[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?
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Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?
With the Reddit blackout, I see plenty of communities redirecting
their members to their Discord. But Discord is far from being a
real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not
searchable through a search engine. Why not use a forum-like
solution like Discourse?
Author : lnalx
Score : 127 points
Date : 2023-06-19 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
| Daegalus wrote:
| Others have made great points already, but one thing I see
| mentioned is "I don't want to manage separate logins for all
| these forums". We need to remember that most people don't use
| password managers and don't like "logging in" to things. They see
| it as a hassle.
|
| 1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If
| everyone made their own forum, these people would get login
| fatigue and just won't bother.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Discord is more popular because it gives more instant feedback.
| This makes it far more addictive than forums
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it 's
| overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search
| engine._
|
| I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a
| real loss for the web.
|
| _However._
|
| Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works.
| Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right
| patterns/etc to hook people.
|
| Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Users fundamentally do not care and want something that
| works.
|
| Arguably, it works less than more traditional forums though (a
| la Reddit). The fact that web search isn't supported means that
| users will keep asking the same questions. Searching for topics
| is harder too (as it's a long line of intertwined topics).
|
| I moderate a room and see this a lot, so...
| tester457 wrote:
| I don't like discord but new users can be directed to the
| Forum Channels and search those. That new feature has helped
| me.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I also moderate and run support in a Discord. _We_ see that
| it 's harder/less efficient/etc; you and I also both know
| full well that users don't think about this at all.
|
| Like, tell me the last time a user who came in for support
| _actually_ used the search bar. I 'll wait, lol...
| stavros wrote:
| I've been wondering about this myself, and I wonder if anyone
| here knows: Would Zulip with public conversations be a good
| alternative? (I've never used public conversations in it and I
| don't know how they work, but I love Zulip itself).
|
| Presumably they can also be indexed, but I'm not sure at all.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Personally, I'm not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All
| the packages I've tried weren't what I wanted: missing features,
| clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain
| for something I should be using a package for. And I'm not sure
| how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people
| might post
|
| There's signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another
| account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They
| already have Reddit/discord accounts though
| soared wrote:
| ^ likely the best answer. Forums are difficult to manage
| whereas on Reddit and discord any user can click one button and
| have their own community. No user management, etc etc
| altairprime wrote:
| Discord has a very good anti-abuse system in place that prevents
| most sockpuppet and spam attacks. The moderation burden on a
| Discourse is vastly higher than on a Discord as a result, and
| since most public forums have no paid moderators, the
| optimization of effort is strongly in favor of Discord over
| Discourse.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| If I had to guess, Reddit has a huge overlap with gaming where
| Discord is already immensely popular. It's easy to set up from
| both a user and server owner's perspective, and most Redditors
| probably already have it installed or have heard of it at some
| point.
| ksec wrote:
| The same reason why Reddit took over Forums in the first place.
|
| No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old
| days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather
| people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting,
| no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to
| care about Web Traffic scaling.
|
| Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a
| Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit
| removes most of the hassle of setting things up.
|
| Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest
| sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other
| alternative.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| samtho wrote:
| Reddit is popular for many reasons but one reason for engagement
| among multiple communities (subs) stands out above the rest: the
| cost to join is a single button. You are already logged in and
| all you need to is discover communities that already exist on the
| platform, which Reddit facilitates by automatically linking
| certain strings like /r/subreddit which will naturally (or
| unnaturally) pop up in conversation. This is a contrast to the
| way that Web 1.0 and 2.0 BBSes and forums operated where each
| fiefdom operates independently, requires a user account, and
| admins or moderators typically had strict rules about linking to
| other communities out of fear of loosing their own members
| because the cost for their members to join other communities
| means an reduction of time spent on their own.
|
| Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather
| inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord
| makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without
| you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply
| switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.
|
| I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar
| platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that
| people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is
| already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or
| specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a
| different forum would also require a user to potentially create
| an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.
|
| A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum's
| history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are
| not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the
| community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to
| see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate
| and intermingled with idle chit chat.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I dont like having technical discussions over forums, its far to
| slow
| timbit42 wrote:
| Assuming the same number of users, I don't see why it would be
| any slower than Reddit. That's not a problem of forums but of
| the number of users.
|
| My biggest complaint with forums is the lack of reply
| indentation.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Funny, I have the opposite - I hate technical discussions over
| chat, because they move way too damned fast, and I just can't
| keep track of them and remain focused on anything else - like,
| say, _my job_.
|
| Perhaps the difference is that I don't typically _start_
| technical discussions - instead, I _search_ for prior ones,
| which 99% of times solves my problem faster than any chat
| would.
