[HN Gopher] Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
___________________________________________________________________
Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
Author : bluetidepro
Score : 227 points
Date : 2022-09-14 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discord.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (discord.com)
| capableweb wrote:
| Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum
| Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text"
| and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something
| that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be
| possible?
|
| Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled
| out to everyone, so thinking something is wrong with my setup.
| drewtato wrote:
| I think this is a feature for community servers, so make sure
| you've converted yours to a community.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode?
| Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in
| some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e.
| everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or
| want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features
| seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit
| communities that are big enough to need different trust
| levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc.
|
| In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your
| server to Community] if your server is just for you and a
| few friends. Community servers are for admins who are
| building larger spaces where people with shared interests
| can come together."
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't
| want a public or large community I'm not supposed to
| convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread
| channels for organizing information. They aren't useless
| for small groups of people, and the same is true for some
| of the other community-locked features.
|
| And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the
| solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious
| nonsense attached:
|
| > Scan media content from all members: this will scan all
| media sent in the server and delete any content that
| contains explicit content
|
| I don't trust an automated algorithm to make moderation
| decisions for me.
|
| > Rules or Guidelines Channel
|
| Useless in a private community.
|
| > Discord may check the contents of your server to make
| sure it's safe!
|
| I don't need a paternalistic american tech company
| invisibly making judgement calls on what my private
| community does or doesn't do.
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360047132851
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| I think we just have a difference of opinion (or a
| different use case) when it comes to threaded channels.
| Personally, I don't have any use for them in any of the
| small Discord groups that I'm in, so I'm perfectly happy
| with having them classed alongside "Rules channels" and
| the like. Based on their decision here I suspect that
| Discord sees it the same way. Obviously, you feel
| differently.
| sphars wrote:
| Same here, I imagine they'll roll it out to all servers over
| the next few days/weeks.
|
| Edit: from the blog post, it's working it's way out and is for
| Community servers:
|
| > Forum channels are slowly making their way to Community
| servers starting today -- keep an eye out on your own server to
| see when you'll be able to create Forum channels! Don't have
| Community enabled? Check out what features enabling Community
| brings to you and your server here.
| capableweb wrote:
| Aah, I see. That wasn't at all clear from the "Forum Channels
| FAQ" linked above. Hopefully someone from Discord sees this +
| previous posts and includes the requirements for getting
| forum channels :)
| seydor wrote:
| How about FTP?
| Zopieux wrote:
| Google Wave finally found a new home.
| yosito wrote:
| Great, Discord has reinvented forums in a walled garden with a
| gamified payment model.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| There's no paywall at all. What are you talking about?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| When is Discord going to add advertisements?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I wish they broke down and let people have the /ignore feature
| that they've been crying out for, instead of just having to rely
| on the very clumsy and comparatively loud blocking feature.
| ccleve wrote:
| I wonder that Discord doesn't use Discord for their own support
| forums:
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us
|
| An example:
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/532642...
|
| This looks a lot like Zendesk.
|
| Maybe they finally realize that long-term knowledge retention is
| a good thing.
| worble wrote:
| And then when Discord eventually folds all of this info will be
| lost, as it's not even easily archivable.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Meh, Internet Archive doesn't meaningfully archive any dead
| forum either. It gets one page of one thread here and two pages
| of this other thread there.
|
| It's basically unusable except to stimulate some nostalgia. So
| I don't think Discord changes much in this regard.
| dancemethis wrote:
| Oh, more ways to hoard user data and metadata and sell it.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the
| time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent
| on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the
| case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company
| based in California.
|
| Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely
| suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought.
| They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every
| mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC
| company.
|
| I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I
| use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free
| for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I was talking with some friends about how the gaming community
| of today has no idea what Teamspeak, Ventrilo or Mumble are.
| What does Discord do that these others never did well?
|
| Screen share, video conference, filesharing (TS had a primitive
| fileserver), and rich text/emoji, persistent chat, and a better
| UI for moving from server to server.
|
| The mumble client already supports using certs for identity. I
| think if Mumble could make multi-server browsing easier _and_
| have screenshare /videoshare, that would be enough for many
| people to swing back to a decentralized tool.
|
| After screenshare and server browsing, having "Mumble as a
| Service" to spin up a new server instantly ala Discord would be
| the killer migration feature to compete.
|
| I wonder if any Mumble developers think about pivoting to a
| more direct competition with Discord? Or if any people with
| videoconference software dev experience would know where to
| start on Mumble?
| cyral wrote:
| > but then scrubbed every mention of games
|
| There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming
| discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are
| playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?
| BrainVirus wrote:
| Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming
| both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder
| images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or
| replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider
| their real target audience.
| bool3max wrote:
| They operated a games storefront and library for a short
| period of time, but that died pretty quickly.
| [deleted]
| shabbatt wrote:
| What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default
| support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers
| needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because
| chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of
| context with screenshots.
|
| I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower"
| and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view.
| Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available
| all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
| dmix wrote:
| I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice.
| Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often
| needing admin approval before posting, etc.
| shabbatt wrote:
| actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime,
| ferrarichat
|
| i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were
| quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due
| to this admin wall.
|
| it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing
| where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number
| of accounts to impact opinions.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > actually many communities still using phpbb like
|
| But the point of your complaint is that many communities
| have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > Having to sign up for the hundred forum account
|
| On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to
| sign up _at all_ , and I can stumble across interesting
| things through either a web search or perchance a link from
| elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's
| all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
|
| Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively
| participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just
| happy to occasionally browse through, and _quite_ a few
| more I just randomly stumble across while searching for
| information on whatever subject currently occupies me.
|
| While having to sign up separately for every forum might be
| considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't
| find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now
| and than that I actually feel the urge to actively
| contribute something.
|
| The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter)
| works on the other hand means that all the serendipity
| stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum
| thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm
| having can't even happen in the first place because like I
| said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
|
| So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run
| forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for
| being able to just casually browse through and being able
| to find them at all in the first place.
| jacooper wrote:
| Honestly, matrix.org is the best alternative.
|
| Its basically the new chat standard.
| holler wrote:
| I'd love to get feedback on my project sqwok.im and whether it
| may interest you.
| tester756 wrote:
| >They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed
| every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from
| a VC company.
|
| what's wrong with that?
|
| did anything change in the way Discord works cuz of that?
| because I didn't notice
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful.
|
| Like?
| jacooper wrote:
| https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_neve.
