrote:
| Why not have another email address for less private uses
| then? Spams and scams are everywhere and imo email
| filterings is good enough to snuff out most these days,
| unlike DMs on social media (the junk in my reddit "chat"
| inbox is insane).
| superkuh wrote:
| Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on
| alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a
| couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a
| great group that provides free text group access and posting.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Just be the change you want to see._
|
| Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-
| source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > usenet
|
| It hasn't gone away. It's usage has changed though.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a
| Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot
| about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution
| model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even
| back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing.
| And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable
| idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider
| it.
|
| I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with
| plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for
| internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and
| trophies, so no one would use it now.
|
| Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of
| Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much
| Usenet exists these days.
|
| In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike
| a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst
| in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of
| the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad,
| but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where
| most threaded public conversations moved to.
| VLM wrote:
| NNTP does not equal Usenet.
|
| Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would
| never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you
| mention is/was a mess.
| wott wrote:
| > _Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage
| and bandwidth even back then_
|
| It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary
| newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a
| substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no
| obligation to keep a long retention history, and could
| limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
| ruslan wrote:
| Besides, text messages compress very well.
|
| Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a
| local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an
| issue at all, but bandwidth was.
| fragmede wrote:
| Google Wave may not have picked up, but Google Docs certainly
| did. In the broader topic of online discussion, I feel like
| we'd be remiss if shared Google Docs didn't get a mention. (I
| assume MS O365 has a similar set of features, but I haven't
| used it extensively, so I'm avoiding using a generic term here,
| at the risk of sounding like a commercial.)
|
| Usually, a heavy email thread will start with a multi-paragraph
| essay, and try to get to some sort of consensus from the
| participants. Where google docs lets users comment on a
| specific phrase or word, and have a discussion thread based on
| that highlight, Google Docs makes it possible to have a
| conversation about a specific part of the document. By allowing
| for shared editing, Docs allows someone who came later to
| rewrite words or phrases (if that user is allowed to).
|
| If I'm working on any sort of a doc - engineering design doc,
| marketing copy, whatever - with multiple people, both email and
| slack fall short compared to a Google Doc. It's got a specific
| use case, so it's not _remotely_ a replacement for slack or
| email, but there 's a lot of good, focused communication
| happening in those comment margins.
| aqsalose wrote:
| Mailing lists are nice to use, but quite difficult to set up.
| mch82 wrote:
| I've looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source
| projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for
| Mediawiki. Some communities miss out on the potential of
| mailing lists because they implement the distribution list
| aspect without taking the additional step of implementing the
| browsable archival website. The archive is important because it
| lets late joiners find and participate in discussions.
|
| People love to say email is a bad technology, but my hypothesis
| is that other messaging tools have succeeded because people use
| email improperly. Email is a highly manual medium and degrades
| rapidly unless people use it well. When people behave selfishly
| or rush (lazy subject line changes, reverse chronological
| messages, lazy quoting & replies written deep in old messages,
| off subject replies, etc.) email gets hard to read.
| Miraste wrote:
| > Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless
| people use it well.
|
| I'd argue that is a bad technology, at least for a general-
| use tool. I admit that I don't use mailing lists but I don't
| see how they have any advantages over a well-implemented
| forum. Trying to run a project over email and building an
| archival service to cope with it seems like a reversal of
| priorities.
| gizdan wrote:
| > I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with
| recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all
| the communication there and I don't think it works.
|
| I feel like Slack would have been a lot nicer for those
| discussions iff you could sign up to one and sign in to many. I
| have way too many slack items in my password manager. It's a
| pain having to making changes to multiple ones.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Not sure about the mailing list thing. I just started watching
| sci.electronics.design out of curiosity, and >80% of the posts
| are just two guys (one of them with an IEEE email address!) who
| appear to have been waging a years-long politics flame-war. The
| few posts about, er, electronics design are completely drowned
| out by self-righteous screaming about Trump, Biden, vaccines,
| elections and covid.
|
| Now I understand why Google's mail service automatically
| classifies any alerts the user signs up for from Google's
| mailing list service as spam.
| maccard wrote:
| The problem with a mailing list is that the interfaces for
| interacting with mailing lists are all terrible. I've yet to
| see one that comes _close_ to the UX that discord/slack (and
| tbh even IRC) provide.
| stavros wrote:
| What's a good mailing list service for a company? I'd like
| something I could restrict access to, at least, and with an
| easy/simple UI.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the
| Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but
| with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push
| all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's
| hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to
| find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy
| conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You
| might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just
| because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is
| perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen
| in late evening hours.
|
| Yeah, Slack is _even worse than email_ for most uses. At least
| with email you have conversation threads that consolidate
| discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My
| experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets
| fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put it
| back together again.
|
| IMHO, Slack is only good for a few narrow cases (e.g. replacing
| long coordination email chains, organizing lunch).
| moonchrome wrote:
| >Yeah, Slack is even worse than email for most uses. At least
| with email you have conversation threads that consolidate
| discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My
| experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets
| fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put
| it back together again.
|
| Just recently I spent an hour unbundling a mail chain with
| layers of poor quote - reply - ask for clarification -
| further reply.
|
| The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all
| related discussion in a thread.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Just recently I spent an hour unbundling a mail chain
| with layers of poor quote - reply - ask for clarification -
| further reply.
|
| I'm not saying email is perfect or always works well, it
| just seems to naturally work better _more often_ in some
| ways.
|
| > The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group
| all related discussion in a thread.
|
| My company has not been disciplined about that, and even
| when threads are used new ones get started to continue the
| same topic relatively frequently.
| bavila wrote:
| > The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group
| all related discussion in a thread.
|
| Same at my company: Top level comments initiate a thread,
| and all responses must be made as comments within the
| thread.
|
| If I had my way, I'd take it a step further and require
| that Slack be treated like a message board, not a chatroom.
| If you have something to say, then say it all at once in
| one cohesive paragraph or set of paragraphs -- just as we
| do here. I do not want to be pinged multiple times in rapid
| succession while someone sends every thought they have in a
| stream-of-consciousness fashion, e.g.:
|
| >> hi
|
| >> can you help me with a problem?
|
| >> i need to do x with y but i'm not sure about how to
| handle z
|
| >> oh wait
|
| >> nvm
|
| >> figured it out
|
| Awful.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I've found the opposite - if I start an email discussion,
| people reply-all from different points in the thread (and
| some people accidentally hit reply instead of reply-all, and
| then someone will notice and reply-all just to send that
| message to everyone. And this all makes it hard to
| consolidate the conversation.
|
| While if I start a slack discussion, the thread is in once
| place, and everyone sees the state in real time, so the
| thread is more coherent and easier to follow.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Sometimes slow is a feature. For once it's a quality filter.
| Chats are 1% signal, 99% noise.
|
| Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you commit
| to a topic, which adds order and caring.
|
| But it's still fast, so it's tempting to writz anything you
| thinl about.
|
| When I'm on my phone I stop commenting on HN midway quite often
| because the effort is not worth it. On a computer, it's too
| easy to type.
| unholythree wrote:
| > When I'm on my phone I stop commenting on HN midway quite
| often because the effort is not worth it. On a computer, it's
| too easy to type.
|
| With longer comments I usually quit because the editing
| required to sound like a halfway intelligent person is way
| harder on a phone. I imagine some other people can nail their
| first draft, and others just don't care how they come across.
| spidersouris wrote:
| > Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you
| commit to a topic, which adds order and caring.
|
| I've never used Zulip, but realistically, how does it differ
| from Slack's thread system?
| fragmede wrote:
| Slack's thread UI is simply atrocious. Zulip's UI makes it
| harder to not be part of an existing thread. In slack,
| anyone can just wander into room and start typing things
| that should be in a thread, outside of any thread, even
| (especially) if the thread they want is right there. That's
| not _impossible_ with Zulip, just harder enough to do that
| it 's not an issue in the same way.
| philsnow wrote:
| If I understand Zulip's threading correctly (I can't log
| in right now to check), it imposes a strict two-level
| threading system. Quill (https://quill.chat) has nested
| channels but unlike Zulip, clicking on the "outer"
| channels doesn't show you all the content of all the
| "innner" channels.
| stavros wrote:
| Two things: In Zulip, you can't _not_ have threads. Threads
| in Slack are an afterthought and the UI actively tries to
| prevent you from using them (they 're a narrow column on
| the sidebar and you can't see everything), whereas in Zulip
| they're a first-class citizen.
|
| The second thing is that Zulip's UX is fantastic. You can
| zoom in and out of conversations with a single keystroke,
| and the UI is responsive and does exactly what you want.