| frou_dh wrote:
| According to you it's overwhelming and "not a real KB", but many
| will consider it a more natural UI for conversing than a web
| forum.
|
| That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just
| having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a
| proper KB.
| timbit42 wrote:
| And then it goes into a black hole and no one else will ever
| benefit from that knowledge. It's a major reduction in the
| utility of the internet.
| nicbou wrote:
| Because the web is a dark forest. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-
| dark-forest
|
| Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk
| there.
| beardog wrote:
| Because gen z uses both discord and reddit heavily
| taubek wrote:
| If you don't have your own infrastructure or knowledge to deploy
| Discourse there are some costs related to it. As far as I know
| there is no free tier when it comes to Discourse. [1]
|
| [1] https://discourse.org/pricing
| LordKeren wrote:
| Many Reddit moderators are interested in Pc Gaming, and Discord
| is ubiquitous in that space. It's free, infinite scaling, and
| there is a big overlap in the user bases.
|
| > But discord is far from a real knowledge base
|
| I think you'd struggle to find many reddit moderators that see
| themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to
| resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or
| unintended side effect.
| 7speter wrote:
| >Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly
| seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.
|
| Maybe to subreddit moderators but to reddit admins and
| executives and stakeholders, they see it as a major plus that
| reddit is an ever growing and indexed knowledge base.
| [deleted]
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that.
|
| It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite
| communities", something you don't have when you become an indie
| forum.
|
| It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that.
| Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of
| having a conversation on HN.
| [deleted]
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| "I already have an account there," is a much more powerful
| force than some realize. Signup fatigue is real, and a lot of
| people will just hit the back button if it turns out they need
| to register a new account to participate.
| Zak wrote:
| This is something federation (e.g. Lemmy) solves, but it has
| its own signup fatigue that's higher than average.
|
| OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but
| never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow.
| Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only
| widely-accepted providers.
|
| Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and
| there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism
| for independent forums _and_ reduced signup fatigue.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| Lowest friction, but yeah I agree. Reddit was useful because it
| was searchable and self-discoverable, and Discord does not have
| any of that.
| cowsup wrote:
| The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users
| that add to the community. When you're a Reddit moderator, or any
| type of online-community leader, you care about the people who
| participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing.
|
| Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It
| lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It
| lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others
| later on, so they can re-read prior information.
|
| Their concern is not "Someone off the Internet can't find this
| off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return
| again." They simply do not care.
|
| Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an
| alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in
| reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that
| benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.
| JCharante wrote:
| You're assuming people who find reddit results in google only
| use it as a knowledge base and are only lurkers.
|
| I'd say it's the opposite. Every new message is not new,
| valuable information. 99% of users are saying useless stuff and
| people interacting daily are only saying useless stuff that
| doesn't matter. People using reddit as a knowledge base do
| still contribute and someone engaged in that subject matter by
| googling it is more likely to be interested in that subject
| matter and participate in the community that they've found.
| Communities are killing their discoverability and turning into
| a closed-off echo chamber and keeping only their useless users.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is there any tooling that can plug into Discord to make the
| corpus within Discord more publicly accessible, perhaps on a
| per server basis? Let folks come together where it is easier
| for maintainers and participates, and offload the heavy lifting
| of exposing the knowledge to middleware.
| yonixw wrote:
| "Show HN: Answer Overflow - Indexing Discord content into the
| web"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 ( 19 hours ago
| )
|
| Should've asked for a million dollar...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As
| others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of
| nowhere - they start as lurkers. Many of them remain lurkers.
| Surely someone run a study on this, but at least in my personal
| experience on HN and some more discussion-oriented subreddits,
| the most interesting/valuable submissions are often one-offs
| done by users who otherwise don't submit or even comment much.
|
| Also: moving the community from an open discussion board to a
| closed chat strongly favors the most active participants - i.e.
| those who are dedicated enough or otherwise have nothing better
| to do with their days than to actively participate. It's not a
| problem if the "community" is just a bunch of friends and
| regulars shitposting. It starts to be a problem when large open
| source projects move from open boards to closed chats, as they
| effectively shut off anyone who has a day job, kids, or... well
| anything else to do, tech or otherwise.
|
| Also: lack of (or bad) indexing and search affects not just
| outsiders, but community members themselves: it's not just that
| some rando can't find the fruits of your discussion via Google
| search - it's also you who can't find it one month later.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though.
| As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out
| of nowhere - they start as lurkers.
|
| I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities
| and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're
| interesting) (2) forget about them forever.
