[HN Gopher] Discord is not documentation
___________________________________________________________________
Discord is not documentation
Author : edent
Score : 401 points
Date : 2023-07-16 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| simonw wrote:
| There's a cultural/process hack that can really help here: be
| meticulous about turning questions in Discord into updates to
| your documentation.
|
| If you do that, Discord can be a powerful accelerant to the
| quality of your project documentation. But you have to be
| disciplined about it!
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Surely an LLM could parse the chat and keep a public FAQ up to
| date? Somebody must already have implemented this, but last
| time I looked I still came empty handed...
| raidisco wrote:
| https://recurai.com/discord
| xigoi wrote:
| Yeah, if you want to have an inconsistent documentation with
| lots of subtle and non-subtle errors, using a non-
| deterministic black box to generate it is a great way to
| achieve that.
| Karunamon wrote:
| From some experiments with a discord bot, the non-
| deterministic responses you get from an LLM are the big
| killer for that use case. Ask the model to summarize 100
| lines of chat 10 times and you will get 10 different outputs,
| all worded subtly differently, with different headlines
| missing each time. (Even on state-of-the-art GPT-4)
| le-mark wrote:
| This is the key. If I have to do my job and monitor slack
| discord mattermost all day, I'm not doing my job. Unless my job
| is support. It's just one more instance of software development
| taking over yet another business area (support) because
| developers are by and large naive, opinionated, and eager to
| please. It happened with agile (we got project management) and
| devops (we got sysadmin). Ymmv.
| fsniper wrote:
| Discord, or any IRC analogue for that matter used as
| documentation is same as saying, "hey look we have a cantine in
| our head quarters, if you have any questions pop and ask on a
| table thats designated for that purpose. And this way you will
| reach all our users that have similar issues!" A modern day
| direct democracy assembly.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| I feel this. Lately I'm using Remix as my web framework, but most
| of the discussions and issues are had on discord. This means
| they're not searchable via Google, and even in discord, the
| search completely sucks.
|
| There's so much good info which is really hard to access.
| nativeit wrote:
| I remember when I was given CorelDraw in the mid/late 1990s and
| it came with 3 volumes of manuals, several hundred pages of
| documentation, in rather nice paperback with glossy color pages.
| tchock23 wrote:
| There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to
| Discord, including all support. It is an awful experience for
| users/customers for the reasons this post cites.
|
| It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel
| structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a
| solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will
| actually answer.
|
| If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to
| Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience
| for at least some of your users.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| Putting all your community resources on Discord is the surest
| way to repel me from joining your community.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such
| as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an
| audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g.
| GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence,
| which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become
| unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier)
| outrage.
|
| You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants
| like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible
| customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying
| "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it
| right?"
|
| Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you
| need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such
| matters.
| RunSet wrote:
| > There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to
| Discord, including all support.
|
| Which in many cases is, effectively:
|
| "To read the FAQ just provide your phone number to verify your
| newly-created Discord account even though you _just_ verified
| your email address. "
|
| Previously treated on Hacker News:
|
| "Discord is a black hole for information"
|
| https://knockout.chat/thread/33251/1
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982
| koonsolo wrote:
| The thing is, Discord might be 99% effortless.
|
| For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone
| wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to
| moderate, it's basically almost no effort.
|
| To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the
| community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform
| you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it
| just does.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the
| community,
|
| Survivorship bias? You're counting all the people who _want_
| to use discord as support for using discord, but since you[1]
| have no other avenues for the non-discord people you don 't
| know how many users you've lost simply because you've
| silenced them.
|
| IOW, you're[2] looking at the 5 people who express support
| for discord but ignoring the 500 who hate it enough to not
| use your support at all.
|
| I think, if you're a business using discord for user support,
| you should should be wondering, if you've got 100k users, why
| are only 1k people in your discord?
|
| [1] Not you personally; for all I know you have multiple
| channels, which include discord. The places who normally use
| discord only have one channel for users to use.
|
| [2] Once again, not you personally.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Let me give you some more info. I started first with a
| forum on my own website (bbpress). I also had a twitter and
| facebook account where I posted updates. Still have
| YouTube.
|
| I'm 44, so for me a forum is ideal, Discord is way too
| intensive.
|
| Then one of my members started a discord years ago and a
| lot of members went there. I switched everyone to an
| official one, and one member volunteered to moderate.
|
| I would say most questions come from Discord, then YouTube
| comments, then email. My own forum wasn't as popular so I
| closed it due to lots of spam that I had to manage.
|
| I also pushed hard for Reddit but never took off (I liked
| reddit more)
|
| One thing to mention that is probably important: this is in
| gaming sphere with lots of kids, teenagers and young
| adults. Also used in schools by teachers.
| bavell wrote:
| As much as I hate discord for anything other than
| strictly gaming and fun, if your user demographic is
| primarily kids, teenagers and young adults I think
| Discord is fine. They're already on it anyway and you
| have to meet users where they're at. If I were to ever
| choose discord it'd be in this kind of situation.
| wpietri wrote:
| The question I'd be asking: works for whom?
|
| Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are
| already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of
| your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people,
| but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others
| will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving
| community that feels good to you.
|
| So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the
| TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is
| only people who are already happy Discord users." But that
| should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move
| toward the broader audience and that will include addressing
| concerns like in the article.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You can configure your server to not require discord
| accounts. Anyone can join Zia the web via clicking a link
| and simply typing a name.
| koonsolo wrote:
| You don't need user interviews, you just see where they are
| going.
|
| Are they discussing this on twitter or reddit? Are they
| making YouTube videos? Did one of them start a Discord with
| lots of people there? Once you see what works, make an
| official one.
|
| Funnily enough Discord was the only one I didn't start
| myself. I liked something async with proper Google
| searching better.
|
| So even when I tried, I wasn't able to steer them.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Yeah, community-driven support + documentation sucks. That's
| how Ory just lost me as a customer. Couldn't even get a reply
| from the DX dude, wanted to pay for onboarding.
|
| A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at
| tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground,
| documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more
| input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's
| how it should work.
| sholladay wrote:
| The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can "do
| it all" in terms of how people want to communicate.
|
| It supports voice, video, and text.
|
| It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction,
| and automated interaction.
|
| It supports web, desktop, and mobile.
|
| I think it's understandable that people want to standardize on
| one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and
| training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to
| use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.
|
| Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names
| is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and
| encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short.
| I've seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and
| rules.
| vkou wrote:
| The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information'
| incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the
| chat app part of a support channel, it is _not_ even a
| _passable_ replacement for a website, or a wiki.
|
| Search in it _sucks_ to incredible degrees, you can 't put
| enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more
| information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it
| completely breaks down.
| edandersen wrote:
| Maybe some users of Discord want the satisfaction of
| answering a question raised by another community member,
| but don't want the answer to be publicly indexable and
| searchable forever? In this case, Discord is working
| perfectly.
| capableweb wrote:
| I also don't understand it from the perspective of the
| business.
|
| Instead of having information available publicly that can be
| found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation
| website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a
| question that most likely already was answered before?
|
| It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know
| that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and
| ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by
| self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something
| like that up to date instead?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I also don't understand it from the perspective of the
| business.