| ..
| jhgg wrote:
| I am curious about this as well. We take privacy very
| seriously at Discord. Earlier this year, we entirely re-wrote
| our privacy policy as well to be more plain English and less
| legalese. I think that it's actually one of the more well
| written privacy policies out there.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> We take privacy very seriously at Discord._
|
| You don't even have something as basic as adjustable
| message retention. You host your service on Google Cloud
| and AFAIK, you don't use E2E for anything, not even direct
| messages.
|
| Your privacy policy includes the following clause:
| We may share information if needed to enforce our Terms of
| Service, Community Guidelines, or other policies, or to
| protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and
| others.
|
| Which, as anyone semi-aware will realize, is generic enough
| to allow for sharing anything with anyone.
|
| Oh, and according to the same privacy policy you retain
| deleted account information for at least two years by
| default. Anything else requires the user to "submit an ID
| for an age verification appeal". That's telling in its own
| right.
| josephd79 wrote:
| so its just threads but a different view?
| aliqot wrote:
| Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that
| cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this
| was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly
| dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord,
| etc.
|
| Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same,
| but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media,
| and I'd go one further to say that newsgroups were well indexed
| and searchable. We are in a 'dark decade' of lost history search-
| wise in some hobby communities.
| fny wrote:
| PHPBB:Reddit::AIM:Discord
|
| The name of the app is Discord for crying out loud. Have you
| seen the kinds of things people are using it for? Discord is
| *wildly* hackable chat, not forum software. There's tons of
| crap being slung around on Discord that doesn't deserve to be
| archived because that's not the purpose.
|
| Is IRC indexable or searchable? No. Usenet served that purpose.
| People hacked in query bots to IRC. At least Discord comes with
| built in search.
|
| If you want a forum, go use forum software.
| devmor wrote:
| >If you want a forum, go use forum software.
|
| Boy have I got some news for you about what Discord just
| announced. You should check out the link on the post you're
| commenting on!
| mediaman wrote:
| Sure, but the problem is that so many communities are moving
| discussion around solving domain-specific problems to
| Discord. And the collective wealth of knowledge - some of
| which gets accumulated across decades - instead becomes an
| amnesiac experience where answering one person's question
| provides no gain to the next person with the same question in
| a year's time.
|
| I'm not sure why this move is happening.
| fny wrote:
| Exactly. This is a people problem not a software problem.
| mjr00 wrote:
| On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and
| indexed is always a benefit.
|
| I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on
| the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements
| I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord
| name>". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by
| their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a
| _lot_ different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and
| certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.
|
| People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being
| watched. Discussion that happens on public forums usually
| sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized
| by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively
| are.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agreed. Ironically, I already feel that
| Discord is a lot less private than IRC used to be. In a way,
| history not being accessible to those not currently in a
| channel is also a feature.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Scrollback is actually a permission that you can disable;
| but it's on by default and I've never seen someone turn it
| off.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| im in a few servers with it off and it works really
| poorly. even switching between channels in same session,
| especially on web will instantly clear it, they seem to
| struggle with session management
| gwillen wrote:
| Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let
| you still see history from when you joined; it just lets
| you see whatever bits of history your client has cached,
| which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop)
| or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure
| (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make
| much sense.
|
| I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but
| it's not what Discord users expect; the mobile behavior
| is just random, since you can't control when the client
| is "connected" or not.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Doesn't it? I'd argue that this is a perfectly reasonable
| outcome. Server-side history is disabled -- for everyone.
| Sure, you could have saved the conversation when you saw
| it, but it doesn't do it for you.
|
| Ephemerality can be desirable. However, I do agree there
| should ideally be three options, including the one you're
| describing.
| SomeBoolshit wrote:
| So it's really just IRC mode?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just
| switching between channels on the same server doesn't
| reliably retain chat history, so it basically just
| doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| That's a good point and now that you mention it I
| remember seeing that option. But as you say, it's almost
| always on, so it barely matters.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying Discord or any server admin
| are making a mistake here, scrollback is often very
| useful. But I've definitely opted not to share some
| things because I knew they would be searchable
| ultimately. Having witnessed the transition of some IRC
| channels to Discord, I dare say others must have felt
| something similar.
| jotm wrote:
| That's where the anonymity comes in. Why the hell would you
| use any personally identifiable info? Just use _mjr69420_.
|
| It's this ability to find random comments on obscure stuff
| that really made me love the Internet.
|
| Nowadays, the social media stuff, and frankly, the influx of
| idiots, has turned into garbage. Their thoughts should still
| be archived and searchable though.
| rrix2 wrote:
| > the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different
| than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook
| or LinkedIn.
|
| but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds
| necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for
| information sharing within the fighting game community, for
| example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your
| local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on
| the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and
| there's no way to search for questions across them, so
| everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address
| FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some
| other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and
| its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope
| that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still
| access with information about character matchups, frame data,
| etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a
| new game is basically difficult to solve in this
| decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like
| shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed
| chat rooms and google docs.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> I don 't want people on the internet to be able to drudge
| up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling
| "site:discord.com <my discord name>"._
|
| We've had public and private forums - or more often, private
| sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don't see
| why you can't achieve the same separation on Discord, as long
| as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for
| each channel.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it
| would work out that way in practice. Most users would
| probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't
| understand the setup would carry on as they always had,
| many of those who do would find it easier to treat all
| alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could
| always change).
| solveit wrote:
| I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting
| privacy.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Privacy should be the default so that people who go for
| privacy don't stick out.
| solveit wrote:
| Sorry, my comment was overly brief and flippant. I see
| this change as a net positive for privacy, and the fact
| that it's of only limited benefit for people who are less
| scrupulous about privacy is unfortunate but I am still
| pleased on the balance.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> Those who don 't understand the setup would carry on
| as they always had, many of those who do would find it
| easier to treat all alike_
|
| This is exactly what used to happen on "legacy" forums,
| too. I'm all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some
| point you have to just let people take some individual
| responsibility.
|
| 1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to
| disable posting to public channels in their account
| settings, etc.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private
| platform such as Discord, rather than something public
| like Twitter or Reddits _is_ exercising that
| responsibility.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as
| Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or
| Reddits is exercising that responsibility._
|
| I find it difficult to believe that people choose Discord
| over eg Reddit because they value privacy - you can
| create a private subreddit _much_ more easily than you
| can create a new Discord instance. People choose Discord
| because they want live chat that works.