| Slack is so slow on my new Ryzen that I frequently out-type
| it, and half my keystrokes end up interpreted as channel-
| switching keystrokes, so I end up having typed something
| random in a random channel instead. Fuck Slack, sincerely.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I loved forums and mailing lists, so I don't have to be on 24/7
| to join a conversation.
|
| Hate discord since you can't jump in a conversation that
| happened 30 min. before, as it would get mixed with the current
| conversations. Now they have the threads, and the `in reply
| to`, but I feel that they way they did the threads don't help
| for separating the conversations and keeping them on long-term
| tucnak wrote:
| Drew DeVault managed to make a mailing list renaissance of
| sorts. https://lists.sr.ht/
|
| I guess that's something. I've made "the leet list" of my own
| and encouraged friends to join (my friends are in their early
| 20s, so they are not quite acquainted with email, lol) and this
| worked out. The slow pace is a feature and people seem to be
| loving it. https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Too bad Google Wave didn 't pick up._
|
| With Google's abuses coming to light I'm actually _glad_ it
| didn 't pick up.
| cube00 wrote:
| The recent wave of hiding old Usenet groups from their
| DejaNews archives because the algorithm now says no is a
| perfect example.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have to put up with Slack due to work, and to dismay of other
| people, I just use it exactly like email, by turning
| notifications off and only looking into it during "compiling"
| moments.
|
| And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed
| relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.
|
| Jesus no. Please, just no. There is a reason why people are
| favoring Discord, Slack, Facebook Groups and whatever else over
| the old strongholds (mailing lists, IRC):
|
| - anything email based (including usenet) requires you to
| expose (at least) your email address to the general public,
| meaning you will get hounded by spam
|
| - mailing lists (by design) have to break common anti-spam
| schemes and it's difficult to get the workarounds done
| correctly, so you'll end up fighting your spam filter all the
| time to read the emails you want to read
|
| - mailing lists require strict moderation to avoid people
| abusing it for spam, which leads to issues when the sole
| moderator goes off on holidays and no new mails come through.
|
| - mailing list management tools are often enough a pretty
| horrid/inconsistent mess
|
| - for each mailing list you join (and want/need to stay in
| longer), you have to setup folders and filters in your mail
| client/provider, and you have to follow the incantation of the
| specific mailing list to opt out, whereas IRC and Discord make
| organizing and leaving easy
|
| - mailing lists and many IRC channels end up being publicly
| indexed in Google which may or may not be in your interest
|
| - many mailing lists and IRC in general restrict incoming
| content to plain-text or limit file sizes which means it's hard
| to enrich a question with screenshots, videos or binary files.
|
| - mailing lists are asynchronous and don't support different
| modes of communication that do not require exposing your phone
| number publicly - it's not (easily) possible to have a quick
| call to quickly solve an issue, yet a 1 minute phone call can
| transport much more density than wasting half an hour playing
| email ping-pong
|
| I'm sad about IRC though given that there hasn't been any major
| reaction to Slack and Discord, which led to an erosion of its
| userbase and then the final implosion of Freenode.
| zh3 wrote:
| I love Slack. I love waking up in the morning to be told I need
| to upgrade to use exactly the same product as I'm forced to use
| every day, and which behaves exactly the same (except a bit
| slower) after I've updated my OS to install the latest browser
| to access Slack.
|
| I love the bad search, the poor integration, and the web
| interface to a product with the functionality of an '80s app.
| It just burns so much time, but hey the wasted hours are all
| chargeable and that sure pays the bills.
| asdff wrote:
| Switch to ripcord to help alleviate some suffering
| hrbf wrote:
| I really, really support that. It's threaded by default,
| requires only a simple signup and in the end is just text
| email. You can use a mailing list with any email client you
| choose. Web-based forums are notoriously unsafe and each one
| has its own eccentricities, not least regarding text
| formatting. I don't want to put up with that.
|
| That being said, the old Usenet was indeed a place to properly
| discuss. I can even remember a time before that, of using
| FidoNet, a BBS-based messaging platform. The quality of
| discussion in the proper channels there was pretty great.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Old simple PHP based forums or even reddit / Google groups was
| better than current state-of-art using discord or JS-heavy
| discourse forum.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Some of the best chats I've ever had have been on niche
| Internet Message Boards using some of the worst technology
| run by people who didn't understand how to run a website. But
| the communities were so tight-knit and dedicated to their
| conversation topic and produced brilliant and entertaining
| ideas.
|
| And sadly most modern search engines don't rank these
| conversations highly in searches. There's a treasure trove of
| unbelievable hidden ideas out there that you'll never come
| across because search algorithms prioritize garbage,
| corporate churned content.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Indeed. I think the technology is somewhat orthogonal to
| the community, but it's the community that's important. A
| lot of technical people equate the two. (Though there are
| definitely technical and systemic benefits to more open
| standards than Discord, even if that doesn't necessarily
| help the community.)
| hef19898 wrote:
| I find the fact that reddit forces me to use the app on
| mobile, and not the browser, highly irritating. End of story,
| I don't go there.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How do I use mailing lists properly? Last time I tried, I
| embarrassed myself by replying to someone directly. Couldn't
| figure out how to add the email to the thread.
| capableweb wrote:
| Usually by doing "Reply all" instead of replying to just one
| recipient. One of the addresses will be associated to the
| mailing list, and forward you message to everyone when you
| send it.
|
| Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account
| everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
| price wrote:
| "Reply all" is the best single answer, but it also varies
| between lists -- on some lists, the norm is that you reply
| _only_ to the list and don 't CC the sender.
|
| For example this is the norm on many Debian mailing lists.
| Or at least some people firmly consider it a norm, and will
| grouch at people CC'ing them.
|
| The fact that this varies from list to list, and it's not
| encoded in software and you're just supposed to know which
| style to use, and that people then blame the human senders
| for not getting it right all the time, is among the reasons
| that mailing lists can be an unwelcoming medium.
| dqv wrote:
| On Thunderbird I get a button that says "reply list" that
| lets me do that. Failing that I guess you can just do a
| normal reply and then change the To: field to the list
| address.
| layer8 wrote:
| Traditionally, many mailing lists set the Reply-to header
| field to the mailing list address, so that replies would go
| back to the mailing list by default. For various reasons,
| that has fallen out of favor. Nowadays the message headers of
| mailing list messages usually indicate the list address in a
| separate header field, and mailing-list aware email clients
| provide a "reply to list" action. Unfortunately, too few
| email clients are mailing-list aware in that way. "Reply all"
| is the fallback, but make sure to remove the non-mailing list
| address, or else the original sender will receive two copies
| of your reply (one through the mailing list and one
| directly), which can be annoying.
| Bjartr wrote:
| The fact that you're getting downvoted is precisely the
| attitude that drives people away from mailing lists.
| rmidthun wrote:
| Slack decided that my phone is no longer good enough. So I have
| lost access to the main method of communication when I am away
| from the computer.
|
| I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...
| Popegaf wrote:
| Please not mailinglists. They are unbrowsable and who likes
| getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?
|
| What's more, not everybody follows etiquette:
|
| - reply and just keep the original message at the bottom
|
| - reply in between the original message
|
| - reply at the bottom with the original message on top
|
| - Some mix quotes and then reply to some parts in the original
|
| And then how do you link to users or messages from your email
| client?
|
| Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5
| different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner
| that allows the world to see my private email address?
|
| I heavily disagree that emails are the way forward in this
| regard (maybe even in any regard).
| aloisdg wrote:
| Beside you cant edit a post after sending a mail, right?
| ballenf wrote:
| Some call that a feature not a bug:
|
| - incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending
|
| - increases reliability of the list as an archive
| db48x wrote:
| > Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5
| different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner
| that allows the world to see my private email address
|
| You seem confused. Signing up to multiple mailing lists won't
| require you to have multiple email addresses, and at the same
| time they don't require you to subscribe using your main
| email address either. Many email hosts will give you as many
| mailboxes as you like, either using plus-addresses or just
| new mailbox names.
|
| > And then how do you link to users or messages from your
| email client?
|
| Every email has a unique message id. Simply include a message
| id in the body of the email, and your email client should
| turn it into a link (provided you happen to have that message
| available). If your email client doesn't do that, perhaps you
| need a better email client.
|
| > They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox
| spammed in order to follow a discussion?
|
| It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you
| just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
| TimWolla wrote:
| > If your email client doesn't do that, perhaps you need a
| better email client.
|
| Which email client does?
| petschge wrote:
| Thunderbird works just fine.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| >It really sounds like you need a better email client, or
| you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
|
| I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email
| clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email
| client for this task. A properly designed forum software is
| always going to be easier to use for its express purpose
| than a mail client.
| burnished wrote:
| Could you make some recommendations then? You are kind of
| just grand standing, because it looks like you are
| absolutely right, but as some one who likes what you are
| talking about I don't know much more than I did before.
| layer8 wrote:
| Thunderbird, or Mutt if you like TUIs.
| prepend wrote:
| > who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a
| discussion?
|
| I just put the emails into a folder, skipping my inbox, and
| browse them at my leisure.
|
| What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into their
| inbox.
|
| I like managing this client side rather than trying to figure
| out how to fix this on the server for everyone.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| > What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into
| their inbox.
|
| The kind of mad person who tries to use a Hey.com email
| account with a listserv...
| s0rce wrote:
| I haven't found discord replacing forums but Facebook groups
| certainly have and it really hampers searching and finding
| information and stuff just seems to vanish.
| everyone wrote:
| I really like when some random program or service I am trying to
| use has a Discord, cus I can just go on, ask my dumb questions
| and immediately get help in realtime from a human who knows about
| this stuff.
|
| As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X
| amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to
| make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single
| response, and so on.
| rchaud wrote:
| I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to make a
| brand new post on a forum. The guiding principle of 2000s forum
| etiquette was "do a search first", because you weren't the
| first to come up with that dumb question.
|
| That is the value that will be lost.