|
| Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in
| that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger
| customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the
| shots, then that would make-sense.
|
| ...just something I've noticed.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I don't think there's necessarily a problem with a company
| operating a Discord server for purposes of community
| engagement or marketing. But that's an entirely different
| thing than using Discord as a support platform.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Honestly, I'd take it over other archaic forms of
| documentation that came before. These are, off the top of
| my head, the things Discord solves:
|
| Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another
| website.
|
| Paying for documentation.
|
| Documentation in a PDF that you can't access until you have
| a sale calls.
|
| Documentation on just a website.
|
| No documentation.
|
| Random forums I have to sign up for that are separate from
| the help desk sign up that are separate from the actual
| services signup.
|
| Not be able to search across others issues and to solve
| problems without needing to ask.
|
| Using HN to get assistance.
|
| Using Twitter to get assistance.
|
| Hoping my email doesn't get lost or stuck in spam either
| way.
|
| Having notifications so I can respond.
|
| Not having to sit on some website in some chat window.
|
| Not having to use some crappy web form that won't take my
| screenshot because it's 2MB instead of only being at most
| 1MB.
|
| Not being able to add attachments at all.
|
| Being able to have a real time conversation with someone.
|
| Still having a search function.
|
| Have something that works well on mobile and desktop. (Oh,
| but websites work well on both... OH no they don't have to.
| People can easily screw that up and make websites that work
| horribly on difference devices).
|
| All of these things _can_ be solved, but they aren't.
|
| And keep in mind, the context of the discussion here isn't
| documentation that _ONLY_ exists on Discord. Rather,
| documentation that exists on web AND also stuff that exists
| on Discord. So, stuff that has yet to make it to the
| website.
| rchaud wrote:
| > These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord
| solves: 1) Documentation that requires you to sign up to
| yet another website. 2) Paying for documentation. 3)
| Documentation in a PDF that you can't access until you
| have a sale calls.
|
| Huh?
|
| Who has ever had to log into something to view
| documentation? Discord seems to be the only example!
|
| Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it,
| pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any
| way.
|
| As for the last one, well, getting you on to a Discord
| and into their marketing drip feed is a lot cheaper than
| having a sales call.
| irdc wrote:
| > Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it,
| pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any
| way.
|
| Very normal when working with ICs.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it
|
| It was once very common. Microsoft had a "developers
| club" that basically sold access to their APIs docs.
| mook wrote:
| MSDN sold a service where they mailed you physical CDs.
| Once they had the documentation on their website it was
| all free. (A subscription would get you licenses for
| QAing on different versions of Windows / additional other
| stuff, but the help files were free)
| xigoi wrote:
| What's wrong with documentation on a website?
| lgas wrote:
| Right. This is actually what I, and I think most people,
| actually want.
| Per_Bothner wrote:
| The complaint was about having to _sign up_ to (register
| for) yet-another website.
| xigoi wrote:
| Which site requires you to sign up in order to read
| documentation?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| It's certainly less common now, but prior to 2015 it was
| common for "legacy" vendors (y'know... the paranoid and
| posessive types, like ProgressDB...) - or just those
| embarassed about the state of their products compared to
| the rest of the industry: they'll hide their KB articles,
| bug-reports and workarounds, and more besides) behind a
| registration-wall, or even worse: only grant you access
| if you have a current support contract with them.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| One of the reasons everyone hates writing documentation is
| precisely because nobody reads them.
|
| So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted"
| writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering
| the same question again and again and again and again and
| again.
| williamdclt wrote:
| even if people ask the same question rather than looking
| for docs, it's still a huge timesaver to direct them to the
| documentation rather than re-explaining from scratch
| everytime. Plus, after having been shown the docs they
| _might_ now be aware that they exist and self-serve the
| next time
| Spivak wrote:
| Most servers have a bot that people use to store and
| retrieve common answers so contributors don't have to
| type it out every time.
|
| Now you could be like clearly that should just be in the
| web documentation but people still show up and ask even
| when it is and RTFM isn't exactly nice.
| dizhn wrote:
| Plus it's an opportunity to fix the documentation. You
| will figure out quickly if a section of it is too
| confusing. It would also help you to realize if it's not
| easily discoverable.
| sowbug wrote:
| That is survivorship bias. You hear only from the customers
| who don't read it.
|
| (I like writing documentation.)
| nerdponx wrote:
| 1. Of course people read it.
|
| 2. People read the docs when you send them a link to the
| relevant doc page. Having docs makes your chat support a
| matter of linking to the right page.
| simonw wrote:
| If nobody reads documentation, it means they don't trust
| it.
|
| Trust is something that documentation for a project has to
| earn over time.
|
| People will assume the documentation is incomplete and out-
| of-date, because that's the default for most things.
|
| If it's comprehensive and stays up-to-date with new
| changes, the project community will eventually come to
| realize they and start trusting it. But it takes time to
| build up that track record!
| bavell wrote:
| Case in point: Arch Wiki
| palata wrote:
| I think we also tend to teach people to _not_ read
| documentation (or spend time learning anything, really).
|
| Maybe there is some kind of negative reinforcement, too.
| The way it feels to me is: "I won't write documentation,
| because users don't read it -> Oh great, I will use
| ChatGPT to support my users -> The users don't know how
| to read documentation (or anything other than a
| 500-letters answer to a chat question) because they do
| everything with ChatGPT-like prompts -> I won't write
| documentation, because users don't read it".
|
| Same for many things: most people tend to complain about
| CMake, but almost every time, I quickly realize that they
| don't know how to use CMake. Either they complain about
| it and never used it, or they complain and use it wrong.
| Therefore many devs try to build alternatives that will
| solve that problem by "being better than CMake". Turns
| out I have seen Meson projects that were a big mess, it's
| not just a CMake thing. On the other hand, people who
| learn how to use Autotool/CMake/Meson usually manage to
| make it quite maintainable.
|
| Here the negative reinforcement would be: "People don't
| learn how to use the tools properly -> They make a mess
| -> They complain about the tool -> Someone makes a
| "better tool" -> People don't learn the new tool and make
| a mess -> repeat.
|
| I truly believe that we could solve many problems by
| teaching people how to learn, instead of building
| technology that helps them being productive without
| learning.
| pmontra wrote:
| I don't think that they don't trust documentation. I
| think that they don't want to invest half or a full day
| reading the docs and learning every facet of the tool.
| They are in hurry and if they can find the right answer,
| discord, ChatGPT, whatever, that would do.
|
| I read all the Unix man page of every command line
| program I used but there were only a few of them. There
| are a zillion of tools now, I can't spend days reading
| their docs: I won't be able to deliver to my customers
| and get paid. Googling how to do X magically works well
| enough.
|
| Discord is the very last resort, only if desperate. I
| tend to keep very far away from tools that have discord
| as their primary documentation. There are always
| alternatives.
| [deleted]
| reaperducer wrote:
| If nobody reads the documentation, that's an indication of
| success, not failure.
|
| It means you've done a good job with the product and people
| don't need help to use it.
| [deleted]
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Yes, but don't confuse cause and effect.