|
| Anyone who _is_ consciously choosing Discord for privacy
| reasons shouldn't have a problem policing themselves when
| it comes to public vs. private channels, no?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think people chose Discord because they want a private
| place to chat with friends.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people
| think they are.
|
| What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing.
|
| The solution to this problem is to have a very clear
| indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If
| you really want to, make it a link that explains what
| that means.
|
| And you're done.
|
| This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a
| problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern
| software that went to crap, not the users.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| _> People are a lot more open when they 're not worried about
| being watched._
|
| I have some bad news for you.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate
| protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| people don't think it be like it is, but it do
| kbyatnal wrote:
| If you post on a public Discord, I think you are accepting
| that your comments will be made public. I totally agree with
| you on private Discords though.
| rektide wrote:
| > _On the modern internet, I don 't know that being
| searchable and indexed is always a benefit._
|
| Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search &
| find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity.
| Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but
| endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable
| advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on.
|
| All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked
| for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown,
| especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely
| think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd
| over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to
| greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to
| speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context
| low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most
| fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination
| & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad
| conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have
| tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so
| rarely a real issue.
|
| The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally
| stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to
| freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly,
| saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this
| structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the
| public-ness of these mediums.
|
| Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is
| exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private
| debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes.
| Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities
| thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the
| public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see
| whose gotten world.
|
| Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal
| horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private,
| exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability
| to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent
| aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make
| a public conscious possible).
| mbesto wrote:
| (1) Most forums are pseudo anonymous. You happen to be on one
| right now.
|
| > People are a lot more open when they're not worried about
| being watched.
|
| (2) This is a very "techie" take. Facebook has proven most
| people don't care about their privacy. Note - not saying
| privacy _ISN 'T_ an issue per se, I'm just saying that we've
| already proven the general population really doesn't care.
|
| (3) AVS Forums, Tesla Forums, Malibu boat owners, etc. are
| all forums I regularly use and have great indexed content
| that would easily get lost in a Discord server. Also, no one
| knows who I am there. So as long as YOU want to stay pseudo
| anonymous while still contributing...you most certainly can.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds
| like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a
| potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.
|
| Maybe if you use forums with a real name policy? I wouldn't
| give prospective employers all my nicknames :)
| Arrath wrote:
| > I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)
|
| I wouldn't give them any, to be honest.
|
| And it weirds me out to see people posting with their real
| names, be it youtube comments or on niche forums. That
| anonymity is a deeply held thing to me, I guess.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Some employers like to see their employees participating
| in online forums around their particular field of
| expertise. Mine also, though I've declined to do so for
| now.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said
| nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name.
| Frequently used for high profile job positions and their
| "background" checks.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of
| that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples?
| Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about
| me.
|
| Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit
| more complicated not to mix them up now because almost
| every email service requires a phone number and I only
| have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid
| sim over the counter, they have this annoying
| registration process with photo ID that also has to be
| renewed every once in a while).
| pph wrote:
| What could be a greater way to start a professional
| relationship than some cyberstalking... /s
| bee_rider wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had
| a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that
| people had to sign up and you could set things so that only
| friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the
| end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends
| network is eventually infiltrated and scraped.
|
| Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense --
| the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but
| this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team,
| not because they are benevolent.
| bakugo wrote:
| Have you considered simply not using a username that ties
| back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand
| this need people have nowadays with associating their
| identity and personal information with online aliases and
| then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows
| using multiple accounts on the same client now.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| This is not really practical without good opsec because of
| the risk of doxxing. You basically need to have strong
| discipline to censor out every information that could
| remotely be traced back to you. The doxxer need to succeed
| to id you only once; you need to protect yourself on all
| and every comment you make.
|
| Take a look at my comment history. Can you figure out who
| am I? I worry constantly about this.
|
| I was targeted once in a politically motivated witchhunt on
| Reddit (that also targeted other moderators of a national
| subreddit), and there were a doxxing pastebin that
| circulated in hate groups. It contained the real name,
| addresses, id number, etc of many moderators; a lot of them
| had made a conscious effort to not leak anything, but they
| could be traced nonetheless.
|
| In my username it had "none information could be found".
| But I later checked out my comment history on reddit and
| found out plenty of information leaks; people were just not
| determined enough to comb out the comments.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > Have you considered simply not using a username that ties
| back to your real identity?
|
| I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To
| the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the
| Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important
| and a well thought-out reason.
|
| Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so
| that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN
| and HN-related posts.
| max51 wrote:
| >I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now.
|
| people can be extremely naive.
|
| It has also been a problem with people who make content
| on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit
| too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show
| the street where you live.
| robotguy wrote:
| >it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street
| where you live
|
| Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically
| doxxer training.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| In the 90s we were taught, never give out your name, your
| age, where you live, or anything that can be tied back to
| you.
| mjr00 wrote:
| For something like Discord, I'm eventually going to form
| human connections with people. I'm not going to post my
| address and SSN, obviously, but my real name, my
| occupation, the company I work for? Yeah, that'll probably
| come up.
|
| To say "just practice good opsec and never tie your name to
| your real identity" is the same as saying "just don't make
| friends on Discord" to me. I understand why people would do
| that, but I really don't like the idea of being a
| pseudonymous blur on the internet like I am on HN/reddit.
| jhgg wrote:
| There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be
| indexed.
|
| I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very
| much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on
| Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.
| danudey wrote:
| I'm already coming across more and more communities who say
| "For more information/to download the example files/to see
| our FAQ just join our Discord!", which is an immediate
| turnoff. I'm not going to "join a discord" just to see an FAQ
| or download some prerelease build or something else.
|
| Now even entire communities are going to move onto Discord
| and become completely unreachable for people like me who
| don't want to "join the community" just to read one post that
| one person wrote one time.
| pph wrote:
| I also feel that "just" is very much an understatement when
| it means "sign up for a service that doesn't play nice with
| anonymous networks (Tor) and often requires to share and
| verify your phone number".
| joe-collins wrote:
| I'm hugely relieved that you see the black box as a situation
| to be addressed. For me, that circumstance alone turns
| Discord from a neat and useful tool into a tragedy that I'm
| forced to live with, and I'd love to see it move into the
| former category
|
| Hopefully distinct from mere searchability: how about
| integrating a wiki service for big/boosted servers?