|
| Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals
| from other sites or happy accidents. I rarely join a
| community simply to lurk on it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to
| the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to
| name or even describe it.
|
| Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage
| with any chat-based communities, because from experience I
| know that
|
| - I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a
| time,
|
| - If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of
| my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing
| or caring about, and
|
| - It stopped being sustainable around the time I started
| working full-time in the earnest.
|
| I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a
| relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord
| equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't
| possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few
| days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real
| case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once
| to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've
| been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only
| as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and
| Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield
| no insight, and the problem _still_ remains something I
| need to solve - only then I 'll bother with Slack/Discord,
| as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes
| time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the
| question several times until I do it in the right timezone
| so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just
| from thinking about it.
|
| And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense
| of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I
| pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab
| after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and
| doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people.
| Also, when in the process I read something
| interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that
| same place a week or month later, and still find that thing
| I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing
| or broken search.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to
| find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of
| productive community members initially found the community via
| search. Of course there's no easy way to make things
| discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but
| choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably
| not the right choice for most.
| Kye wrote:
| Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or
| Google, or any number of modern internet household names
| through those companies advertising. I heard about it from
| someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC
| channels that came before. Someone invited me because they
| thought it matched my interests.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on,
| say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find
| high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute,
| is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community
| personally by existing community member, who themselves
| were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind
| of "word of mouth".
|
| Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to
| be an outsider looking to learn something or start to
| participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby
| groups moving to Discord - or worse, _Whatsapp groups_ -
| there 's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your
| toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or
| reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the
| thing it's worth it.
|
| This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd
| happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.
| Kye wrote:
| Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public
| forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way
| to find these things before The Great Consolidation.
| They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find
| the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and
| hop on.
|
| That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the
| fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star
| Trek subs: https://startrek.website/c/daystrominstitute
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Exactly. The current trends make a lot of places suddenly
| out of reach for passer-bys.
|
| Thanks for posting the link. I am aware of the current
| location of /r/DaystromInstitute, and registered on that
| Lemmy instance already - but to reinforce my point, I
| actually learned about it thanks to someone posting that
| link on HN a few days ago, randomly, in the middle of the
| Reddit blackout discussion thread. Much like you posting
| it here, which will hopefully help some other interested
| people find it.
| 7speter wrote:
| Ironically enough, subreddit sidebars were almost always
| a great place to find highly relevant and useful
| discords, forums and blogs.
| [deleted]
| dkga wrote:
| Mostly by direct interest. For example, all Discord
| communities I participate are related to open source projects
| I follow.
| keerthiko wrote:
| Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most
| reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have
| been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a
| regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits
| where I have contributed information/knowledge because I
| happened to visit them but had more information than the
| discussion already had, which is still valuable to the
| community even if I do not become a regular member.
|
| Discord is a space for a completely different kind of
| community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that
| comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.
| dsir wrote:
| > _Discord is a space for a completely different kind of
| community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that
| comes from a subreddit_
|
| I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set
| of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's
| sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are
| search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily
| incentivize ownership over the communities created on the
| platform as it feels like the people curating the communities
| should be rewarded for the work that they do.
|
| Here's an example community:
|
| https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending
| rcxdude wrote:
| Communities rarely want to maximize growth: at most, they
| want a slow and steady growth, and at least they may wish to
| shrink. You'll find most long-lived communities that actually
| still have a sense of identity and norms have some form of
| barrier to entry: whether that be obscurity, extremely
| aggressive moderation, a strong set of norms which are
| actively policed by members, or a culture sufficiently toxic
| (at least superficially) to keep most people away. Often a
| combination of all of the above. I think for most moderately
| sized communities too much growth is more of a problem than
| too little.
| bee_rider wrote:
| At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as
| much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next
| thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.
| jrflowers wrote:
| A lot of people already have Discord for various reasons. It's
| easier to convince somebody to use something that's already on
| their phone.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is
| spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to
| attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very
| central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam,
| that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames
| and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a
| vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent
| cash.
|
| This means that forums are _always_ under attack on multiple
| fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance
| around the clock.
|
| Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies
| of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for
| reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't
| really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't
| really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that
| shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
| Semaphor wrote:
| They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small
| (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a
| non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments
| manually allowed.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the
| platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate
| submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't
| have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage
| user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with
| spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be
| filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit
| operators had to neither manage nor pay for.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide
| data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on,
| they're in a position to build a very competent botspam
| filter.
|
| Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's
| actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that
| would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > they're in a position to build a very competent botspam
| filter.