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums
| and they're much easier to search and access if you're not a
| member.
|
| But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a
| message or image you might not want posted in your Discord
| scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something
| inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of
| the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a
| bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule
| breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is
| much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that
| follows is lessened.
| schwapnut wrote:
| Made an account just to post this.
|
| Internet forums are the senate chamber
|
| Discord and the like are the private chamber of whispers.
|
| Caesar was murdered in the chamber, but you can guess where
| Brutus and Co conspired, and it wasn't the chamber.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| We have both, it works fine, and both platforms have their own
| goal.
|
| I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is
| transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I
| know there's no public search history anywhere (gitter does have
| that iirc?).
|
| There's a LOT of information and history in old forums and even
| old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably
| useless, but it's that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.
| drumhead wrote:
| Did people not learn a lesson about closed communities from
| Facebook? At somepoint Discord will want to agressively monetise
| the numbers of people using its platform, and a lot of the
| convenience it currently provides will find its way behind a
| direct or indirect payment mechanism.
| hyperpl wrote:
| Long time IRC user here. I didn't mind using discord for some
| communities but it seems as though they now require phone
| verification which I certainly will not provided them. I feel as
| though one should be able to use it similarly to IRC and not be
| tied to one account for one phone number.
|
| I haven't been able to find a temp phone number to use for this
| purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports
| SMS but alas, that didn't work.
| cfgghsj wrote:
| It's not strictly required, but you need a high reputation
| email address verification. For example, a custom domain email
| will not work, but gmail or outlook.com will allow you to make
| an account without a phone.
| ngrilly wrote:
| I so much agree with this. That's why our team is starting to use
| Discourse for Teams instead of email and Microsoft Teams.
|
| Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should
| have a title. That's how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but
| also Zulip work. That's what I miss the most in Slack, Discord,
| Teams, etc.
|
| Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to
| fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of
| quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing
| lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with
| typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying
| like a chat system.
| burnished wrote:
| It's weird reading an article about damage to the internet in-
| between two aggressive advertisements that I can't seem to get
| off my screen.
| murkle wrote:
| Reddit works fine as a forum. Just make a subreddit and start
| posting :)
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Highly disagree with Reddit censoring, when speaking for
| alternatives to Reddit what comes to mind is decentralization.
| Arrath wrote:
| I much, much, much prefer the original, threaded and immutable
| conversational structure of traditional forums.
|
| One thing I particularly despise about reddit is having to
| scroll past the bevy of meme/joke/tired reference (is that a
| jojo reference?? unexpected letterkenny!!!) comments that
| percolate to the top thanks to upvotes. In reasonably popular
| subreddits anyway, more niche ones may not generate any
| comments at all.
|
| I'd much rather find a megathread about a subject on some
| popular forum, start some time in the past and work my way
| through the posts in chronological order as god intended.
| Macha wrote:
| "move it all to reddit" has some of the same issues as moving
| it to discord. It puts control in the hands of a single company
| who might say, decide your subreddit is only available to
| mobile users if they install the app and sign in
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Notably, however, this was not the issue focused on by the
| article (somewhat to my surprise). The article is about real-
| time versus asynchronous communication, and reddit would
| solve for that.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| No, reddit is absolute garbage for long-running threads.
| Their algorithm is predicated on people constantly posting
| new threads. This leads to people constantly posting the
| most common discussion topics over and over and over.
| sk2020 wrote:
| I would like to think putting everyone's eggs in one basket
| to be used for unstated purposes would bother most people,
| but it really doesn't.
|
| I think they're right though. I'm inclined to think that
| chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that
| paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts.
| Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to
| encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious
| argument by contradiction of this.
| ranger207 wrote:
| As the other comments point out, reddit has cultural problems,
| but I just want to say that I love old reddit's interface. It's
| compact, unlike forums where people's signatures and profile
| pictures take up half the vertical space, messages and message
| indentation is clear, unlike new reddit, and most importantly
| conversations are threaded, unlike traditional forums where
| everything is a mess of intertwined conversations of people
| replying to each other.
| deepstack wrote:
| Reddit is a bad example. On smart phone they force you to use
| the app instead of the mobile web page. That doesn't happen
| with forum such as PHPBB. The exact reason why it is better to
| be a simple forum that works in simple browsers.
| babuskov wrote:
| > On smart phone they force you to use the app instead of the
| mobile web page
|
| I have been using i.reddit.com for years on mobile. It works
| great.
| dagw wrote:
| Yes there are various 'hacks' for using Reddit on mobile
| without an app, but the default discoverable Reddit web
| site that most 'normal' people will find is completely and
| intentionally broken on mobile
| est31 wrote:
| i.reddit.com doesn't support stuff like videos or image
| galleries, so often links lead to new reddit. It is usable,
| but often quite annoying.
| egberts1 wrote:
| I'm app-free, save for Firefox.
| arkh wrote:
| It's a pain to check your old comments or filter them by
| subreddit.
|
| Also it is not really your forum as it can be quarantined or
| removed on the whim of the admins.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It works fine, but you're beholden to the Reddit overlords, you
| don't have enough control, and if someone decides that your
| subreddit no longer fits with Reddit's brand, or that old posts
| should be purged, etc that information is lost. Then there's
| the whole old vs new reddit, its complete inaccessibility from
| web (for which Google will probably punish them at some point)
| in favor of the app, etc.
|
| So yeah, it works, but with some big caveats.
| slig wrote:
| The search sucks. The new interface sucks even harder. The
| mobile interface doesn't even work anymore, you have to use an
| App.
| tored wrote:
| Yes, how do I even search my own comments per subreddit?
|
| And to read anything you are almost required to be logged in
| because of the threading mechanism, just trying to do use
| find in the browser is annoying.
| babuskov wrote:
| > The mobile interface doesn't even work anymore, you have to
| use an App.
|
| I'm using i.reddit.com right now and it seems to be working
| just fine.
| randomeat wrote:
| Reddit is at the whim of hyper political, power hungry mods. On
| top of that, everything is superceded by hyper political, power
| hungry admins and the same for the company itself.
|
| Forums sometimes had those issues, but the centralization of
| Reddit is the problem.
|
| The sooner Reddit dies and forums become decentralized again,
| the better
| Crusoe123 wrote:
| I disagree completely.
|
| Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to
| actually have quality conversations there as communication is
| by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less
| chance someone will read what you have written, and it's
| popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and
| predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the
| sub is heavily moderated.
|
| Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions
| have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates
| an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you
| like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.
| themulticaster wrote:
| There's also the aspect on how you deal with simple questions
| that are asked repeatedly. But in my experience, both Reddit
| and Forums aren't dealing with it perfectly.
|
| For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's
| assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common
| questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?"
| or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock
| CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially,
| questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which
| are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum
| veterans.
|
| In Forums, moderators often close threads with those
| questions with comments like "This has already been answered
| 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately,
| exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in
| your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function
| of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind
| registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who
| came up with that idea).
|
| In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple
| questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads
| that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection
| of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable.
| Especially considering Reddit's search function has also
| turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to
| look for terms that have _definitely_ been mentioned a lot of
| times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in
| a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any
| results.
|
| I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard
| answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack
| Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls.
|
| [1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not
| be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context
| (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use
| $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but
| let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard
| answers.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| It really depends on the size of the subreddit. There is
| definitely an inverse correlation between subreddit size and
| quality of content / discussion as more karma is available
| for bots to farm.