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| This would be a huge boost in adoption!
|
| But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few
| to any links to content from discord.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I think with the amount of internal linking and original
| content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if
| the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.
| gpm wrote:
| That sounds like Google's problem?
|
| I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the
| size and popularity of discord.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Searchable? Yes. Indexable? Absolutely not.
|
| Even public servers are only public to human accounts and only
| server admins are allowed to invite bots. If you try to scrape
| Discord with a human account you will be banned.
| jotm wrote:
| That's AIcist :D
|
| But really, you can't tell human accounts from bots.
| franga2000 wrote:
| With a sophisticated enough crawler, sure, but that would
| require a significant amount of R&D. I don't know of any
| organization that both has the resources to do that, is
| willing to break Discord's ToS and make their index public.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Given what I've heard about people getting banned for
| "self-bots"[0] they seem to err more on the "ban humans
| that look too bot-like" side of that dilemma.
|
| That being said, while there is _some_ overlap between the
| two, it 's not terribly difficult to detect specific things
| that bots would want to do, such as scrape a Discord
| channel, and ban any human accounts that match that
| profile. A regular human is going to be sending lots of
| messages and querying message history only rarely; a bot is
| going to hit the message history API as quickly as the rate
| limits allow and never send a single message.
|
| Browser fingerprinting could also be used to sus out bots
| that don't look like a web browser enough. Most bot
| developers are just making HTTP requests rather than firing
| up a real browser and attaching to it with WebDriver[1].
| Once you do that then you have to play walls-and-ladders[2]
| with the Discord user-interface team. Oops, your bot just
| clicked on the fake invisible "please ban me immediately"
| button that we snuck in right next to the link that opens
| #general! Oops, we decided to obfuscate all message content
| so that incoming message JSON is unreadable and outgoing
| HTML requires having your specific Discord CSS loaded to
| view it!
|
| Just as there's unlimited ways to disguise a bot as a
| human, there's also unlimited ways to unmask them or
| frustrate them while remaining usable for human users.
| Turing completeness is a harsh mistress, and scrapers only
| work because people find economic value in being scraped -
| not that scrapers have an inherent advantage.
|
| [0] Scraping your own Discord client token and using it to
| authenticate a Discord bot with your own account
|
| [1] Writing a WebExtension content script to inject input
| into a browser would also work to self-bot
|
| [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120117-00/
| ?p=85...
| [deleted]
| SteveMoody73 wrote:
| I've run a forum and worked on a couple of others. First one
| was for lactose intolerance when there was very little
| information available. Others were technical sites. In that
| case more information became easily available and in others,
| it's moved to platforms like facebook and twitter.
|
| I do mourn the loss of these forums as there was a lot of good
| information, and more importantly some first hand experience in
| some of the posts. A lot of these things now are view or click
| driven so they lose the personality. While there are still a
| lot of good forum sites around and do well, I think the rise of
| spam posts and increasing work of moderating the smaller sights
| was too high and eventually killed them off.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| It's important for a forum to be both externally searchable and
| internally. A lot of the old forums had internal search tools
| that really sucked, and external search engines didn't seem to
| cover everything.
| holler wrote:
| I created https://sqwok.im because I wanted an open, indexable,
| public chat site tailored to kitchen-table conversations,
| influenced from my years growing up on IRC.
|
| There's been an active discussion on whether to allow
| gifs/images in the chat, with many saying they like that it's
| focused just on conversation.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Apt association I'd never made before. Communication in discord
| does have similar traits as communication in IRC.
|
| IRC is indexed via passive bots. I can still go back and search
| my old IRC user names in popular search engines and find
| messages I sent 15 years ago.
| EGreg wrote:
| Discourse vs Discord
|
| Not PhpBB
| tester756 wrote:
| mehh, I'd rather use PHPBB-like forums instead of Discourse.
| kbyatnal wrote:
| I totally agree - I find myself missing the Google discussions
| filter (if you remember what that was?) very often. It would
| let you search only across forums, message boards, and other
| places where actual discussions where taking place (as opposed
| to SEO and blog spam).
|
| I actually built a small tool for myself to try and replicate
| this. It searches across a few discords, a curated index of
| forums and message boards, and a little bit of Twitter (while
| applying some advance parameters to filter out the marketing
| spam). Works pretty well!
|
| If anyone else wants to give it a go (desktop only for now):
| https://crew-rho.vercel.app
|
| (the forum search takes a little bit of time to load, but
| you'll see it if you scroll down)
| freediver wrote:
| Knowledge being accessible via search engines is the main
| reason we are sticking to a real 'forum' vs the new Discord
| feature (despite having a very large Discord community).
|
| There is a lot of sophistication needed for managing a forum so
| it could mean that this Discord feature is meant to address a
| different need.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in.
| I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to
| categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups
| (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't
| sufficient.
|
| Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and
| that's it.
| nullwarp wrote:
| Oh so much this. I find discord utterly impossible to use and
| keep up with. I'm in 8 servers, each one has a bunch of
| channels. I have no clue what's going on. Every time I log in I
| have to click through 8 servers and like 150 different
| channels.
|
| I've just given up and I'll just never use it again. Absolute
| dumpster fire.
| emptysea wrote:
| I think it's pretty common for open source projects and even
| companies to use a combination of Discord and Discourse. Discord
| entering the forum space makes a lot of sense.
|
| If they can figure out how to make the forums public / exposed to
| search engines then it could entirely remove the need for
| Discourse.
| Prestoon wrote:
| Earlier discussion about Discord being a black hole for
| information https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982
| angryasian wrote:
| I get discord is the hot thing but I find it to be so noisy.
| Maybe its because i'm old but I don't know how people are able to
| find relevant things. Its like slack on speed.
| philippejara wrote:
| As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally
| terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for
| specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact
| strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be
| pleasant.
|
| [0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/community/posts/3600430...
| acedTrex wrote:
| Discord search? terrible? I've been ludicrously impressed with
| it over the years. one of my favorite discord features
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. I've been thoroughly
| impressed with how I can search a word and find all instances
| of it going back months and months. It can do somewhat fuzzy
| searching too which is huge.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Discord's search definitely has lots of space for improvement,
| but it's already among the best in all these new IM services.
|
| For example, Telegram has it 10 times worse than Discord. It
| (roughly) can only search whole words, which basically means it
| doesn't work with East Asian languages _at all_ (since they don
| 't have spaces between words).