| esafak wrote:
| That is one of the explanations but you should not
| dismiss the others.
| zokier wrote:
| I find this prevalent attitude actually harmful. It is
| kinda weird thing to think that the tools we use should
| not need any learning or training, that anyone should
| just be able to pick them up and be productive.
|
| Of course I understand it is reflective of the current
| situation where naturally it is not worth seeking
| expertise when software gets at minumum a redesign every
| six months if not thrown out completely. But I'd really
| question is that actually good situation to be in?
| mrweasel wrote:
| People read the documentation and fails to understand it.
| Writing good clear documentation that successfully guides
| your users or customers to gain the most value from your
| product is incredibly hard.
|
| It's fine to have Discord, or something similar, for when
| you users come to you with a problem, but then you need to
| consider if you have to go back at update the
| documentation. Early in my career hanging out on
| mailinglists was much more popular, frequently you'd ask a
| question and the maintainers of whatever software you where
| using would take the answer and put them into the regular
| FAQ or documentation. Now we replaced Discord with
| mailinglists and that might be sensible, the feedback loop
| just should not be excluded. Discord is terrible place to
| store knowledge.
| j0057 wrote:
| If it's hard to write documentation that people will
| comprehend, doesn't that make it equally hard to write
| near real-time chat messages that people will understand?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes and no, but at least they'll be able to provide real-
| time feedback and you can tailor your response to they
| specific situation.
| capableweb wrote:
| I guess that's true. I also guess one should consider the
| fact that you could (as long as things don't change)
| "waste" your time writing the documentation once, and saved
| time accumulates, while "saving" your time today not
| writing documentation will accumulate time spent on
| answering questions over and over.
|
| Saved time today VS saved time tomorrow, the constant
| question for startups :)
| duped wrote:
| People are just going to post their question on your forum
| anyway, even if it's been answered a hundred times.
|
| And at least with discord it's easy to source answers from
| your community instead of paying developers to handle
| support.
| bombolo wrote:
| You don't see the majority of people that do not do this,
| because they never interact with you in any way.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| There's always going to be people who don't read your
| documentation and just post on your form but I think it's a
| pretty big fallacy to say for that reason it's useless for
| us to create and publish good documentation. You'd need
| data on customers that look through your documentation and
| never post to make that assertion.
| mooreds wrote:
| We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software.
| Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention
| forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We
| even have an internal slack channel where we capture
| questions that have been asked on other media (including
| private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it
| to post on the forums. This helps future questioners.
|
| Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the
| evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question
| about a specific piece of software.
|
| I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.
|
| > Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help
| portal/documentation and ask questions regardless
|
| It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let
| the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to
| answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back
| and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.
| safeimp wrote:
| The majority of the time they aren't thinking about the
| customer, they're (selfishly, or naively?) thinking about
| themselves and how they can crowd source their support versus
| providing real personal solutions.
| janoc wrote:
| The whole point is that they _don 't have to answer_. They
| hope someone else from the community will before they get to
| it.
|
| It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style
| "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer
| them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the
| communication at all yourself. Win!
| Retr0id wrote:
| Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant
| documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).
|
| The ability to talk directly to a real human is really
| powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it _is_ the
| lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at
| least, those within a certain demographic.
|
| There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or
| otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the
| audience you can reach.
|
| I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why
| they end up like that.
| d-cc wrote:
| I suspect they've figured out that whole search engine
| business model thing has been deprecated for months in its
| current form. Their product has been shitty in specific
| areas for several years now.
|
| Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union has
| lead to a competitive advantage being not just lost, but
| far surpassed. As nature intended.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| It's still good for finding documentation if you know the
| domain it's hosted on, which for product documentation you
| should. Just add "site:documentation.com" to your search
| query.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Give me an example of a search for a given tools
| documentation that doesn't have the result on the first
| page. Google seo is bad but I think this is hyperbole
| because I use it to find documentation easily most every
| day.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Search "python __init__" (sans quotes)
|
| The the first page of results are from, in order:
| mygreatlearning.com udacity.com
| geeksforgeeks.org stackoverflow.com
| w3schools.com micropyramid.com edureka.co
| pythonmorsels.com tutorialspoint.com
| pythontutorial.net
|
| Some of these resources are alright, but none of them are
| python.org or other primary source. As a python user and
| google expert, I know how to tweak my query to get better
| results, but if I was a novice I wouldn't.
|
| On the other hand, if I went to the python community
| discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from
| a real human in seconds. (the python discord is
| particularly excellent, by the way)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Thats not what I mean by using a search engine to parse
| documentation. I would just type "python documentation"
| where the first link I get is the documentation. Then I
| would search within that documentation for " __init__"
| which, when tested just now, took me about 30 seconds all
| in to get to the known good source of truth here. That's
| pretty good I think.
| wizofaus wrote:
| But why would a novice care if it came from python.org,
| providing the information was accurate? I don't think
| you've found a good example of what the GP was asking
| for, at any rate. I've certainly had that experience
| recently, but it turns out it was something more obscure
| than I would have expected (relating to ensuring that
| gulp scripts don't return an error code when warnings
| occur - I'd searched for `gulp --warnoff` and none of the
| answers were anything to do with the gulp tool, but it
| turned out "--warnoff" wasn't a standard flag anyway,
| though there is a blog post about how to add support for
| such a flag).
| dageshi wrote:
| It doesn't seem like python.org answers the question very
| well? As in the implied question of "What is python
| __init__?"
|
| The returned sites do?
|
| If I google "php __construct" I get php documentation as
| the first result.
|
| Google knows when someone doesn't find the answer they're
| looking for from a result, I suspect the results you're
| seeing are the ones the majority of searchers for that
| query wanted.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > The instantiation operation ("calling" a class object)
| creates an empty object. Many classes like to create
| objects with instances customized to a specific initial
| state. Therefore a class may define a special method
| named __init__(), like this: def
| __init__(self): self.data = []
|
| > When a class defines an __init__() method, class
| instantiation automatically invokes __init__() for the
| newly created class instance. So in this example, a new,
| initialized instance can be obtained by:
| x = MyClass()
|
| Seems like a good explanation to me? Maybe people are
| upset that it's buried a bit in the docs instead of
| having a tiny out of context statement about it?
|
| [0]: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html
| dageshi wrote:
| Yes, I suspect people saw a wall of text and went back to
| look for a shorter answer.
|
| I would guess google A/B tested those results till
| python.org fell off the front page.
|
| More to the point, I don't think either google or the
| people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't
| "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python
| __init__?".