|
| But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The
| subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate
| without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet
| spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few
| hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new
| content that the default view isn't static, but not so much
| that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based,
| forums suffer from this as well -- if your post reply isn't
| on the first or last page, it's probably not getting read.
|
| Forums suffer from significant bitrot -- particularly when
| images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful
| forum posts from 10 years ago aren't really useful anymore
| because all the images are gone and the links are dead.
| Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is
| actively maintained.
|
| Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to
| e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which
| are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on
| patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably
| the best option.
| OJFord wrote:
| > more karma is available for bots to farm.
|
| Are there bots 'farming' karma? To what end, what's the
| point?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| You can sell high-karma accounts or leverage them into
| mod positions. For whatever reason people take high-karma
| accounts to be a signal of quality (or at least
| activity). Mod positions on large subs are used to
| signal-boost corporate social media campaigns (ever
| notice how a bunch of fast and furious memes always pop
| up across a ton of subreddits a month before the movie
| comes out?) There's money in that and it's basically the
| same role and business model as a social media influencer
| on Instagram.
|
| Some people also do it for the lulz, it's not that hard
| to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of
| Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same
| meme, which is an interesting engineering project for
| someone wanting to learn those methods).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator
| memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication
| unless the sub is heavily moderated.
|
| I am reading a manga and there's a reddit sub for it. Until a
| year ago give or take we were like 30 or 40. The manga was
| slowly moving the storyline but it picked up again and now
| there are tens of thousands of people. When there were only
| 30-40 people there used to be a stupid puerile joke related
| to the manga. You could see it once a week, or maybe in a lot
| of posts but quickly drowned or irrelevant anyway since only
| person did it. It was not mentioned much.
|
| Now with all those people ? That supid joke/meme is present
| in every post, every comments. Every new chapter release gets
| many comments with that dumb joke.
|
| I also feel like comments are now shorter and story theories
| much simpler and... well, quality is reduced. As you said,
| predictable comments are ruining the fun.
| Kiro wrote:
| Do you think HN would be better as a forum? I definitely
| don't.
| Crusoe123 wrote:
| HN and forums have different use cases (this site is called
| Hacker _News_ after all). So I agree with you this format
| is better for HN. When discussing news longstanding
| discussions are not really the point, and this site is
| fairly strictly moderated.
|
| But that's not true for most types of discussions and
| communication.
| dreyfan wrote:
| HN is closer to chat than forums. Topics after the first
| page are effectively closed forever and it's near
| impossible to continue a conversation without constantly
| checking it or relying on some external tools/extensions.
|
| The point based default sorting also makes it difficult for
| any late entrant to participate in the conversation. The
| community has already decided what consensus is and that
| topic will quickly disappear anyway.
|
| HN has a great community but a shit format.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's better than Discord, but still not great. A lot of helpful
| information ends up lost because some people do full purges of
| their accounts. It's awful to find a Reddit thread that used to
| have the answer to your questions but now just shows half of
| the posts as deleted.
| agjmills wrote:
| I have the same problem with Gitter.im or slack for FOSS projects
| - quite a few communities have switched from being forum based
| (and therefore the conversations are logged and indexable by
| search engines), to being ephemeral conversations in Slack
| channels.
|
| You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral
| platforms, but most large communities provide some form of
| indexable log of the conversations
| fossuser wrote:
| Forums are awful UX - really bad, it's why all this other stuff
| exists.
|
| I don't like discord either and don't like the model of megacorps
| sucking up all our communication and locking it away while
| creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control.
|
| I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads.
|
| I'm also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of
| solving this in a way that doesn't centralize ownership while
| also enabling a UI that doesn't suck.
|
| Asking people to use forums will not succeed.
|
| As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree -
| but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.
| tester756 wrote:
| I hardly disagree
|
| "HN" comment chains may be better (but that's debatable) than
| forum's linear discussions, but
|
| HN "news" model (front page oriented) is terrible and
| everything that falls from front page is automatically dead,
| end of topic.
|
| Forum discussions can last weeks, months or even years
| meanwhile everything that's 2 days old is dead on HN, here's no
| discussion once something disappears from front page.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I don't disagree with you on that.
|
| It's the threading model I think is superior - the forum
| pages model where you get hundreds of slowly loading pages
| and horrible quoting, signatures, etc. make it unusable for
| me.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Urbit a solution?!? Hardly!
|
| Urbit is a digital fiefdom made by a neo-fascist whom coded
| that arbitrary limits at the base of the protocol.
|
| I cant get far enough away from that garbage.
| fossuser wrote:
| Its design is interesting and the non-zero cost of IDs make
| sense as a way to build reputation and eliminate spam:
| https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf
|
| I'm no fan of CY's neo-reactionary politics, but he's also no
| longer involved in the project and they're not relevant to
| the problems the design solves.
|
| Similarly I think the 2008 monetary policy around QE was an
| incredible success, but I still think Bitcoin is worthwhile
| and interesting despite the fact Nakamoto thought the
| bailouts were a bad idea.
|
| It's possible to look at these things separately imo. (John
| Nash, Bobby Fischer, etc. - long list of people that do
| worthwhile things but may believe things I don't agree with).
|
| Simpler less technical intro:
| https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
| dethos wrote:
| I agree. Very unlikely that I will find a meaningful discussion
| on discord, about a subject or problem when I'm searching for it
| on Google/DDG/etc.
|
| If i cannot find it, I won't be able to participate.
|
| A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at
| different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord's
| support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1].
|
| [1]https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
| dangus wrote:
| Some of these forum owners _want_ chat instead of forums. Forums
| just used to be one of the only ways to facilitate chat in a
| practical way.
|
| I think that the author of this article didn't really consider
| what the communities' and companies' needs are, and is more
| interested in criticizing them for "making the Internet worse."
| For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not
| about what the owners of the forums or their users want:
|
| > Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to
| the point where there are only a handful of people left actively
| using the forum.
|
| It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum.
|
| There _are_ going to be communities and companies that want
| forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They 're great
| for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of
| knowledge. They're great for certain types of discussions. At the
| same time, not every community is out there looking to do that
| kind of thing. A lot of them just want to _socialize_ live, and
| that 's where services like Discord shine.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Why not a Discourse forum, which has a mailing list mode and a
| forum view? Plus, Discourse is open source.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I asked a very similar question on HN about this a few months
| back related to software support forums going to discord and
| slack. Total pain for finding answers to issues and problems
| nilleo wrote:
| I feel the same way about Facebook groups. I'd much rather create
| a throwaway account registered with my domain
| (whateverforum@mydomain.com) for every forum than create and use
| a Facebook or Discord account to engage with multiple
| communities. I don't want or need a centralized "social" account.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of
| searchability but also because it's difficult to have multiple
| identities with Discord. It's frustrating to be looking for help
| with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join
| their Discord server. I don't want to join those with the same
| identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give
| up at that point.
| uyt wrote:
| I think they also force phone verification if you make multiple
| accounts connecting from the same ip. I don't want to run VPN
| just for a throwaway discord account and I don't know how to
| get burner phone numbers.
| danaris wrote:
| Apparently someone on Discord is paying attention, because I
| _just now_ updated my copy, and a popup came up drawing
| attention to their new feature: different nicknames per server!
|
| Edit: Ignore me; see reply.
| rjbwork wrote:
| This has been a feature as long as I remember (I've been
| using it since late 2015). The nickname is still tied to your
| name#dddd account identifier. And if someone checks your
| profile, they can still see mutual servers and friends. GP is
| asking for multiple accounts, not nicknames.
| danaris wrote:
| *blinks*
|
| You're right. Apparently the _new_ part of the feature must
| be the ability for those with Nitro (the paid tier) to
| change their avatar per server. (At least, I 'm guessing
| so; I've never had Nitro so I don't know if that was
| already available.)
|
| This is what I get for posting too early in the morning.
| [deleted]
| mlok wrote:
| Firefox Multi-Accounts Containers might help a lot in this case
| : https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-
| co...