| airstrike wrote:
| Probably worth pointing out that Whatsapp has near perfect
| search. I can go into any group chat and search for words and
| quickly skip to some reference from 5 years ago, then reply
| to that message
| Kye wrote:
| Guilded had this a long time ago:
| https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Fo...
|
| No one used them for the same reason Discord killed forums:
| realtime chat is better for most things people used forums for.
| asddubs wrote:
| huh, is guilded basically just an exact replica of discord?
| Kye wrote:
| Early forum software copied features back and forth and often
| looked very similar. Modern PHPBB doesn't look much different
| from the original perl UBB, for example. Keeping the
| tradition alive.
| asddubs wrote:
| i'm pretty impressed by how close it is, at least from the
| screenshots. if you swapped out the logos for discord
| logos, there's no way I'd notice or even be able to tell
| you what's different if you told me
| radiojasper wrote:
| All that, and still no photo gallery option... They added
| flicking through photo dumps, but thumbnailing them and putting
| them in a nice gallery is apparently still too hard.
| jhgg wrote:
| This is actively being worked on right now actually :)
| radiojasper wrote:
| Oh for real? Thanks!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I knew Discord would eventually try to become a forum. Every new
| communications paradigm tries to become all things to all people.
| Sadly, Discord will never be as good a forum as vbulletin/xenforo
| or even phpbb, and it'll lose some of it's focus elsewhere
| attempting to do so.
| jacooper wrote:
| Honestly I would rather just use Matrix.
|
| What they need now is just better clients, element needs to
| improve.
| Arathorn wrote:
| We're doing our best... https://element.io/blog/an-
| unrecognisable-improvement-elemen...
| k__ wrote:
| Seems like a huge improvement over threads, which get lost all
| the time.
| datpuz wrote:
| I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world.
|
| I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me,
| or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so
| tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many
| channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get
| better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with
| features that it takes too much effort to find what you need.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The value of Slack is its integrations with dozens of business
| apps like Jira. They don't focus much on end user UX because
| that's not the point of it - they deliver straight business
| value. It wasn't until recently Discord bots were capable of
| much other than parsing chat messages and reactions for input,
| let alone the full menus google calendar puts into Slack. I'd
| love a Discord frontend to slack (see https://cancel.fm/ripcord
| for a serious attempt at one) but Slack itself is not going
| away anytime soon.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'm the same way. Slack for my day job and multiple Discord
| servers for my friend groups. I greatly prefer Discord over
| Slack (replies being one of the things I like most, stop trying
| to make ~~fetch~~ threads happen Slack).
|
| The only thing I wish Discord supported better are group chats
| (not on a server). They support them but there is no way to
| "pin" them to the main sidebar. In general I wish I had more
| control over the Discord sidebar (show specific channels and/or
| group chats).
| debacle wrote:
| Is Discord the "federated social media" that everyone has been
| looking for?
|
| How are they going to monetize?
| grishka wrote:
| No, it's as centralized as they ever come. The "servers" are a
| misnomer, really. That's what they call communities/workspaces
| for some reason. If you want federated social media, you're
| looking for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects. I'm also
| building my own one.
| datalopers wrote:
| Discord has a premium subscription tier and in 2021 did >$200M
| via that monetization strategy.
|
| https://discord.com/nitro
| aaronax wrote:
| It's not federated though...?
| Siecje wrote:
| Why can't you discover Discord servers with less than 1 thousand
| users?
|
| IRC had this same discoverability problem, Discord can solve it.
|
| How do you grow a Discord server without having a community
| somewhere else?
| mizzao wrote:
| In terms of building a community to share and discuss
| information, would Reddit serve the same purpose as this, and if
| so would it be better or worse?
| moepstar wrote:
| I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge
| storage" in the form of Discord.
|
| Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really
| good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a _tiny_ bit
| overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there 's so
| much to wrap my head around...
|
| Anyways, if i _could_ look up the answers to my questions _very
| probably_ someone has asked before on a forum, i wouldn 't have
| to join their Discord and use the (imho) subpar search to _maybe_
| find what i was looking for...
|
| So yeah, those kind of communities would be (again, IMHO) better
| served if they'd use a forum - especially since that knowledge
| also would be indexed by search engines.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| It's because people get a really large amount of value out of
| real (or near-real) time discussion- in many cases more than
| they get out of archival reference. Forums slow down the
| interaction time _drastically_. I 'm plenty old enough to
| remember using forums and subsequently switching to chat, and
| the ability to work through things and problem solve increased
| massively. Not being able to find things later is, well, a
| problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of
| now.
|
| This forum channels thing might be a middle ground that gives
| the possibility of free flowing interactions but with
| structure, and indexing as a possibility.
| wil421 wrote:
| Lots of forums I belong to have tons of already answered very
| common questions. I've joined a few on various topics from
| BBQing to NAS building. When I was building my NAS every
| single question I had was answered and they had plenty of
| stickies on various topics. IRC or discord would have been a
| fall back to the searchable knowledge of a forum.
|
| The only time I had a question was when I ran into an issue
| with my UPS freezing up my NAS during power outages. The guy
| who figure it out could've helped faster on discord, still
| only took one work day of back and forth, but now the next
| guy can search my topic.
| derefr wrote:
| > Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for
| later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now.
|
| Who said anything about finding things later? I want a forum
| because, for niche topics/questions, slow+indexed is the only
| way to hope anyone will be able to answer my question at all.
|
| I can ask a question on a forum and maybe be answered a week
| later, by someone who's looking through older open threads
| under the expectation that they can still be of help; or I
| can ask a question in a chatroom and the people who know
| aren't online, chat continues, when they come online they've
| missed it, and so I get my response never.
|
| It's a key difference in assumptions, mostly due to different
| etiquette.
|
| When you solve a problem you asked about in a forum thread,
| you tend to _say_ that. So a forum thread that remains open
| with no replies is effectively "left hanging", with the
| author still likely to be interested in an answer. So, for
| the people who offer help in such forums, there can be value
| in looking through old open forum threads / solving "cold
| cases."
|
| Meanwhile, chat messages are sort of "drive-by" things, where
| you'll write a thing, and then, if nobody responds, leave and
| never come back. You were hoping for an immediate response;
| you didn't get it; so you gave up. There's no expectation of
| someone ever coming back, or seeing a response given much
| later; so people don't try to offer them.
| moepstar wrote:
| ...as well as the tiring dance of having to explain things
| over and over and...
|
| In an ideal world, if i haven't found an answer from a
| previous thread on my own, i could be gently nudged into
| the right direction.
|
| Mind you, i've been around on IRC for a very long time and
| know how tiring it can get to basically get asked the same
| question in different form all the time (and "having" to
| answer it).