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Surprising, the same search on duckduckgo gives me:
| www.w3schools.com stackoverflow.com
| docs.python.org
|
| and a sidebar quoting the 2nd result which is the top
| voted answer to: "What is __init__.py for" on
| Stackoverflow.
|
| Google is in a sad state it seems.
| mooreds wrote:
| > The ability to talk directly to a real human is really
| powerful.
|
| 100%. But different strokes for different folks, as well as
| at different times in the evaluation/discovery journey.
| Many devs don't want to talk to someone.
|
| From the perspective of the product company, things are a
| bit different. If you are pre-product market fit, you
| probably want every interaction with a possible
| customer/user you can, so you can move towards
| understanding the problem space. Set up discord for that.
|
| Once you find PMF, it's all about setting yourself up for
| scaling. We made a choice to scale back chat and focus on
| online, public forums, and it worked out well for us. If
| you want to talk to a human, you can absolutely engage with
| our sales team, or in other public spaces like Twitter.
|
| That said, some projects are big enough or inspire enough
| people that the community can scale on discord. Haven't
| seen that often, but it happens.
|
| > Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant
| documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).
|
| Agree for generic programming queries, but for product
| specific queries, I haven't noticed that. And product
| specific queries are what documentation and forum are
| designed to help with.
| croes wrote:
| >The ability to talk directly to a real human is really
| powerful
|
| In a fresh and new project. But how will it look in 5 years
| when the user numbers are smaller because of other new
| projects?
| Retr0id wrote:
| This isn't a new problem. I was doing some classic iPod
| research a while back, looking back on mid-00s hardware
| research. Some knowledge was present only in IRC chat
| logs, and some is surely lost to the sands of time.
| Similar story with PDA hacking.
|
| The knowledge still needs to be transferred to wikis etc.
| so that it can be preserved long-term.
| croes wrote:
| There were many times when I would have been lost without
| the Internet Archive. And more than once it was because
| of discontinued platforms on MS.
|
| Knowledge in forums or now Discord has a shorter half-
| life until it's gone completely.
|
| That's sad.
| StackOverlord wrote:
| https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/epstein-knew-dirty-
| secret... - 2019
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/google-co-founder-larry-
| page... - May 2023
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
|
| > On December 3, 2019, Larry Page announced that he would
| step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and be replaced
| by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why Discord?
|
| Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one).
| Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting
| all their content on some third party centralized service? I
| don't get it.
|
| Aren't all Discord "servers" controlled by one company? And why
| did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for
| everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories
| of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication",
| it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that
| matches the way we want to communicate".
|
| Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.
|
| Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to
| using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
|
| Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform
| if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.
| EGreg wrote:
| What is QOL? What is so bad about Matrix or Keybase or
| Gitter? Seems great
| ussrlongbow wrote:
| Guess it stands for Quality Of Life.
| danhor wrote:
| (Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the
| sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message
| can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in
| general a much less polished experience.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or
| maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I
| used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is
| just a bunch of hacks put together. For example
|
| - Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because
| rooms within a space are only tangentially related,
|
| - No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for
| this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker
| packs[0])
|
| Not a great bet to go to keybase with the Zoom
| acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210
|
| 0: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-
| proposals/pull/195...
| palata wrote:
| Didn't Matrix (or whoever owns Matrix) buy Gitter? That
| was my understanding...
| Arathorn wrote:
| Ah, the joys of open source: where "nobody has
| implemented 'mark all as read' on a space yet" is
| extrapolated to "half-baked and just a bunch of hacks".
|
| Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951
| (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various
| clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't
| exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent
| decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for
| storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in
| unix.
|
| Sorry you feel Matrix feels half-baked; meanwhile we're
| busy doing a major iteration as per
| https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20 and
| https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-
| of-e.... Right now the target is more
| WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage style messaging than
| Discord/Slack/Teams, but we'll (re)address the latter
| eventually.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for
| everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories
| of discussion.
|
| Just want to point out that they fixed this, it's possible
| to create Topics once the channel's community reaches 200
| users.
|
| Though this probably isn't what most users want for a
| support channel. Having one place to go is simpler then a
| community with a dozen company meme channels that you have
| no interest in seeing.
|
| > Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get
| to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's
| level.
|
| It goes to hell if you make the mistake of enabling E2EE
| for channels since the key exchange bogs it down and only a
| few clients support encrypted message search. Otherwise,
| yeah the Element clients have pretty bad UX especially when
| comparing to Telegram. Some other clients like Nheko
| improve on it but don't cover the full set of features, so
| while I'm a user of Matrix I find it hard to continue to
| recommend Matrix over chat ecosystems with better
| usability.
| dizhn wrote:
| Zulip is the best for this IMO. You can even export
| conversations so they are indexable and viewable without
| login.
|
| But Discord has the advantage that people already have an
| account and all the so called servers are within the same
| GUI. (This convenience also makes it a walled garden)
| kobstrtr wrote:
| I agree, though pushing support to Discord has great benefits
| for startups.
|
| It provides a great funnel for users to join the community,
| establish a feeling of belonging and identification with the
| product.
|
| I'd go the other way around, and fix Discord's documentation
| problem: A chatbot that automatically answers user questions
| based on previous answers and the docs. We're building exactly
| that at https://awesomeqa.xyz/ - feel free to check it out :)
| aledalgrande wrote:
| And usually there is no responsive mods.
| [deleted]
| dcw303 wrote:
| There should be a good opportunity for whoever can implement an
| LLM that listens in on chat platforms like slack and discord and
| constructs a wiki from it.
|
| Bonus points if it also chats back with answers to questions,
| linking to the docs as needed.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Somewhat related tangent -- while I have issues with Discord as a
| platform, I do find it to be a very friction-less way to get a
| community together easily. But since it has consumed so much of
| the conversation on the internet, it is quite concerning that
| centralizing all of this knowledge and culture in one, closed,
| proprietary space will inevitable lead to that Reddit moment when
| unpopular moves are made from the underlying business and
| everyone suddenly realizes they fucked up. It was especially
| strange seeing Reddit subs during/after the blackout funneling
| users into Discord communities.
| mdev23 wrote:
| This is why I'm working on an AI discord docs/support bot:
| https://recurai.com/discord
|
| Reach out if you'd like to get it set up with your server ->
| contact@recurai.com
| vikmals wrote:
| There is also embedchain which you can use in conjunction with
| a discord bot (create QnA pairs, feed them into embedchain
| along with your documentations).
|
| I don't know how recurai works under the hood since the discord
| invite link is broken and there seems to be no documentation on
| it, so not sure if its worth paying for it.
| UnixSchizoid wrote:
| Exactly! I don't use discord for privacy reasons and I don't want
| to just to learn something that should be included in the README
| file or in documentation!
| discordsucks wrote:
| Discord IS harder to sign up to than other stuff. They sometimes
| force you to sign up with a mobile number and thats just a huge
| NO NO.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Mobile number is required if the admin of a server sets its
| verification level to "highest". This is often needed because
| spam bots are rampant and will do anything, including solving a
| regular captcha (which discord also employs via hCaptcha), to
| send spam in direct messages and channels.