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| seemed that a great idea but in reality it's a hassle :/
| Stevvo wrote:
| It's a native feature in Chrome.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Firfox containers are not the same thing as separate
| Chrome accounts.
| heinrich5991 wrote:
| You can open Discord in a private window in you browser to get
| another identity. On Linux, I can also recommend firejail with
| the --private= flag which allows you to have unlimited
| instances (well, limited by your RAM).
| snassar wrote:
| Does one really need a jailed or chrooted instance when you
| can just create profiles?
|
| firefox -P <profilename>
| Izkata wrote:
| For that matter, Firefox has "open in new private window"
| as a built-in option on its right-click context menu for
| links.
|
| Also I have a "work" container I use for this type of
| thing, so that's also an option in my context menu.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| The profiles have a separate history, password store,
| settings and extensions as a bonus.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Firefox Multi-Account Containers work for this too.
| sleibrock wrote:
| Agreed. I used to use Firefox Profiles like above comments
| may mention, but multi-account containers are great and far
| easier to use than re-launching Firefox instances. Simply
| click "Re-open this tab in..." while being on the Discord
| page to open up another account.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Please do not use firejail. The code used to have, and
| probably still has, very amateurish security flaws (like
| trusting the USER env var) and should definitely not have
| SUID, especially now that linux is getting unprivileged
| namespacing.
| ayushnix wrote:
| I frankly don't understand what to trust when it comes to
| sandboxing in Linux.
|
| On the one hand, there are SUID binaries like Firejail and
| on the other, we have bubblewrap which uses unprivileged
| user namespaces, also used by Podman and Docker rootless
| containers. However, linux-hardened disables unprivileged
| user namespaces by default and the Arch Wiki has warnings
| plastered all over the Podman page about potential security
| risks of using unpriv user namespaces.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults
| than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend
| firejail), considering the audience of RedHat
| (particularly some government agencies)
| maccolgan wrote:
| Security by authority must be one of the worst things in
| 2021, perhaps they are optimizing for DevEx (or whatever)
| rather than security.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Well yeah, and Microsoft is the world's most experienced
| software company and a superscaler who really knows how
| to secure infrastructure well, you really can't hope to
| compete with their security teams, right up to the part
| where their images come with a garbage port of their WMI
| garbage containing uncountably infinite LPEs and RCEs
| running with uid=0.
| ayushnix wrote:
| > I personally trust RedHat more with setting good
| defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend
| firejail)
|
| You speak as if these "random Arch Linux users" have
| written their opinions on the wiki rather than reasonable
| conclusions based on how unprivileged user namespaces
| have been a source security vulnerabilities in the past
| and is still seen as a security risk.
|
| Maybe try not to let your bias get in the way?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Systems that have implemented stricter sandboxing are in
| general far less trustworthy and I think the security
| discussion went out of scope here.
| loxias wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! Is there anything (packaged easily
| for Debian) you'd recommend instead?
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Your sibling comment has a few good ones.
| true_religion wrote:
| Why can't you have multiple accounts? I have three: open
| source, gaming, personal.
|
| It's not like social media where you are required to have only
| one account and link it to your real name.
| devwastaken wrote:
| It's against TOS, and some servers use "alt finding" bots,
| which search all the servers you're in. and totally won't spy
| on you /s
| elurg wrote:
| Doesn't it require a phone number for validation?
| [deleted]
| raxxorrax wrote:
| There are services for virtual phone numbers that still
| work. I expect many users to use them because you won't tie
| your ID to your account, even if many users have been
| groomed to share that by now.
| jayshua wrote:
| Last I tried you could reuse the same phone number to
| verify multiple accounts. There's just a cooldown period
| after each verification before the same number can be used
| again.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| So your accounts will be retroactively and publicly
| correlated for time immemorial when discord's database
| gets dumped?
|
| Using phone numbers for human verification is lazy and
| needlessly intrusive.
| true_religion wrote:
| I don't thinks so... it's relatively difficult to get
| different phone numbers so it's a good way to limit spam.
|
| Plus in the real world, it's also a way of separating
| your identities. I have a work number and personal
| number, and only attach the work number to business
| services. Sure, it won't prevent Google from banning all
| your accounts but for everyone else it's a hard barrier
| to correlating that you are the same person. Added to the
| fact that my work laptop uses VPN, and I'm pretty sure
| that sites like GitHub have no idea I have multiple
| accounts.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Does Discord store the number alongside your account? The
| smart way to prevent issues with associating accounts by
| phone number is to only store the link up until the
| account is verified. After that, they don't need the
| number linked to the account. The number just has to be
| stored in a list alongside the last time it successfully
| validated an account, and then only stay in there until
| the cooldown period expires.
| [deleted]
| mindslight wrote:
| Given that the smart way is to not ask for phone numbers
| in the first place, I wouldn't assume anything.
| anticensor wrote:
| It does.
| nkotov wrote:
| 100% in the same boat. I don't want my gaming identity to be
| related to my day-to-day work. If I see a product/tool has a
| community Slack, I'd be more open to joining that.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| > I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of
| searchability...
|
| I personally have found the search on Discord to be very robust
| and good, actually. I'm curious to see why you are saying it's
| not searchable?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You will never find content from Discord in any system
| outside of it. It is an isolated island.
|
| New users will have difficulties finding any discussion.
| baud147258 wrote:
| are discord servers indexed by search engines the same way
| regular forums are?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| It's searchable if you've already found the Discord server
| and are in it. You won't find any of it if you're doing a web
| search.
| amelius wrote:
| This sounds like something Google would want to fix ASAP.
| Are they talking to Discord about the issue?
| lghh wrote:
| But then you run into the problem of having one username
| across Discord "servers". I don't want what I say on
| servers with my friends to be easily cross-searchable
| from what I say on a "server" for some software
| development library.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| You can set your username and avatar per server and
| people can only see your mutual communities AFAIK.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Discord accounts have hidden (until someone uses a bunch
| of hacking tools known as "dev tools") IDs which uniquely
| identify an account and never change. The username#1234
| stuff is pure fluff. The per-server thing is also just an
| alias on the server, it still shows the foo#1234 name if
| you click on a profile.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I've thought before about how Discord could deal with
| this. Ideally we would be able to set up aliases, and
| when joining a server get to select which alias is used.
| They would have to look externally in every way like they
| were distinct accounts including when friending or DMing
| people.
|
| Alternatively, in the UI they could let you sign in to
| multiple accounts and then provide another layer of tabs
| to let you switch between those. That would help keep
| things organized but also can make navigation more
| difficult by adding another level to the navigation tree.
| somnic wrote:
| Easy account switching is the sort of thing that browser
| extensions would have been developed to cover in the
| past, something like like RES for Reddit or XKit for
| Tumblr.
|
| That's obviously less relevant when a majority of users
| are using desktop or mobile apps rather than browsers,
| but a plugin interface even for closed-source commercial
| desktop software used to be far more common than it is
| now, leaving users dependent on the development team to
| add features and usability.
|
| I assume this decline is due to security concerns,
| wanting to be able to develop faster internally rather
| than needing to continue supporting old APIs for external
| developers, and marketplaces like Google Play and the App
| Store not wanting to enable competing marketplaces within
| the apps they distribute. It's a tradeoff to be sure, and
| I'm not sure moving past plugin functionality is a bad
| thing, but I find it a bit sad.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I hope not. I can't think of anything that would make me
| leave Discord faster.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| Many, probably most, Discord servers operate under
| assumption that discussions are private and are limited
| to invited users. Making all of these discussions public
| would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| You can search across unjoined servers from within Discord.
| hachari wrote:
| Really? I've never found a good single source for
| discovering servers, only ever find expired links buried
| on old posts online
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Yes. Scroll all the way down on your server list and the
| final entry is "Discover"
| hu3 wrote:
| That's neat. How do I proceed to do that?
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final
| entry is "Discover"
| [deleted]
| joconde wrote:
| It's still out of reach of traditional search engines
| like Google, right? Stack Overflow and other forums have
| the huge advantage of being indexable by outside
| services.
| loxias wrote:
| Sounds like it's time to write a Discord crawler...
| slightwinder wrote:
| That won't work. Discord is pretty eager in protecting
| their data. They even kill legit bot-abilities to prevent
| people from harming their space. But to be fair, discord-
| space is also very toxic and borderline in some content,
| with phising and other attacks are being quite common. So
| it's justified that they protect their customers.
|
| I guess if a big name like Google would ask them and
| ensures that privacy is preserved, they might cooperate
| to some degree.
| benatkin wrote:
| Search engines are a big deal, so much so that I could
| see crawling with a browser extension or browser
| automation. However, Discord also discourages use of the
| web app.
|
| How about if when the app's data is fully locked down,
| people start recording their screens and OCRing them?
| Incentivize it somehow. That way at least content that
| the participating users viewed would be indexed. Then you
| get back to trying to block people from recording their
| own screen with software, and after that hardware[1].
| Never ending cat and mouse game.
|
| 1: https://pallycon.com/blog/choose-your-weapon-to-fight-
| screen... (see "Screen recording using camera")
| slightwinder wrote:
| Of course, will it be always possible to catch data some
| way. But it's a difference whether you actively work
| against the company and must invest money and time into
| it, or not.
|
| And outside the technical level, discord also has the
| legal way. They can try to shut down your service, remove
| your code from public space and make you sink more time
| and money in an uphill-battle.