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I think discord is a very good knowledge storage channel for
| newbies who are too novice to even form their questions
| coherently and need help to do so. Though it is taxing to help
| them and takes a lot of patience.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be
| hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to
| the point that many will not recognize them as ads)?
|
| Right now Discord has great usability and many people have
| Discord accounts.
| shagie wrote:
| Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably?
| https://docs.github.com/en/discussions
|
| An example of this -
| https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions
| Kye wrote:
| Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not
| a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't
| necessarily want to join a community they would join on one
| with an account made on the other.
| cowtools wrote:
| I get the impression that discord users are mostly
| children and not programmers.
|
| While there might be some overlap as discord users grow
| up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing
| that even in that case they will have a separate
| github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or
| unprofessional programming.
| gorbypark wrote:
| There are a ton of very active programming related
| channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly
| replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about
| projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown
| support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to
| Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a
| place to discuss programming.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds
| or thousands posts each day.
|
| Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place.
|
| And it is still proprietary lock-in.
|
| But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not
| asking phone number for read only access.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Github for some reason disables search engine indexing of
| wikis, not sure about discussions.
| jotm wrote:
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > has decent interface with minimal ads
|
| For now, while they still in "bait mode". If experience has
| something to show in the web is that once they go into switch
| mode, the more and more ads will come, interface will become
| worse as in a bad Facebook clone, site will become
| intentionally unusable on mobile to force people to install
| the app (with even more ads and tracking!), every minimally
| controversial subject for the advertisers will be banned,
| platform will start requiring phone numbers ("It's just to
| prevent spam and recovery your password, we swear!!"), an
| algorithmically controlled timeline will appear to improve
| engagement, text or longer posts will be de-prioritized to
| give more visibility to low-effort easy-consumption meme-like
| content (that give more of the said engagement), and "out of
| community" content will be pushed into it.
|
| Reddit is currently best example of this happening.
|
| Am I too pessimistic? Nope, I just saw this happen too many
| times.
|
| If you want to build a future-proof online community, be
| prepared to deploy and control your own infrastructure and
| lose the "easy to get" users. Won't the cheap and won't be
| easy.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including
| your own content you wrote there.
| StuckDuck wrote:
| Yep, and that's the story of how I lost years worth of
| discussions and chats because Discord thought well that
| linking a phone number doesn't automatically allow you to
| verify yourself with it.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Discord has a low barrier to entry and continued use.
|
| With a single account, I can join a dozen communities and
| easily stay up to date with them, and get an instant
| notification on my phone or desktop when someone answers a
| question I asked in any of them.
|
| To do the same with a dozen phpbb communities, I need to create
| a dozen accounts and track each site individually.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _easily stay up to date with them_
|
| How do you stay up to date when there are thousands and
| thousands of messages generated per day or even per hour?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Aggressive muting of channels and servers.
| babypuncher wrote:
| You can control what triggers a notification on a per-
| server and even per-channel basis. For most big servers, I
| have everything set to mute except for when people @ me
| directly or respond to one of my messages.
| xena wrote:
| People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX.
| It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an
| earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum
| engines.
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar
| (aka good branding and emotes)
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?
| whateveracct wrote:
| Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards
| slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a
| feature in a way - own the domain and build something
| real.
|
| Discord basically won because of style over substance. I
| use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's
| nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they
| poured into going to market and branding.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Discord basically won because of style over substance.
| I use it plenty because I don 't have a choice._
|
| This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because
| "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the
| best. If there was another option out there people would
| use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set
| up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live
| community on there; and moderate it. Or forget phpBB, try
| Discourse.
|
| When you say Discord is "Style over substance" you
| willfully ignore all the downsides about forums that
| caused people to migrate to Discord/Slack in the first
| place. We will never have robust forum software as long
| as people continue to believe that the reason Discord is
| as popular is it is is because of "VC marketing dollars".
| abduhl wrote:
| >> If there was another option out there people would use
| it.
|
| This statement seems to not account for lock-in or
| network effects. Why do people still use Oracle products
| or Microsoft products like Outlook or Excel? It's
| certainly a big stretch to say that these things are "the
| best" (although Excel is, objectively, the best) unless
| your definition of "the best" is simply "the thing we are
| currently using because if there were something better
| we'd be using that." This seems a bit circular to me.
|
| Why do people use Discord (or Slack) for housing
| information instead of bringing it into a self-hosted
| forum or internal database? Because people were lazy when
| they started and they're too lazy to port it over now and
| the massive inefficiencies are distributed over time and
| a number of users. It's a tragedy of the commons.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Because people were lazy when they started and they
| 're too lazy to port it over now_
|
| Some of these communities are _older than Discord_ but
| somehow they were lazy. It simply can 't be because
| Discord/Slack are better tools. The implication that
| there are communities working on database internals using
| Discord, but they are too dumb to standup Discourse is
| astounding.
| abduhl wrote:
| "When they started" has nothing to do with the company's
| founding but when they started using Discord for this
| particular purpose. Consider on-prem versus cloud and not
| switching between them when it makes financial sense
| because of lock-in and inertial resistance.
|
| Another example: I used to use a wristwatch rather than
| my phone's clock (this is pre-smart watch) even though
| just using my phone would have been more efficient. Why
| did I do this? Because of habitual lock-in. How did I
| break out of it? I eventually realized how expensive it
| was to maintain my watch and that there was another
| option that I already had that did everything my watch
| did. In your world and under your definition of "the
| best" then my wristwatch was "the best" solution for
| telling time despite it obviously not being the most
| economical or efficient. Until it wasn't, and then my
| phone somehow became "the best" tool for telling time in
| your world.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _You don 't use it because "you don't have a choice"_
|
| I do.
|
| There are many dev communities like Svelte which use
| Discord so I'm forced to use it although I kinda hate it
| too.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because
| "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the
| best.
|
| Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't
| want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden.
| Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the
| decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate
| with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for
| me.
|
| It's a really poor choice for this IMO, matrix is so much
| better and you can use any client you want.
| Qualadore wrote:
| In my experience when I see an open-source community use
| something like Zulip, Glitter, Matrix, or Slack it seems
| inactive relative to an equivalent hypothetical Discord
| community. I think this outweighs the privacy concerns.
|
| Discord's biggest advantage in my eyes is that it makes
| it easy to build a critical mass of users. This makes it
| easy for newcomers to get answers to questions quickly.
| dancemethis wrote:
| It doesn't. You are the one heavily devaluating the need
| of privacy.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _I hate discord with a passion because I don 't want to
| be data mined by some corporate walled garden._
|
| So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user
| experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone
| might consider when actually _using_ the product, but it
| has to do with the ethics of the hosting company.
|
| I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from
| Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason,
| but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is
| a better car than the 911.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes, "better" means different things to different people.
|
| But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche
| 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a
| very good car in my eyes.
|
| I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different
| than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like
| clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive.
| They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but
| because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way
| with services.
| jhgg wrote:
| All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the
| needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a
| better experience for users.
|
| To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC
| money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we
| also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product
| that was better than what was out there and solved a
| problem for our users."