| discordsucks wrote:
| This is one but not the only case discord uses mobile
| numbers. If for any reason discord figures you are a probable
| source of spam - they dont tell you the criteria for that for
| obvious reasons - discord will present you with a prompt to
| verify with a unique mobile number. They only tell you so
| after the normal email signup and the profile will be instant
| locked. So you are locked out on profile not on "server"
| level. For people not on discord: A "server" is something
| like a subreddit or a part of discord which is subadmined by
| a certain group/admin. The thing is whatever they exactly do
| it can flag you for any reason, not only if you really
| spammed the platform and they seem to use rather creepy
| technology to make the flagging sticky. At least flushing
| your browser profile and changing IPs is NOT enough to remove
| it, so they might be using TLS supercookies, screen
| resolution or whatever. Would be intresting if some privacy
| researcher reverses their tracking tech. I had that happen to
| me in the past and cant tell you what exactly caused it. It
| may (and equally likely may not) have been caused by an
| account of mine being thrown out of a "server" after pointing
| out some lets say inaccuracies that our student government
| spread. (I didnt spam the server. But it contraticted some
| talking points they rather not want contraticted.) This wasnt
| a platform ban either just a local admin action, but it
| teached me you really want seperate identifiers for different
| tasks, especially if you somehow engage with politics, cause
| otherwise crazy people will start following you around and
| discord makes it easy to track you across servers. You would
| probably run into the same issue if you engage with health
| related, nsfw or really any non mainstream content. Other
| reasons discord might figure you are a likely spam source
| might be use of a vpn or a network range they already have
| seen spamming. I cant tell you if they also just want to
| collect numbers, a blog post of then claimed they only do so
| to combat spam and not for advertising. At least in germany
| mobile numbers are tied to your real identity: To get one you
| have to provide ID to the mobile provider so the goverment
| has an easier time to spy on you if it wants to. Also you can
| be followed between platforms with the number. For example
| you would be able to find me on signal if you had my number.
| There are ways to firewall against this by using virtual
| mobile numbers (google voice or something) but they can be
| detected, it is work and Im not sure if they are allowed or
| blocked. Lastly, at a certain point you can only join so many
| "servers" with a free account, which will be quickly reached
| if every damn software project out there uses one. Though I
| think this is fair from discords POV. I mean in the end they
| need to make money somehow.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > At least flushing your browser profile and changing IPs
| is NOT enough to remove it, so they might be using TLS
| supercookies, screen resolution or whatever.
|
| Fairly obvious that they flag your account in their
| database. They can't use TLS supercookies for the primary
| reason that all of their traffic is proxied through
| Cloudflare - every API call, CDN image, and websocket
| event.
| discordsucks wrote:
| Cant be just that. You can change your IP, create a whole
| new browser profile and of course not log into your old
| account and it will still flag you. It might just be that
| Im unlucky and for some reason outside of my control
| whole regions of my ISPs adress space are flagged.
| MicropenisMike wrote:
| The alternative is being overrun by spam, which is already
| really bad on discord.
|
| What's your solution?
| anthk wrote:
| HTML files. Or a PDF.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's not the only alternative. You see these kinds of
| intrusive checks on platforms that have drastically under-
| funded moderation/safety teams. I don't know Discord's
| numbers, but Twitter's total revenue pre-Musk was about
| $1/user/month or about $0.01/tweet. Plus there's a hunger for
| investor-beloved growth metrics that leaves things biased
| toward greasing the signup funnels. So you end up with
| privacy-destroying compromises like this.
| discordsucks wrote:
| Im aware of that and dont have a solution for that. Its not
| my job to provide one. The thing is there doesnt need to be
| one if you just document your stuff in a normal way. Also
| other platforms like reddit face the same problem and seem to
| be able to solve it in another way, so its not mandatory to
| survive in the net. Spam has always been an issue as long as
| the public internet existed. There are other ways to deal
| with it than introducing global identifiers which can be
| correlated between platforms and the "real world".
| flangola7 wrote:
| Reddit solves it by having millions of unpaid human
| moderators manually removing spam. And also by
| throttling/shadowbanning accounts that use anonymous IPs,
| non-FAANG email accounts, or non-google/apple SSO.
| vaylian wrote:
| That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone
| number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold
| together with their other data which can lead to more nasty
| problems.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| The solution would be easy: at least offer an alternative. I
| would gladly give you a few cents or a dollar so you leave me
| alone with the dishonest bullshit. Probably one of the
| easiest and most effective ways you could use to fight
| spammers, but it is obvious why nobody does it or offers the
| option, because they want numbers. Would be nice to at least
| stop the charade.
|
| In short, no, the alternative is not "being overrun by spam".
| nerdponx wrote:
| Documentation
| yard2010 wrote:
| Documentation is really cool, but it doesn't support voice
| chat yet :)
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| nerdponx wrote:
| Right, but that's "support", not "documentation".
| Completely different thing, and the latter is not really
| a substitute for the former, whether it's on Discord,
| IRC, XMPP, or at the bar after a conference.
| lightedman wrote:
| The phone number is only a requirement in higher-security
| servers.
|
| You could join mine with almost nothing verified.
| jesprenj wrote:
| IIRC you do not have to sign up to use discord. When clicking
| an invite link without being logged in, a temporary account is
| created without having to register with an email address/phone
| number/password.
| bbno4 wrote:
| Everytime I read something like this it's almost always because
| the author does not actually know how to use Discord.
|
| There's some nice search features:
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-U...
|
| And on top of this I'd push the Discord to use forum channels if
| they do not already https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/6208479917079-...
| [deleted]
| zokier wrote:
| > But if you can't even be bothered to do that, perhaps you
| shouldn't be releasing a product in the first place?
|
| That is simply unreasonable gatekeeping; Discord might not be
| documentation, but having documentation is in no way mandatory
| for releasing your thing into the wild.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing
| your thing into the wild.
|
| No. It's not _mandatory_ to have documentation (or even, _gasp_
| , good documentation), but easy access to quality information
| about functionality and usage significantly enhances the UX.
|
| If you're actually _charging_ money for your product,
| especially if it 's a product that isn't strictly for tech
| folks (e.g., IOT devices, end-user applications, LOB
| application frameworks, etc.) you better have some decent
| documentation or you're asking for a world of hurt.
|
| With Discord (bots notwithstanding), you need actual, meat-
| based agents to handle the support channel(s). Providing
| quality documentation reduces the support load, and over the
| long term, likely reduces support costs significantly.
|
| What's more, making folks jump through hoops to get answers to
| questions, most of which are about ordinary
| usage/configuration/dependency/etc. options is not a good look.
|
| I'm not rejecting Discord and similar environments as support
| channels, but we should use the right tool for the right job.
|
| As an old guy, I remember the DEC days, and as Ken Olsen put
| it[0]: One of the questions that comes up all
| the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
| Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many
| years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our
| machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX
| use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
| easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for
| somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging
| programs between different machines. And so,
| because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We
| have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
| It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will
| run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a
| real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to
| be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're
| looking for something, you can easily and quickly check
| that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS,
| no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-
| foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough
| it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of
| UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all
| there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD
| Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of
| UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain.
| Ed.]
|
| Now, Olsen was wrong about Unix/unix-like platforms. But he was
| right about documentation, _especially_ in a business context.
|
| These days, of course, you don't need physical, paper
| documentation and that's a good thing.
|
| Would you rather have to connect to a Discord channel (assuming
| you know the right one to use), have searches for similar
| issues return copious useless results, watch your
| question/issue slide off the page (potentially) with multiple
| other conversations going on, and wait for someone (who may or
| may not have a clue) to attempt to answer your question or,
|
| open a browser tab, search the _indexed_ documentation and
| quickly see all the relevant options, capabilities and /or
| specifications?