|
| This is the same battle people are fighting against all
| walled gardens. And so far the gardens usually win. So
| someone taking on that fight, should be aware of this.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Because the only way to find info on a Discord server is to
| join the Discord server. That means the info is hidden from
| standard search engines and that even just to see the info I
| need to reveal myself to the Discord server.
| ntauthority wrote:
| There's no global search across all your DMs and guilds you
| are in either.
| mithusingh32 wrote:
| Or group servers for a search query. This simple feature
| would be a game changer.
| anticensor wrote:
| How would that work, in terms of retrieval? Each guild is
| operated by a particular instance of the guilds server in
| a many-to-one fashion.
| tpxl wrote:
| The search straight up doesn't work. You have to search for
| an exact word or it wont find it, ie 'hell' wont find the
| word 'hello'.
| trutannus wrote:
| Not even that. I just don't want to have to join a chat group
| to get documentation or ask questions. If I don't know the
| sorts of people in the server, joining is not generally
| something I'd be super comfortable with.
| [deleted]
| ziml77 wrote:
| That's certainly another barrier. As someone very socially
| anxious, it can be difficult to muster the courage to join a
| real-time conversation. Making forum posts is a lot easier.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| At worst case can you use something like cookie containers or
| separate user profiles of chrome?
|
| I have more reasons to dislike discord (too bloated for my
| network, android app not good), by the way.
| martin_a wrote:
| > I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in
| gaming
|
| xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day
| on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my
| HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
| screye wrote:
| I agree with seneca. HN os one of the last places on the
| internet to have serious civil discussions. The absence of
| low effort meme jokes is one of the ways it soft discourages
| people from opening the gates to memeery.
|
| I'd rather rather compromise on a couple of laughs than see
| HN become a generic reddit like forum / social network.
|
| Just may 2 cents
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Dunno what you're getting at here, GP was making a real
| point in a tongue-in-cheek way, it's not a "low effort meme
| joke".
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| If they're making a point, I don't understand it. They
| seem to be ridiculing someone for trying to protect their
| identity. Any famous person will be acutely aware of how
| problematic it can be to "just join a server as your real
| identity."
|
| I've had similar problems. I fully agree with the other
| commenter: if you have a point, just say it minus the
| cheek.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Not a complete solution, but for those who might not know,
| Discord allows you to choose a name per-server.
| penagwin wrote:
| The user id though will burn you though. People who use
| something like BetterDiscord will be able to easily spot it
| (as well as your join date).
|
| I'd recommend just using the browser to make an alt.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Too much friction for some tasks. Forums and their
| features/flaws are better than Discord for some things.
| ashes-of-sol wrote:
| This is how I setup an account for the public facing
| discord at work, I just use the web client in a Firefox
| container.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Only if the guild allows nicknames to be set manually. Not
| all do. And your actual username when @ mentioned still is
| the same.
| Cosmin_C wrote:
| I think that's ~xXN0oBMa573r69Xx~ tho.
| Zababa wrote:
| Please don't ridicule people that are trying to protect their
| identity.
| seneca wrote:
| > xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other
| day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me
| with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
|
| Please don't make posts like this here.
| martin_a wrote:
| Yeah, sorry, that RegEx-topic is really not for those with
| a weak heart. I'll use an XML parser instead.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| but have have you tried using rust??
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| a good portion of discord is using a combination of
| elixir and rust actually
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Good point
| [deleted]
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I completely agree with this. For a while I'd have a second
| device for different discord identities. I really hope they add
| this support natively because I use discord in so many
| different contexts with real people and online strangers.
| ganzuul wrote:
| > searchability
|
| Forum representation is search results on Google in particular
| is abysmal. The way Google misrepresents the information
| mankind has created is actively making us less intelligent.
| topspin wrote:
| At least there IS a representation. Once some clue is found
| one need only go from there to the primary source and its
| native representation. What's so horrible about that?
|
| Stuff squirreled away in some discord server effectively
| doesn't exist outside of Discord's gamer chat platform. I'll
| take a poor representation that doesn't involve logging in
| and searching multiple platforms over essentially anything.
| What good are forums that don't appear in common search
| engines?
| floatingatoll wrote:
| That is a feature to forum admins, because it means no longer
| having to deal with sock puppets, or at worst reporting them to
| Discord who then takes action to protect the platform.
|
| We've had twenty years of pseudonymous identities on the
| Internet and we've put the social fabric of humanity at risk.
| The needle is swinging towards "you get one identity, use it
| wisely" and I think that has absolutely been earned by those
| who abused pseudonymity to hurt others. No doubt the needle
| will swing back someday, and I will look forward to that once
| I've had a few years' break from the tragedy of today.
| neither_color wrote:
| I also resent that discord/slack are companies that own their
| platforms, whereas IRC/Usenet/phpBB/etc were all software
| anyone could own and operate their own instance of. Sure you
| can have your own discord server, but youre still subject to
| the whims of Discord Inc. While they may not have done anything
| notably bad yet(I think there was a mini controversy with
| wallstreetbets but I didnt follow that story closely), but it's
| still centralization where it wasnt there before. Would you be
| ok with X Corporation you dont like buying Discord for cash
| tomorrow, even if they promise not to change any rules? Or does
| it make you feel easy to think about what they _could_ do ? The
| Microsoft offer certainly scared some people.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| and then you have the godawful bots. Try to join a server, get
| spammed by 5 different bots that want to verify your identity.
| And so many different rules when you just want to ask a
| question. Kafka would be proud
| Meekro wrote:
| As someone who runs one of those Discord servers, let me say
| that the rules have a purpose. Lots of people will jump in
| and post their question in the first channel they happen to
| see without looking into which channel would be appropriate
| (or worse, post it in _every_ channel). Or they 'll @-message
| or PM every mod. Or their attitude will be nasty, treating
| volunteer helpers like a personal servant. There will be
| posted rules saying not to do these things, but they'll do
| them anyway.
|
| When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say
| something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your
| attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who
| deal with this stuff over and over will start getting
| tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame
| them.
| mnd999 wrote:
| This sounds like it could be easily solved using a forum
| instead of discord.
| vikingerik wrote:
| This has already happened. That forum is Reddit, for
| quite a large proportion of niche hobbies where someone
| would come in and ask a question.
|
| And it has the same problems of one-way escalating
| moderator strictness.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Forums had all the same rules and rule enforcements for
| moderation. (Agree to the community rules, agree to the
| community terms of service, verify your email account,
| for the first few hours/days of your account you see only
| a curated subsection of the forums, etc.) It's a lot of
| the complexity in forum software that accumulated over
| time because it wasn't handled by "third party bots" and
| instead had to be baked into the forum app itself, which
| lead in part to why forum software is so hard to
| build/run/host because for a good, well moderated forum
| you need all of those moderation tools and generally
| can't just bolt them on with a "Forum Bot" from someone
| who isn't the forum software's author.
| ajuc wrote:
| > Lots of people will jump in and post their question in
| the first channel they happen to see without looking into
| which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in
| every channel)
|
| That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| People would do the same thing in forums: spam their
| question in the first or possibly every "board" whether
| it looked appropriate or not. The moderation needs don't
| change that much between chat and forum.
| ajuc wrote:
| Expectation in different media differ even if technically
| they can be used in the same way. Nobody uses search on
| discord chat. Google doesn't index discord chats. You
| cannot easily link to a discord message from 10 years ago
| nor quote it permanently. It's ephemeral for all intents
| and purposes.
|
| Meanwhile people mostly arrive at forums from google
| searches and link to posts without thinking about it.
|
| It's the difference between writing a book and giving a
| speech. Imagine if we started burning books because
| people can just talk over a phone. That's what replacing
| forums with discord is.
|
| Moving from forums to discord is another step in
| destroying everything that made open web great. It's sad
| that people don't even understand what they are losing.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Google doesn't index most _moderated_ forums either. They
| 've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors.
|
| For what it is worth, Discord _does_ have permalinks to
| old messages. You definitely aren 't going to find a 10
| year old link today in large part because Discord hasn't
| been around 10 years yet, but I've copy and pasted
| Discord permalinks before to get points across and I have
| friends that use it for answering FAQs (have notes full
| of Discord links to copy/paste to answer common
| questions).
|
| For what it is worth, there _are_ users that use search
| on Discord (including the sorts that copy /paste the
| permalinks to answer FAQs). Maybe "nobody" thinks to
| "search first" is a truism, but even then I've seen
| plenty of forums full of the exact same users that never
| think to search first when they enter a forum and go
| directly to asking a question previously answered many
| times before. (Even when they arrive in a forum from a
| google search on that very question, people like/prefer
| the immediacy/power/relationship of folks responding
| directly to them than a canned answer.)
|
| I'm not saying Discord is particularly great at some of
| these use cases or even the right answer, but they are
| _very_ comparable and it 's definitely _nothing_ like
| burning books to chat over a phone. (That 's a really
| broken analogy for several reasons.)
|
| (ETA: If there is something to criticize Discord here
| for, it's much more the centralizing force problem that
| old forums used to be distributed across every style of
| web host in the old web, but Discord is a single for-
| profit point of failure for so many eggs to be put in one
| basket.)