|
| If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of
| donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to
| disrupt discord? Awesome! :)
| ianburrell wrote:
| My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering.
| It does a good enough job that moderators don't complain
| about that. It is good enough that can have mostly
| unmoderated subreddit if don't care about off topic posts.
|
| The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and
| catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.
| not_alexb wrote:
| I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that
| spam leaks through everyday.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like
| a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work.
| But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to
| bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public
| forums to decentralized forums.
| mooreds wrote:
| And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.
| Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but
| I haven't seen one that compares to Google.
|
| Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on
| forums vs slack/discord:
| https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451
| bsder wrote:
| You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't
| make spam management or login security any easier for an
| admin.
|
| Those concerns are _so_ painful that people are willing to
| use a tool (Discord) _completely unsuited_ for what they want
| simply to not deal with them.
|
| A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both
| of those over gazillions of users.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums,
| is spam management and maintenance.
|
| It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs.
| Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or
| go through a queue and approve comments.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets
| people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the
| owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social
| software can be
| musicale wrote:
| I really don't want to join another Discord server.
|
| Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably
| slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities
| across instances.)
| SirMaster wrote:
| Simple, because Discord is real-time chat.
|
| Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new
| messages etc.
|
| And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I
| use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and
| help other users.
|
| I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable
| alternative to Discord.
| halfdan wrote:
| > I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a
| viable alternative to Discord.
|
| That wasn't what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit
| communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time
| chat where there's no easy way to search through history.
| culopatin wrote:
| The question was about replacing a Reddit subforum with a chat,
| not a discord chat with a forum. Reddit is a slow async
| platform, forums are too, I don't see what part of the things
| you mention makes Discord a no brainer.
| l0ngyap wrote:
| [flagged]
| Solvency wrote:
| Everyone here ignores Discourse because it's not "cool". Some
| might complain about its UX issues. Yet those same people are
| tolerating the mountain of issues with Lemmy or Mastodon because
| they are approaching "cool" status.
| Zak wrote:
| I think people are more tolerant of issues with Lemmy and
| Mastodon because federation is a major benefit that inherently
| adds some UX complexity.
|
| I think Discourse is fine for what it is, but it's less OK to
| be a siloed forum in 2023 than it was in 2013. Yes, I'm aware
| federated forums are just reinventing Usenet, but there was a
| good idea there we lost sight of in the web era.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I don't think I can personally reconcile that reddit/forums are
| incredibly different products to Discord.
|
| To me, a move from reddit/forums to Discord is akin to a move
| from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.
| superkuh wrote:
| Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the
| benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no
| worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc)
| but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open
| protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary
| corporate software services of today.
| massysett wrote:
| Ok, what website do I go to to get this Usenet thing?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Google used to have Google Groups which was the Usenet groups
| but web-based.
|
| Usenet was created before the web was created so you can use
| a newsgroups app to access it if you don't want to use Google
| Groups.
| Vermyndax wrote:
| I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a
| resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate
| greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving
| to yet another corporate-controlled entity.
| SuperShibe wrote:
| Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?
| ixwt wrote:
| Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features.
| The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because
| it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a
| new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the
| purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols
| have more complexity built into them because that's what the
| average user expects.
|
| But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification
| process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique
| usernames still baffles me.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single
| organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable
| brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and
| effort streamlining onboarding.
|
| There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself
| off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack
| seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC
| transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.
| Macha wrote:
| IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which
| was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a
| lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over
| Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result.
|
| Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions,
| whereas Reddit doesn't.
| 6510 wrote:
| I've only seen usenet clients stuck in the past. A bit like RSS
| and IRC. Quite the reminder how lucky we are with the success
| of web browsers. Email made it something like 1/4 of the way
| which is still nice.
|
| The functionality of the www also changed quite a bit over the
| years. If we could do the same with the other clients and
| protocols it would be quite the something.
|
| edit: How is it that all desktop apps had to morph into web
| based apps while with phone apps it is the other way around? It
| cant both be right.
| spullara wrote:
| Scaling by making a huge numbers of copies. Basically a
| blockchain and similarly efficient.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If we're ranking needless waste, this is not worse than
| modern websites delivering JS over CDNs. _In theory_ this
| should be a net win - everyone having all the scripts cached
| locally, or on a nearby static host. In practice, with CI /CD
| being the norm, you have to reload all the JS every other
| refresh, because someone changed something - and so do all
| the CDNs and all other users.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The barrier to first participation is so much lower on Discord.