|
| Now get off my lawn! :) :)
|
| [0]
| https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/...
| kaycebasques wrote:
| There was a thoughtful comment [1] along your lines in the
| discussion about Diataxis a couple weeks back. The author
| basically argued that in early stages of a project, certain
| types of docs aren't necessary or even that helpful and are
| therefore not a great use of project collaborator time &
| energy.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611205
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Im sure airbags are similar for prototype cars re: costs. We
| sill do it though because its common sense.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I've needed discord documentation for unreal engine, several
| niche plugins, and a few video game mod communities. The
| experience is way better in my opinion. The hard part of finding
| information in a new field is formulating the question, not
| finding the answer. Talking to people who can help you formulate
| the question is great. Most documentation for things is pretty
| bad for hard problems. You want some barebones stuff, sure, but
| most projects have this.
|
| The watchy example looks fine to me:
| https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started
|
| I'd rather post a question and wait for a reply than waste time
| trying to find answers on dead forums and bad docs.
| cabalamat wrote:
| In terms of the 4-document model, I find a lot of software
| systems (libraries and frameworks), while they are good at
| providing tutorials and an API reference, they are a lot poorer
| at providing an Explanation.
|
| What I want to know when learning a new software system are what
| are the main classes/concepts in it and how they relate to each
| other.
| d-cc wrote:
| With chatgpt you can have the documentation write itself. Far
| superior to nothing for sure.
| thealienthing wrote:
| This post says everything I've been feeling. Ive been doing a lot
| of work with the Dronecan/UAVCAN protocol and nearly all their
| documentation is relegated to a Discord channel with no
| discussions about problems I've been trying to solve. A LOT of
| people have asked the same questions I've been asking and not one
| person has responded. Probably because their questions are ignore
| for a short time by busy people and then the questions are buried
| in a deluge of other questions from users. No doubt people have
| solved the same problems I've been coping with but have neglected
| to post what they've learned because discord does not allow you
| to make focused threads on a very specific topic without the
| content being buried. I'm getting more frustrated that projects
| are ditching the tried and true old school forums of yore where
| conversation can be focused and easily found.
| vikmals wrote:
| Interesting, I've experienced the opposite. People would join the
| discord server and ask questions that are already answered in the
| documentations, so you're ending up just sending them the link.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| This is close to an ideal outcome, IMO. For us technical
| writers it's a sign that we're doing our job correctly when
| support/software engineers answer customer questions by linking
| to our docs. It's viewed as a good thing because presumably it
| wasn't too much work for the engineers to find and send that
| link. Much less work than recreating ad hoc explanations for
| the same question every time that it comes up, at least.
|
| If something feels off about the situation, you might argue
| that it could be a symptom of suboptimal design. I.e. "this is
| covered in the docs, why aren't customers finding it?" But in
| my experience there will always be a subset of new,
| inexperienced who default to asking for help in the forums.
| Once they see that the engineers keep linking to the docs to
| answer their questions, they usually get the hint that they
| should just check the docs first.
| richbell wrote:
| The Internet is flooded noobs. You don't experience the people
| who _don 't_ join your Discord because they've already read the
| docs.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Yep. Reading the docs first used to be _expected_ and they
| were worse and harder to find in the past. There's a lot less
| willingness to make a solid effort before asking for help
| these days (IMO).
|
| I can't even count the times I've solved my own problem by
| spending an afternoon trying to build a reproducible example.
| dazed_confused wrote:
| gone are the days where RTFM applied
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| Part of building a community is dealing with people who
| know absolutely nothing. At some point, each of us knew
| nothing about our strongest subject, including how to
| effectively get help.
|
| Yes, that includes people who don't read the docs, or are
| confused by the docs, or are totally new to the problem
| domain as a whole.
|
| Part of what differentiates successful communities is how
| they remain welcoming to those complete beginners, even
| when the question was asked for the 5th time today.
| richbell wrote:
| Sure, but there's difference between beginners and people
| who don't know anything _and_ expect you to do everything
| for them. Tending to the latter is a recipe for burnout.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This is why you have a bot you can use to easily answer FAQs.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| The other part is that many companies consider Discord as being a
| malware source and thus block it.
|
| Great, I have an issue which may be a bug, but you're only
| supposed to post confirmed bugs.
|
| Guess I'll disable VPN. Need to do that anyway to read
| documentation on SourceForge.
|
| 0 accountability in security.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Discord attracts a weirdo community of young people into anime
| and furry stuff .. Slack, whilst not my favorite, is way more
| professional and enterprise. Don't understand the developer
| evangelist stuff moving to Discord. Maybe if you were a gaming
| company or made some gaming mod, but for a web product/tool, big
| fail.
| qwytw wrote:
| Slack requires you pay per account and the free tier is even
| worse than Discord since every message is deleted after 90
| days...
| Eumenes wrote:
| You can join Slack channels as a free user ... Devrel teams
| usually have a budget to manage their communities.
| qwytw wrote:
| For paid products/support sure.. obviously not for open
| source and/or free projects.
| lightedman wrote:
| Discord is far, far superior to slack (except in actual product
| parity between mobile and desktop.)
| Eumenes wrote:
| It may be a superior program/app, but its use case was not
| built with business/enterprise in mind.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Chat is not documentation.
|
| So I hit a blocker, how can I solve this problem? I do a cursory
| look over the implementation to see if I can figure it out, but
| it's an unfamiliar codebase. So I check the docs and there's
| nothing except a "join the Discord community" link. So I open
| Discord, install updates, do the custom email-based 2FA dance,
| agree to the changed T&Cs, dismiss a Nitro banner, agree to the
| server rules, and join #general. I write up my question with all
| the context I can and post it. No reply. So I crack out the
| debugger and step through the library/framework/etc one line at a
| time figuring out what's going on. I set up my own editable copy
| so I can add logging and try some fixes, eventually after a few
| hours I find that X just doesn't support Y, or that I have to
| pass in the value encoded in Base 47 or Latin 1. Three days later
| at 1am I get a dismissive response on Discord telling me to refer
| to a conversation that happened 2 weeks previous to me signing
| up.
|
| Chat massively shifts the burden on to users both in terms of
| figuring stuff out themselves, and in terms of providing support
| to each other. It's no substitute for documentation, particularly
| in the world of asynchronous working. We think it's good for
| async working because you can reply asynchronously, but it's not
| because you can't unblock asynchronously.
|
| In ~8 years of working with Django (split over the last 12
| years), I think the only time I used a debugger on Django code
| was when I found a security vulnerability and needed to be
| certain of some very low level details. In ~5 days (over a month)
| of a hobby project with a project that encourages Discord for
| documentation I've had to use the debugger 3 times to figure out
| what's going on.
| rcme wrote:
| I used Discord for support at my last company. It was _amazing_.
| It takes a while to bootstrap the community, but once you do, it
| becomes a huge asset. Here are the biggest benefits:
|
| 1. Real-time user feedback. Discord is conversational. If someone
| gives feedback on your product, you can quickly have a
| conversation about the exact issue they're facing and you can
| propose solutions to see how they feel.