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| You know why volunteer helpers get treated like servants?
| Because people are looking for answers, _now_. And there's
| so many pointless barriers in the way, it's maddening.
| Imagine if instead of Google being a search engine the way
| it is now where you get results damn near instantly, you
| instead had to jump into some big Google chat room and ask
| someone a question and wait some undefined amount of time
| to get a response, and often a useless one.
|
| People are in a hurry, if you're not giving them what they
| want, then just get the fuck out of the way.
| LocalH wrote:
| This viewpoint is entitled as fuck, communities do not
| exist to serve you
| xwdv wrote:
| Believe me, I have zero desire to interact with
| "communities" when I am just trying to passively look up
| some quick information.
| price wrote:
| Then don't.
|
| If you aren't willing to interact with people as humans,
| that doesn't give you the right to treat them as tools.
| The people who are interested in talking about some game
| mod don't owe you the ability to quickly look up
| information about it.
| xwdv wrote:
| Why would they delete a forum and force people to go to a
| discord if they aren't willing to serve?
| chowells wrote:
| Running a forum _sucks_. Why would you do that when your
| community is better served by other tools?
| _jal wrote:
| This is one reason why I always look at how support is
| handled when choosing software. If I run in to this, I'll
| go look at the next thing on my list.
|
| I'm not trying to downplay the problems you run in to, I've
| seen all of this and worse. It just seems that you chose
| tooling that doesn't work well for actually managing
| support, so you have to beat your users into the right
| shape to fit your software.
|
| Godspeed, I guess.
| Meekro wrote:
| If we're talking about formal support for a paid product,
| I agree with you. But I don't actually know any companies
| that use Discord as their primary support system, usually
| it'll be email or some sort of ticket system. Sometimes
| small internet companies will have a public Discord as
| well, and you might even be able to get questions
| answered there, but I can't think of any cases where they
| actually promote it as the primary support system.
|
| I was referring to things like open source software, game
| mods, photography enthusiast communities, etc. These
| kinds of communities are often on Discord these days, and
| suffer from the problems I mentioned previously. These
| lead to heavy-handed moderation.
| prepend wrote:
| I feel for mods, having moderated digital stuff for
| decades.
|
| But this seems like a problem of your own making.
|
| If users keep doing the same thing over and over, then the
| problem probably isn't the users but the forum.
|
| I think this is because discord was designed for deep users
| and groups of friends who had lots of preexisting context
| as well as a desire to be part of something longstanding.
|
| Support forums are for people with no context and don't
| want to join anything, they just need help. So making
| someone join a server, with specific rules they don't give
| a shit about results in these problems.
|
| There needs to be a "read only" mode that lets me read a
| server and explore without joining. This is a strength of
| forums, mailing list archives, and even IRC.
|
| Mods complaining about modding hard stuff because they set
| it up to be hard doesn't warrant much empathy from me.
| Meekro wrote:
| I get what you mean, and I agree with you that Discord
| shouldn't be a company's primary support system. I also
| haven't heard of any companies that do this.
|
| The issues I described come up when you have a community
| that occasionally offers help. For example, there might
| be a Discord devoted to a game mod. People can gather
| there to hang out with the mod developers or just talk
| about gaming. They sometimes answer newbie questions,
| too. If you come to take advantage of their generosity,
| you should do it with the right attitude and respect--
| just like if you show up at a game shop in real life
| hoping someone will teach you how to play Dungeons &
| Dragons.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| for all of those reasons you're better off with a forum.
| plus the lack of expectation for instant replies will
| discourage those users from spamming all threads
| blstz wrote:
| >And so many different rules when you just want to ask a
| question. Kafka would be proud
|
| Yes. Kafka is when rules, and the more rules the more
| Kafkaesque.
| lucasverra wrote:
| >Discord not just because of searchability
|
| is it like slack that limit to < 10K messages on free spaces?
| Or Search is limitless?
| clay10 wrote:
| Its limitless but not very good.
| Asraelite wrote:
| This is true of a few other services too like Instagram and
| Twitter. Firefox containers are useful here, but it's a bit
| harder with native clients and mobile.
| Qub3d wrote:
| If Discord could implement a "workspace" (or game-space or
| whatever) similar to slack, that would make me a lot more
| comfortable joining various servers.
| evandale wrote:
| I set up multiple chrome profiles and use different Discord
| users that way.
|
| On Android you can use an app such as App Cloner to create a
| new Discord app and even give the icon a custom colour.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I second this article's sentiment. Back in the 2000s I spent a
| lot of time on forums and Wikia. I can still find lots of posts
| and conversations I had way back over a decade ago (on the forums
| that haven't shut down) and looking things up is easy. Even for
| forums you're not a part of, it's easy to benefit from their
| knowledge with an online search. In contrast, anything within
| discord is stuck within discord, and not only do you need an
| account to participate but it introduces a single point of
| failure: discord. If the company gets shut down or gets bought
| out and changed, everything's gone. If a server runs into issues
| with discord management/leadership, it's gone. Not to mention the
| slower pace of forums and chat nature of discord lead to
| completely different kinds of conversations and discussion.
|
| Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and
| forums would hold real discussion. We'll see if that approach
| survives.
| swayvil wrote:
| I have tried Discord a dozen times and could never stand it for
| more than 10 minutes. It's an utterly obnoxious format.
|
| How about a nice conversation tree? Usenet!
| alkonaut wrote:
| Who does this? I haven't seen that happen even once. They are
| completely orthogonal? Both have their uses.
|
| What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving
| to _discourse_ and that I see happen in tons of places. But
| closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat /voice-chat?
| TillE wrote:
| I've seen a lot of communities moving from IRC to Discord,
| which is a _fantastic_ improvement in accessibility, search,
| etc.
|
| For the types of communities I'm thinking of (eg, certain retro
| gaming niches), forums had essentially been dead for years
| before Discord rolled around and helped revive a lot of
| conversations.
|
| Maybe it's an awkward fit for technical stuff where you really
| just want Q&A, but I love it.
| ggregoire wrote:
| > Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has
| changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for
| people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in
| popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord,
| Twitter, and Twitch.
|
| Isn't Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who
| used to read Eurogamer's forums probably read /r/games nowadays,
| and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by
| games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Forums are still alive on some sites and communities.
| coolso wrote:
| > Isn't Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago?
|
| Unfortunately, yes. I love reddit, but it suffers from a major
| issue that most forums didn't suffer from: homogeneity of
| thought, with little options for those who go against the
| grain, either in general or on one particular issue. If you
| have an unpopular opinion amongst a subreddit's members, your
| comment is ignored at best or goes to the bottom of the pile,
| never to be seen by anyone. How is this healthy for discussion?
|
| Even if you were to go on a forum made of members with a
| completely different set of ideals and opinions, unless you
| were a jerk about it, your voice would be just as "audible" as
| everyone else's. Everyone could have their say and not be
| silenced just because they were outnumbered. And you weren't
| writing just to get the most upvotes, or having to tread super
| lightly in the hopes that you wouldn't offend anyone or have
| them downvote you instead of actually, you know, responding to
| you telling you why you're wrong.
|
| Sometimes we all need to be exposed to things we don't like.
| Yes, the upvote/downvote tree system may have largely solved
| the "asshole forum member" problem, and that's great. And for
| some things, the upvote/downvote system is awesome. Finding a
| solution to a problem? On a forum you have to go through most
| of the posts - on reddit, the best answer is probably going to
| be at the top.
|
| But at what cost? Reddit just feels like a form of censorship
| to me - even when politics aren't what's being discussed. Just
| because the government or a corporation isn't the one directly
| doing it, doesn't make it a good thing suddenly.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I wouldn't lump upvotes and downvotes in as censorship,
| personally, but I hold the opinion that they're a cancer
| slowly destroying society nonetheless.
|
| Not even from a pure user posting perspective, it's just too
| easy to manipulate them for things like subtle advertising.
|
| I worry though that we've entered a world where people don't
| know how to look for content without it.
| grumple wrote:
| It's not censorship in that it's _technically_ still
| visible. But it 's like shouting over someone when they try
| to speak. You're still preventing most from accessing the
| message unless people make a greater effort to find those
| messages.