|
| > i need help lol
|
| That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on
| Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such
| a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might
| even be banned.
| re-thc wrote:
| Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of
| questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn't really work.
|
| Slack was popular before Discord.
|
| I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve.
|
| More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord /
| common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and
| external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.
| musicale wrote:
| Forums don't seem to work well for Q&A.
|
| Technical systems that we need help with are always complete
| garbage, users are clueless/eternal September,
| spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to
| expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and
| providing high-quality answers for free.
|
| Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well
| for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over,
| previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is
| high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of
| users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible.
|
| Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own
| issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-
| answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site'
| posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-
| driven oversight, etc..
|
| The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good
| moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any
| other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on
| other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell.
|
| But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy
| of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable
| from a parody of itself.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know
| what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could
| find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from
| having real time questioning and feedback with someone
| knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real
| question and answer.
|
| Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with,
| that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.
|
| The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.
|
| LLMs also excel in this area.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The democratization of the internet with smart phones have had
| the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the
| internet with questions that are easily answered by looking
| just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking
| less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should
| I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer,
| when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?"
|
| Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their
| questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted?
| 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the
| time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close
| the tab and get on with their life.
|
| Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any
| and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or
| gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very
| soon.
| jachee wrote:
| Also: any discord mod worth their salt will have set up a #faqs
| channel with the most-frequent questions and their answers.
|
| We went a step further on the iRacing community discord and
| wrote a bot that will search that channel and spit out answers.
|
| ...because users will nearly _always_ just ask a FAQ instead of
| reading one.
| 7speter wrote:
| People still tell you to use the search function on discords,
| and there aren't even searchable topic names or the option to
| use google's algorithm to power the searches.
|
| Also, the great fun of llms is going on youtube and watching
| content creators accuse other content creators of cheating and
| using llms to write their scripts, even if they may just be
| using it as a research tool to round up preliminary
| information.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| > The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for
| example.
|
| Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its
| Experts Exchange killer website consortium.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional
| forums. It's less friction when you don't have to sign up. If you
| already have an account, you need only subscribe to the
| channel/subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate
| contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in
| turn makes your platform more relevant.
|
| The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of
| advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to
| get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the
| ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing
| up for.
| razodactyl wrote:
| If Discord works - it will adapt. It and its users will grow
| together.
|
| This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.
|
| They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at
| the core are what drive value.
| tikkun wrote:
| The meta-answer is that:
|
| Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that
| a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most
| of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe
| enough people will join/use.
|
| If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option
| I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).
|
| With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm
| not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar
| with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that
| might be confusing or hard to use.
|
| I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than
| reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the
| three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users
| of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've
| used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of
| them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts
| (and Discourse doesn't work like that).
|
| This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People
| want to use things that they think other people want to use.
|
| The two things needed to break that network effect are:
|
| 1) Another platform that's a better user experience than
| Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no
| content
|
| 2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this
| new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or
| people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through
| surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a
| completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's
| hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is
| chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with
| separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page
| watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't _feel_
| real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the
| character of groups that try to migrate. I don 't say it'll be
| objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind
| of participation.
| tikkun wrote:
| Agreed, I think Discord is substantially worse. I do think
| it's the best of a bad set of alternatives, though.
| egypturnash wrote:
| People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an
| account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the
| updates and maintenance.
|
| Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they _do_ use it, it 's on a
| whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires
| either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and
| installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien
| concept to most people.
|
| Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service".
| There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the
| Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these
| both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions
| of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the
| financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free
| to the moderators.
|
| Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and
| telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to
| help them set up and run one?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Why not use a forum-like solution
|
| Because it's _serverless_ *badum tss*
| gsmo wrote:
| It's puzzling. Discord is for real-time chat, not static
| posting/branching. Completely different in my eyes.
| braza wrote:
| (Marginally related): the thing that holds me to move to discord
| it's because their "conversational" nature instead to be an idea
| board.
|
| At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a
| minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit
| it's a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of
| communication it's high most of the communication it's just lazy
| responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement,
| and it's quite easy for any serious conversation derail.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I think Discourse is terrible, too. The beauty of reddit/hn is
| that the more relevant discussions/comments get pushed to the top
| of a thread. The community constantly shapes the thread such that
| when you revisit it 5 years later you can quickly glean what is
| important. A forum is really terrible for that.
| anononaut wrote:
| It doesn't work so well with controversial subjects, even here.
| Instead, only the more popular ideas, often the same, get
| pushed to the top. In retrospect, I view this more negatively
| than not.
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