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for
| server admins that want a modern-looking design and it
| can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If
| the admins have the cash, discourse does offer
| hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1].
|
| 0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing
|
| 1: https://community.cloudflare.com/
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose
|
| And Discord "server" can be setup within several seconds
| via GUI.
|
| Sadly, only for tiny minority really aware of vendor
| lock-in it will be preferable to setup Discourse.
| joemi wrote:
| I'll take a Discourse forum over a Discord any day
| (though I haven't tried Discord's new forum feature).
| Discourse is an evolution of a forum, while (until now
| maybe) Discord is an evolution of IRC. Huge difference.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Strong disagree. Usability and improved UX isn't sugar.
| tyrfing wrote:
| It took over like wildfire because it had 10x better UX
| than any combination of alternatives - and you definitely
| needed a combination to match the features. Start with the
| fact that it's not just chat, but also video, voice, and
| includes things like multimedia uploads that are a modern
| baseline, but still absent from many other services.
| secabeen wrote:
| Forcing each question to be asked fresh also eliminates out-
| of-date replies. I often run into answers on forum archives
| that no longer work because the fast-moving software they are
| regarding has changed.
| jotm wrote:
| Suuuure, _earth shattering_.
| grishka wrote:
| Huh? Discord has really poor UX compared to other IM services
| I use, like Telegram. Notification settings are so complex
| that it takes trial, error, and missed important messages to
| end up with a sensible configuration (no broadcast mentions
| in any shape or form, no badges unless I'm mentioned by my
| own username or there's a reply to my message). Every little
| piece of its UI is custom-built and routinely defies my
| expectations about how UI controls should behave. Just a few
| examples of my pain points with Discord:
|
| - They somehow managed to mess up the message text field so
| much that my system-wide text replacements don't work. They
| work literally everywhere else.
|
| - When I want to add a reaction to a message, there's an
| emoji picker. It shows custom emoji FIRST, and it shows
| custom emoji from ALL "servers" I'm a member of. It takes
| actual time for something that should be a nearly-instant
| interaction.
|
| - There are no last seen statuses when a user is offline.
|
| - The files. Need I say more? Not only does that 8 MB limit
| feel like an insult in this day and age, so does Discord's
| insistence on always storing the original files as-is. OK for
| images, but I sometimes have to send screencasts, and you
| never know what size it even is. I end up having to upload
| them somewhere else and then send a link. Your files are too
| powerful, my ass.
|
| And, yes, it's Electron, and at this point I'm convinced that
| an Electron app just can't possibly be good, no matter how
| hard you try and how good your engineers are.
| entropie wrote:
| Discords notifications are actually are nightmare. I still
| have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot
| figure out (since like 2 month) where it comes from. And
| that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar
| discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get
| rid of.
|
| Overall its usability is okay for me, but there are really
| some big quirks.
| grishka wrote:
| > I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link
| and I cannot figure out
|
| Maybe it's a friend request?
|
| > And that all after I had a little red dot in the
| taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow
| managed to get rid of.
|
| This is the most annoying thing. I think it means you
| have "some" unread messages. A single message in any of
| the 100s of channels in a dozen "servers" you're in will
| trigger that with default notification settings.
| entropie wrote:
| > Maybe it's a friend request?
|
| Just tried that - nope. It actually was the "Nitro - 1
| Month FREE" tab below "Friends".
|
| Never tried that before...
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge
| storage" in the form of Discord._
|
| They don't. Obviously chats are not knowledge storages but a
| means for quick communication.
|
| I think chats like Gitter, Slack, and Discord proliferated
| because the realtime thing makes people feel differently vs
| async communication.
|
| But, like Discord realized, chats are just terrible tools for
| communities built around learning and solving problems (like
| dev communities around a tech project). There's no collective
| learning anymore, no stored knowledge, etc. And the problem
| gets worse as a community grows.
| spankalee wrote:
| My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev) just moved our
| community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be
| happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that
| Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like
| this.
|
| Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going
| to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more
| organized and searchable. I think it's a great middle ground
| between Reddit / old-school forums and chats which are dominating
| the community space right now. Having both in one place (along
| with voice and video channels, and events) is awesome!
|
| btw, Discord's bot API is wonderful as well. We easily made a
| `/docs` bot that searches our Algolia site docs search index,
| shows results in Discord and lets the user choose a result to
| link to. It's great for answering questions.
|
| [1]: https://lit.dev/discord
| capableweb wrote:
| Just a curious question: Why Discord instead of something like
| Zulip?
|
| I myself use both for different projects, but for OSS I tend to
| gravitate towards Zulip, and for closed-source ones Discord.
| spankalee wrote:
| In large part because it seems like just about every other
| OSS project is on Discord these days, and Discord makes it
| very easy to see all your servers at once and switch between
| them seamlessly. We're already seeing more activity even with
| only some users having migrated so far (it's only been a week
| for us).
|
| I looked into options a while back, and had also considered
| Matrix which seemed to fit with open-source a lot better, but
| it had a relative lack of features and momentum compared to
| Discord. Zulip seems more like Slack, and since we liked
| Discord's approach and feature set too, Zulip wasn't that
| appealing.
| dancemethis wrote:
| You could be a lot happier, really - in both practical and
| ethical segments. By using a sane alternative instead of a
| privacy-hostile proprietary platform.