| badRNG wrote:
| > homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who
| go against the grain, either in general or on one particular
| issue.
|
| Doesn't this differ drastically from subreddit to subreddit?
| It's really hard to talk about Reddit as this one place with
| one line of thought when it is really made up of disparate
| groups each with their own moderation style.
|
| What are these "against the grain" opinions that you can't
| find a subreddit for?
| somethinggggggg wrote:
| > homogeneity of thought
|
| I'm surprised Reddit's weird racially segregated subs don't
| get more attention.
| [deleted]
| uses wrote:
| Discord is amazing for getting fast answers to questions, but
| terrible at accumulating knowledge.
|
| For example, several times I've joined a server to ask a question
| about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a
| few minutes.
|
| The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the
| web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with
| forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future
| could benefit from my Q/A session by finding it on a search
| engine.
|
| The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a
| channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I
| post in a random server, I want anonymity.
| wiether wrote:
| A good example is CyclingTips[1]. They are using Slack for years
| but lots of people never went because it's messy.
|
| A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and
| there is already a thousand members and three times that of
| posts.
|
| I'm so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with
| a "fast and easy tool", and then improve this by setting up your
| own platform to welcome everyone.
|
| I use Discord everyday but I agree, it's not THE tool that fits
| every need. Especially if we're talking long term engagement and
| knowledge repository.
|
| [1] : https://cyclingtips.com/ [2] :
| https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about
| raspyberr wrote:
| Scariest thing is Discord isn't accessible without an account.
| And it WILL close down within a decade. And with that all that
| information will be gone.
| slightwinder wrote:
| If you don't have an account, discord asks for a nickname, and
| you still can enter the server without register that account. I
| think they will create some kind of guest-account. And that
| access will disappear at some point, so you need a new invite
| for this server.
|
| Did that changed in the meanwhile?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| It's server adjustable.
| sneak wrote:
| Yes. And the account also requires a phone number as often as
| not, and of course the agreement to their abusive TOS that is
| so restrictive that it even bans political cartoons.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Forums and plenty of other websites close down. They are not
| always archived or backed up. What is wrong with data being
| deleted after a service closes?
| z0r wrote:
| They _can_ be backed up by the internet archive and other
| interested parties, because they are accessed through web
| standard technology. Discord is closed. It's worse for your
| information.
| riantogo wrote:
| I'm swimming the other way and trying to create hosted software
| for plain old forums (https://discoflip.com). I started it to
| scratch my own itch and then opened it up. Honestly, not getting
| much traction.
| abestic9 wrote:
| Cool concept with channels, but it took me over 7.5 seconds to
| load the front page with half of it before any visible content,
| and almost 2.5 seconds to load About. Also, hot-linking images
| is bad practice, it may be worth just getting rid of the images
| while you build out functionality. Are you planning on
| releasing the source for it?
| riantogo wrote:
| The performance sucks. 30 out of 100 on chrome web vitals. We
| are overhauling it this week (including eliminating the post
| load). Great point about hotlinking images which I have taken
| a note of (also creates mixed content http issues). I didn't
| think there would be value in releasing the source. So hadn't
| thought about it. But now that you mentioned it, maybe I
| should.
| chobytes wrote:
| Yeah I dislike that everything is moving on to there. I dont like
| having to share one account with all the random servers I join. I
| dont like all the bots and the gauntlets to enter servers. I dont
| like the format for most of what it seems to be used for. I dont
| like the centralization and the general corporate overlord vibe
| they have.
| throwaway59553 wrote:
| I don't know how people can read anything in Discord. It's a chat
| app, not a good medium to expose any information for people to be
| able to check when needed.
|
| And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it's a
| hellhole.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Works for development when there are < 5 active people and some
| viewers.
| rchaud wrote:
| As a crusty old barnacle in my 30s, I'm inclined to think (with
| no empirical evidence mind you) that younger users prefer chat
| because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly
| updating ticker of new info.
|
| Twitch, IG Live, FB Live, TT all have these auto-refreshing
| streams of comments in the UI.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| Long before that there was IRC. I dunno exactly how old you
| are, but I'm 36 and IRC was definitely a thing during the
| 90s.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm the same age but didn't have Internet before the late
| '90s. MSN Messenger and ICQ were the big chat platforms of
| my time. I rarely chatted with strangers, although there
| were several city-based or activity-based rooms on mIRC
| where that could be done.
| e2le wrote:
| I wonder if we're headed for a future in which knowledge is far
| less accessible than it was in previous years. With communities
| moving to these closed/proprietary platforms (Discord, Slack)
| which aren't fit for purpose (making knowledge accessible and
| easily searchable), I suspect it'll have a negative affect on the
| ability of individuals to learn, collaborate, and share
| knowledge.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I hate discord. Every time I jump on to get help or engage in a
| semi-intellectual conversation, you end up talking to the same
| "regulars" on the server and often times you end up with a lot of
| misinformation. I end up leaving because there's also a lot of
| gate keeping going on.
| winddude wrote:
| or facebook groups. :(
| winddude wrote:
| I see this a lot with automotive forums, or someone steals the
| name of a popular forum for their group.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| "Forums create a record, an archive we can search through"
|
| This article touches on the biggest frustration point of
| communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the
| public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.
| codingdave wrote:
| Forums started dying off when social media started rising. I
| liked them better than what we have now, too, but... it is a
| little odd to attack Discord for the downfall of forums.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Interesting; I'd consider forums to be one of the earliest
| forms of social media. What is the distinction for you?
| [deleted]
| barrenko wrote:
| Not only that, they were the PERFECT form of social media.
|
| Then the name got co-opted so marketing peple could push crap
| around more easily.
| codingdave wrote:
| Forums were content-centric, while social media is person-
| centric. Every user got the same content, with the same
| experience. I consider HN a forum for these reasons - even
| though the content is ordered algorithmically and are voted
| on, Rando A gets the same view as Rando B (for the most part)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yeah, when I think about social media I think something
| like MySpace or our local IRC-Galleria. That is where user
| presence is main thing and not discussion like usenet or
| BBS or simple forums. Not even sure if I would consider
| Discord a social media...
| Macha wrote:
| Lack of singular identity or algorithmic feeds would be the
| big two for me.
|
| Forums are decentralised so you are someone else on the forum
| for game A than on the forum for hobby B, unless you work to
| link your identities. Whereas the big social media platforms
| aspire to be a one stop shop.
|
| Additionally forums generally sort by "newest thread first"
| or "most recently replied thread first" rather than trying to
| push the "hottest" threads or "trending threads" or similar
| at you.
| rumblerock wrote:
| To add onto this, the identities on good forums, with
| reputation scores, post counts, tenure, etc. served as a
| useful proxy for some degree of expertise or experience
| with the general topic at hand.
|
| On Facebook everyone has a transparent identity, yet
| somehow seems more like an anon if outside of your real
| life circle. On Twitter post and follower counts don't
| correlate with having thoughtful or informed opinions. On
| Reddit shitposting dilutes everything, with a dash of
| Instagram-like flex culture for karma points, and the
| effect / bias towards a hive mind is too powerful.
| offsky wrote:
| I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with
| functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics
| that persist and can be searched. On discord it's all one long
| conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to
| find that it's pretty much gone.
| rchaud wrote:
| A "topic" on a message board would be a "channel" on Discord.
| There would still a massive pool of messages to wade through.
| offsky wrote:
| If Discord had one more level of hierarchy, that would make
| it work like a pretty good forums. Server > Channel > Topic >
| Messages. Where mods make the server/channel and users can
| make topic/messages
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Guilded has forum type channels.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| One downside not mentioned is the accessibility aspect.
| Screenreaders are great at reading basic HTML like forums.
| Discord? Significantly more work and trouble. Last I checked,
| VoiceOver completely skips emojis in Discord messages.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| this seems like a old tech people yelling at clouds deal. Get
| over it
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be a
| much better option?
|
| Forums + chat + voting + flairs.
|
| Automoderation for low quality stuff.
|
| Builtin anti-spam, reporting, etc.
|
| Pinning hot topics ...
|
| Search is ok not great but you could build better search on top
| if it's critical.
|
| Alt accounts are encouraged and relatively lightweight.
|
| ... and you can still have a Discord?
|
| I get it, it's just another big platform but feature wise it's
| way better for forum migration...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be
| a much better option?
|
| Cause reddit will kick you out if other subs pressure reddit
| admins to do so.
| femto113 wrote:
| As a middle ground I'd at least love to see some way to expose
| Discord's pinned messages to the web for anonymous viewing. It
| seems like they're acting as the de facto "forum post" of yore.
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