|
| 2. User retention. When users have such immediate access to the
| product's developers, it makes their opinions feel helpful and
| useful and drives user retention.
|
| 3. User collaboration. Once your community gets big enough, users
| start to collaborate together. This might be directly in the
| product (if it's a collaborative product), but can also take the
| shape of brainstorming improvements and feedback.
|
| 4. Community help. Over time, members of your community becomes
| experts in your product and they help newer users onboard. This
| frees up a lot of dev time that would have been spent providing
| support.
|
| Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little
| silly. How many times have you searched an arcane error and been
| brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email
| never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to
| solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an
| efficient means of documentation. We use our community feedback
| to get a lot of signal about what's missing from our
| documentation and then update it accordingly. 10 users came in
| this week asking about feature X? That means we need to update
| our documentation, etc.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| There are two key differences between what you're describing
| and what Terence Eden is describing:
|
| 1. You have succeeded at integrating Discord into documentation
| processes. You get feedback on X and then make sure to update
| the docs to discuss X. Eden is saying that a lot of projects
| just answer about X in Discord and then never get around to
| updating the docs to discuss X.
|
| 2. Your team responds to Discord messages promptly. A lot of
| teams drag their feet or don't respond whatsoever.
| snthd wrote:
| >How many times have you searched an arcane error and been
| brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed
| email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely
| to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an
| efficient means of documentation.
|
| Usually it's a stackoverflow post or an issue on a bug-tracker.
| Discord redirects information away from those open venues.
| Sometimes the answers are how I discover the project.
|
| On the other hand I care about FLOSS and not startups with
| proprietary code, so it may just be a different thing (mainly
| customer focus).
| Zak wrote:
| > _How many times have you searched an arcane error and been
| brought to a mailing list?_
|
| When I search an error message, I'm _usually_ brought to a
| mailing list, forum, Reddit, or Stackoverflow - often all of
| those. More often than not, one of them has either a solution
| or a clue that gets me closer to a solution. My problem gets
| solved and I don 't have to waste someone else's time.
| Salgat wrote:
| For support? Absolutely. For documentation? Absolutely not.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| This seems like a matter of perspective. As the product owner,
| having an active Discord would be amazing--easy dopamine hits
| everywhere.
|
| It's selection bias. Of course the conversations the owner
| participates in turn out well. What about the other
| conversations? What about that question that just nobody
| responded to and 3 hours later people start talking about
| something else and buried the question? Well, the company never
| saw that question. The company does not see what it does not
| see--selection bias.
| rcme wrote:
| Why would we miss a message?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Everytime I am in a remotely active discord this always
| happens. 502 new messages since 9am. Then if you scroll
| while reading the app it scroll jacks as it fetches new
| messages.
| rcme wrote:
| Is this activity across all the servers you're a member
| of or is it a social Discord? Just my personal
| experience, but there isn't too much chatter on product-
| focused Discord servers so it's easier to get to every
| message. I also have a totally separate Discord account
| that I use and make sure every message to the server ends
| up as a push notification to my phone.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If its that slow then you might as well just run a
| mailing list instead. More of your current and potential
| users know and understand email than discord.
| rcme wrote:
| I can confidently say our users would be 100x less likely
| to sign up for a mailing list.
|
| From a user perspective, Discord is much better than
| email. When you give out your email, it's basically
| giving an entity carte blanche to spam you. With Discord,
| the user is more in control of when and how they interact
| with your community.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Why would you miss a message? Because people miss things
| and there is no signal that indicates something has been
| missed.
|
| Missing things is the default state for humans. However,
| sometimes we setup a system, and the system wont let us
| miss things. As much as I hate how metrics and tickets have
| taken over everything, it's hard to miss an open Jira
| ticket. It's hard to miss a GitHub issue that was opened 2
| years ago and still has no replies. These are signals from
| the system that something has been missed, the system
| itself provides tools to help us not miss things, because
| otherwise we would.
|
| What signals does Discord provide that something has been
| missed? If you accidentally scrolled to far and missed a
| one-line message in the chat 6 months ago, what signal do
| you have that you missed it?
| rcme wrote:
| > Because people miss things and there is no signal that
| indicates something has been missed. ... What signals
| does Discord provide that something has been missed?
|
| You can configure Discord notifications so that every
| message generates a push notification to your phone. I
| only ever dismiss the notification if the message
| requires no action or if an appropriate response has
| already been given to the message. Most of the time, I
| respond right away.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| To be fair, I see some good things about that.
|
| But to answer my own question, the system you have in
| place to ensure you don't miss things is "just don't make
| mistakes, just don't miss things". In the event that you
| do make a mistake (like accidentally moving your finger
| in a slightly wrong pattern on the screen) there will be
| no feedback or signal to indicate you have missed
| something.
| esafak wrote:
| There are hundreds of channels and thousands of messages.
| Nobody checks notifications in chat servers of reasonable
| size.
| donmcronald wrote:
| There's no way that scales. I have email addresses where
| I delete everything at 10k unread messages. I can't
| imagine notifications for something like chat that
| produces even more messages.
|
| Do you mean when people mention you specifically?
| asynchronous wrote:
| Sure, maybe for straight support items or collaboration but for
| actual _documentation_ if it only lives on your Discord that is
| a straight sin
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a
| little silly.
|
| How is that silly? I know there's threading now, but it has to
| be used by everyone. If you find someone that asked the same
| question you have, but without a reply, is it unanswered or
| answered out of the thread 1000 messages down the page? Without
| threading it's a disaster.
|
| > How many times have you searched an arcane error and been
| brought to a mailing list?
|
| Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at
| least _good_ answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes
| anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no
| one sees it. If someone does answer, it's often a naive,
| enthusiastic person that doesn't even understand the problem
| I'm having.
|
| I used to post a lot on forums. I'd post well tested,
| reproducible examples that exactly demonstrated my problem. I'd
| also take an "ask a question, answer a question" approach where
| I'd skim the first page or two of unanswered questions and
| leave a reply if I knew something off the top of my head.
|
| Almost every Discord or Slack "support" channel I've tried is
| terrible. They're a way for companies to reduce support by
| shifting the expectations towards ignoring users. Drone (CI)
| did this recently. Their Slack channel is nothing but users
| asking questions (at least for the several days I saw before
| unsubscribing from emails).
|
| I think the real reason Discord, etc. are popular is because
| it's low effort. No one expects you to come in with a fully
| baked example. It's a conversation. So instead of the old
| expectation that you'd come prepared with a concrete example of
| your problem, you just blurt out some half-assed question and
| wait for someone to prompt you and hold your hand through the
| whole issue.
|
| The price for that is the loss of people that want to
| participate in a high effort community rather than an emoji
| filled meme-fest with content splattered at mile-5 on the 1k
| mile continuous scroll. At least that's my opinion.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Discord servers can have forums in them if you didn't know
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| We had a brilliant, visionary solution to this whole problem.
| It was called Stack Overflow. Real questions with actual
| answers, no faffing about. Tragically it has been dying a
| slow death for seven or eight years and as of now looks like
| it will just be milled into LLM food.