| danr4 wrote:
| The velocity????? Discord's product has barely changed, they
| move so slow, but thanks to their market dominance no one has
| been able to compete
| acedTrex wrote:
| What? discord is iterating so rapidly API lib/bot devs can
| barely keep up
| elcomet wrote:
| This has not been my experience. Compared to slack they are
| moving much faster
| revskill wrote:
| Discord has unsuable registration feature. Lol, tried many times
| to register with username vs email and everything is a mess.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| A move against Reddit?
| bluetidepro wrote:
| I am personally very excited for this. While yes, we have gone
| full circle (as I'm sure many will point out), I do think this
| was missing from Discord for various use-cases. I'm excited to
| see servers I'm in evolve with this new feature.
| whateveracct wrote:
| So Discord displaces forums..and then brings them back in a
| worse way (walled garden, in a web app, probably no search
| engine indexing because they aren't actually web pages)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Maybe the next evolution is something that's both good at
| being a forum _and_ good at being interactive chat.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| I think what people always miss in the "come full circle" bit
| is that it's usually "come full circle, but having integrated
| what we learned along the way." Discord took over due to the
| ability to have real or near-real time communication, and the
| vastly improved UX around a whole host of things. Discord was
| never intended/ to replace forums, that just happened because
| people started using in that way.
|
| Now they are recreating the forum experience with the addition
| of all of the learnings from having built discord. Should be
| good!
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > we have gone full circle
|
| And ended with better interface and proprietary lock-in
| ronsor wrote:
| Since we've come full circle, I'm now wondering what new chat
| thing will replace Discord later this decade.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Discord voice has finally become available on Xbox and
| Playstation support is coming soon.
|
| I think this is going to make it pretty difficult for
| potential Discord challengers to usurp it. Unless the
| competitor comes from a company with enough clout or money to
| convince Microsoft and Sony to support it.
| gregwebs wrote:
| This seems closer to the Zulip model of chat, which I have always
| been a huge fan of (but forced to use Slack instead). I see open
| source projects using Discord. I ask a question and then it
| doesn't get answered and is lost in the chat. When a project uses
| forums via Discourse, information is much better organized.
| ewuhic wrote:
| Maybe Discord could replace Confluence now?
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Didn't they add forum channels several months ago? Is this
| different? Or was it limited to certain servers and now they're
| rolling it out to everyone?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| it was a beta feature before.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They're not even rolling it out to everyone apparently, since
| you have to be a "community" server.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here
| are a few highlights:
|
| - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I
| don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If
| so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;
|
| - Multiple places where you set settings;
|
| - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do
| this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it
| anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there
| no cohesive model for pseudonymity?
|
| - Searching and indexing. Nuff said;
|
| - Discord gives you a collection of essentially walled gardens.
| Personally I find this to be a subpar experience;
|
| - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes
| you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea.
| Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to
| tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also;
|
| - Discord seems to be built for people who are terminally online
| on that server. People who see every chat message. If you're not
| in that category all you see is a hot mess with no direction;
|
| - Direct messages are another hot mess. Finding particular DMs or
| people can be a challenge. It's also used for spam and scams
| where servers haven't locked down the ability to DM other people
| on that server;
|
| - Discovery of servers is awful. You're relying on other sources
| for this in its entirety.
|
| So now we're having another communication model: forums. Great.
| Forums don't work for finding information. There's a reason why
| the likes of Reddit or even Stack Overflow supplanted forums: you
| can bubble up good comments or answers and skip all the noise
| that inevitably pollutes forums (eg "first!", "you shouldn't do
| X").
|
| At least Discord has some authentication mechanisms to tie in
| with other platforms and the ability to make bots (note: I've
| never actually made one so I have no idea how easy or hard this
| is).
|
| Still, it's another embedded Chrome Electron bloatware nightmare.
|
| I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm
| sure I'm missing something.
| themagician wrote:
| Its not you. It's a disaster. I often wonder how something like
| this even came to be.
|
| For me the biggest issue is the most basic: the UI is a mix of
| random icons (some labeled and some not), text buttons and
| command line functions. But there is no rhyme or reason. It's
| even difficult to explain how to do something.
|
| I imagine if you have a disability where you can't use standard
| inputs or use a screen reader that Discord is, in fact,
| completely unusable.
| acedTrex wrote:
| > - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or
| sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I
| have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and
| there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad
| experience also
|
| Server owners have the option to create announcement channels
| (different from text channels), you can subscribe to those and
| the owners of the channel can choose to publish posts. You can
| tell which channels you can subscribe to by the megaphone
| instead of the hashtag on the left of the channel name.
|
| > - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I
| don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If
| so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;
|
| What does this mean? if you are looking for a server that you
| are in by name you can do ctrl-k to open the command palette
| and search with that
| datagram wrote:
| > - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to
| do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it
| anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is
| there no cohesive model for pseudonymity?
|
| I'm not sure I understand; pseudonymity is the norm on Discord.
| If you're worried about your identity being leaked, then why
| not make the pseudonym your username and use your real name as
| an alias on the few servers where you want it to be known?
|
| Also, I feel like the Quick Switcher (Ctrl/Cmd + K) would
| alleviate a lot of your problems finding things.
| haunter wrote:
| >I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because
| I'm sure I'm missing something.
|
| - Easy to use multiplatform free voice chat. That was the
| original biggest selling point. Yes not everyone wants to
| selfhost or pay for something a dedicated server, basically
| killed Teamspeak, Mumble etc and such
|
| - UX which is still better than any combination of
| alternatives. Yes people want rich media chat, voice, private
| messages etc.
|
| - It just works. As I said above there might be individual
| better options but the whole is greater than the sum of its
| parts
|
| It's not perfect at all but does its job and what I want.
| lapser wrote:
| Have we come full circle? Sounds like we have. Maybe next up is
| news groups.
| phatfish wrote:
| Full circle to closed Cloud SaaS offerings where everyone is at
| the mercy of a corporation.
|
| Reddit has built the corporate version of Newsgroups already.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| What I don't get is why so many open source projects choose to
| use a closed source walled garden as their primary means of
| communication, it seems entirely counterethical to OSS.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| It has really well designed UI and UX and for now is not
| intensively monetizing.
|
| (not saying that it is a good thing but Discourse, Telegram are
| awful, forums are horrible to maintain and so on)
| mdrzn wrote:
| Yoo they disrupted the old forums, and then add their own? No
| more phpBB or vBulletin, next they'll add BBS and news groups,
| can't wait.
| ilaksh wrote:
| "Hi, Discord, it looks like you are trying to take over the
| internet. Would you like another few hundred million so we can
| further centralize everything?"
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