[HN Gopher] Black Holes of Information
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Black Holes of Information
Author : ingve
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-04-19 06:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (duerrenberger.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (duerrenberger.dev)
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| This has frustrated me about Discord already.
|
| Discussion that used to be "Googlable" in forums is now often
| locked way in semi private Discord channels, buried in long real-
| time conversation threads. And Discord's native search is
| barebones and awful.
|
| That was an issue in IRC too, but I don't think people posted
| important announcements/info dumps in IRC like they do in
| discord. If they did, it would at least be quoted on a forum.
|
| I have no problem with Github though. Its trivial to back up,
| open to search, has a good native search, and they have
| surprisngly resisted many bad incentives.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Is there an equivalent of irclog for Discord or Slack, or would
| using one violate their TOS? I remember seeing daily digests of
| IRC channel activity which was collected by a bot.
| Arrath wrote:
| > This has frustrated me about Discord already.
|
| The little kludges that various Discord communities implement
| to best try to address this is an interesting and frustrating
| little ecosystem of its own.
|
| You have a gamut of solutions from "use search next time or
| you're banned" to "check the FAQ channel where moderators pin
| pertinent comments" to bots that look for keywords and
| automatically reply with the fix for a given issue (often a
| link to the pinned comment)
| xp84 wrote:
| We have the same problem in business. I was in a meeting
| recently where someone suggested that instead of requirements
| decisions being required to be recorded in the relevant
| tickets, or in the internal wiki, that "such-and-such slack
| channel" be designated as the source of truth. I just about
| laughed my way out of the Zoom call. Yes, for every ticket
| someone picks up, they should just scroll forever or try to
| tease out with search whether literally anyone had ever opined
| about the topic, and whether that opinion was accepted as
| correct.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > If you know any modern forum software (which isn't Discourse),
| please let me know!
|
| What's wrong with Discourse?
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| Author here. I mostly just dislike the feel of it, so it's much
| more a personal preference. I like the more old-school
| structuring of content, instead of the tag based approach. Not
| a big fan of the default theme, but that's something one can
| adjust. If you visit the official website, I can't really, even
| with a longer glance, see, that it can be self-hosted, which
| means that at some point the decision was made to push hosting
| options over the "100% open source discussion platform" as it's
| described on GitHub. And finally, I find it quite resource
| intensive and a bit cumbersome to host; you need Ruby on Rails,
| PostgreSQL and Redis, which might be okay for "maximum"
| scaling, but for the couple of hundred or thousand users per
| month, it's slightly overkill.
|
| I think Discourse can be a great option, I just want to hear
| about other forum software.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Thanks for replying! I work on Rails applications so "forum
| software" sounded like something in my wheelhouse, hence the
| question. Admittedly, my mind went to a similar setup as
| Discourse so this helps me understand what a host might
| dislike about their software. I've used many phpBB forums in
| the past and I often find myself wondering why that UI seems
| to have fallen out of fashion so it interests me to consider
| building something myself.
|
| It's not likely you'll see anything from me anytime soon
| (maybe eventually but that's a fuckton of work and I have a
| day job) but I have ideas of leveraging server-side rendering
| per the "don't make js required" comment and progressive
| enhancement in general. If I do build something like this my
| target browser would likely be Lynx[0]. Just consider it a
| pipe dream until you see my "Show HN" post.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
| hlandau wrote:
| It's completely broken if you don't have JavaScript enabled,
| for starters.
| dqv wrote:
| https://i.ibb.co/Lpxzz2V/%20.gif
|
| It takes up a lot of vertical screen space and the scrolling
| behavior is really annoying. I know, I know, pagination is old
| and crusty and no one uses it or whatever, but I do and it
| helps me navigate threads (especially long ones) a lot easier.
| It's the same problem as reading a long book on an ebook
| reader. Sure, if you're reading for pleasure, then an ebook
| reader is fine, but for reading something more technical, being
| able to go back to specific "checkpoints" is really important.
|
| Comparatively, crusty old phpBB can display 4 posts in the same
| space that Discourse uses to display 1 and it has pagination.
| Yes, you can change the theme on Discourse to fix the overuse
| of vertical space, but the theme it ships with is going to
| influence how people theme their Discourse instance.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Try scrolling with their widget instead of the browser scroll
| bar.
|
| You can bookmark or link to any point in the thread. Add
| /postnumber to the thread URL if you don't want to manually
| grab it.
|
| And there are some excellent condensed themes, CSS styles and
| user styles out there if you want that.
|
| Not saying you have to like it, but there are easy solutions
| for those specific preferences, and overall, Discourse has
| been good for participation on old forums.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35050858
| kristjank wrote:
| I hate to see this get so little attention. We need to keep
| working on searchability and persistence of information online.
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