| donmcronald wrote:
| SO is definitely the best there's ever been IMO. I'll
| repeat myself a bit and say that I think the reason
| platforms like that are dying is because many people don't
| want to make any effort and the expectation you try to be a
| good contributor is a negative for them.
|
| I bet 50% of the problems I've ever had were self solved by
| trying to build an example that showed exactly what issue I
| was having.
| rcme wrote:
| > Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or
| at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes
| anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then
| no one sees it. If someone does answer, it's often a naive,
| enthusiastic person that doesn't even understand the problem
| I'm having.
|
| People on forums were free to ignore your posts as well, but
| they didn't, because they cared about their users. Discord
| isn't the cause of indifferent dev teams.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The "its not indexable" used to be a lot less silly but I'm
| afraid you're entirely right.
|
| We have a web that has itself become almost unsearchable (due
| to SEO spam, google shitting the bed with their search quality
| in general, everything becoming a walled garden, everyone
| jacking up API prices/hoarding their data against LLMs)
|
| I think that the death of the searchable web in general is to
| blame, and is driving this shift to Discord. Not so much the
| individual developers, for them its a net win as you say.
|
| We need the "ozempic web": 2023 scale but lighter, indexable,
| un-walled, with less bullshit filler and attention grabbing
| monetization. Until that happens, we can hate the players all
| we want but it's the game itself that is crooked.
| dagmx wrote:
| There's four tiers of support channels imho and I think the issue
| is that people try and push discord as a solution for all four.
|
| - documentation is meant to be official and the best effort
| representation of what a user should know from the perspective of
| the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine.
|
| - forums where support questions come up that may or may not be
| answered by the documentation. This is still externally
| searchable which makes it a great secondary form of
| documentation.
|
| - community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster
| and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it's
| more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing
| issues that have been brought up before.
|
| - 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but
| allows for more sensitive discussion.
|
| The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support
| tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But
| the lack of search engine integration and low history limits
| means that it's really inscrutable to people who are trying to
| solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community
| and waste everyone's time with repeating the same thing again.
|
| there's a place for each of them, and I think too many projects
| try and treat one as a silver bullet
| andybak wrote:
| We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using
| https://www.answeroverflow.com/
|
| You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice
| features and handles issues around consent nicely.
|
| If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating
| upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if
| you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so
| further down the line.
|
| A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-
| back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting
| the community made this the best option for us.
|
| The best solution might be not to use Discord in the first place
| but it does have familiarity in its favour (for some communities
| at least)
|
| We also do maintain "proper" documentation but it's hard to
| capture everything and the Discord contains valuable content
| that's not recorded elsewhere.
| toastal wrote:
| Or at least mirror in the opposite direction. Keep your
| 'primary' communications on something open like XMPP MUCs,
| Matrix Spaces, IRC-or the likes of Zulip, Mattermost. If the
| chat flavor of the week changes, at least home base wasn't ran
| by a megacorp that could rug pull & turn off the service like
| they do with sanctions, or just new paywalls.
| 034jtoa3j94r5 wrote:
| Also, Slack is not documentation, for all of the same reasons.
| I'm working with my company now to improve documentation across
| the organization. We're an old startup (takes a very long time to
| get to market) and in the past quarter I've led two projects
| where I've spent weeks trying to answer questions about old code,
| sometimes finding that the original author is no longer at the
| company and no documentation exists or the original is still at
| the company but literally doesn't remember writing the code and
| no documentation exists. And each time people tell me there are
| Slack conversations explaining everything ... somewhere. No.
| Every project, every application needs a design doc before and a
| user's manual after and they actually need to get maintained.
| mnd999 wrote:
| > In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack,
| Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever
|
| Not true, they demand phone numbers, make you fill out captchas
| and generally try to grab as much identifying data as they can
| get their hands on. It's a pretty scummy app all round.
| RulerOf wrote:
| > they demand phone numbers
|
| It annoys the absolute shit out of me that this has largely
| become "acceptable" for SaaS products. I don't want to be
| identified by a phone number, and I don't want to perform a
| login by proving I can receive a text message.
|
| I want a login form that can be completed by a password
| manager.
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| Discord overall is antithetical to the web's foundational values
| and yet another thing where a "moderator" culture has emerged
| that cannibalizes user interaction
| davely wrote:
| I feel like it harkens back to the days of lurking around IRC,
| chatting with randos about all sorts of stuff. I've gotten a
| lot of enjoyment from it. The main difference is that
| conversations are persistent and you can (sort of) search them.
|
| That said, pretty much every popular modern website is
| antithetical to the web's foundational values, with persistent
| user tracking, monetizing everything, walled gardens, etc. It's
| not a Discord exclusive problem.
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| Funny story: I recently received an email from discord
| threatening my account with suspension because I had simply
| lurked a server they found to be rule-breaking. I had
| forgotten about even joining it until I saw the email.
| n_ary wrote:
| The irony of this behavior is that, Discord's own support channel
| for non-paying users are only e-mails and there are no actual
| discord channel to report discord issues.
|
| Disclaimer: To best of my knowledge. I tried reporting bugs but
| it was always e-mail with scripted responses(reboot device, reset
| router, reinstall client, factory reset device).
| gbear605 wrote:
| They have a Discord server for creating integrations with their
| API, which is probably the most similar usage.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Discord is good for real-time chatting -- both text and voice.
| It's pretty horrible for finding old conversations, unless you
| know exactly what you're looking for (and even then there's a lot
| of manual sifting).
|
| I mostly love Discord. It's better than Teams, better than
| Slack... but it's not a replacement for a well-curated Wiki, or
| even a Reddit thread that I can find via Google search.
| juliangmp wrote:
| Discord and its consequences have been a disaster to the human
| race.
|
| Or the internet at least.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| A ~50 german colleague of mine asked me recently what the hell
| Discord was and I couldn't come up with a good explanation for
| him that wasn't
|
| >"uhh It's IRC but with pictures and far worse."
|
| Next time I am simply going to answer that it's an NSA longrun
| project. Because that even if it isn't, it probably will be.
| mynameishere wrote:
| I am confused. Why would anybody use Discord for anything other
| than...well, I don't know. I guess the same thing the old Yahoo!
| chat rooms were for 20 years ago.
| haunter wrote:
| >Why would anybody use Discord for anything
|
| It's a replacement for Ventrilo/Mumble/Teamspeak. At the time
| (and still) there were no voice chat + text chat service
| integrated into one that can be used for free both on web,
| desktop, and mobile.
| handwarmers wrote:
| Meta comment: HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain
| topics is becoming quite exhausting. Obviously a lot of the
| current commenters didn't even read what the article was about
| and just wanted to vent about the good old days of mailing lists
| and half-assed docs that at best had a code sample, but on
| average were just a "table of contents" for the source code that
| you'd ultimately have to read. I for one wish these projects had
| BBS-es in addition to Discord, but man I love just chatting with
| people working on the thing I am also interested in and making
| friends along the way.
|
| Actual comment: When it comes to Watchy, I found the docs to be a
| good starting point - https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-
| started . They give you the architectural diagrams, have a few
| code examples for some of the more common use cases, and do a
| pretty good job at letting you know that this is very much going
| to be an "adventure" type project with a lot of surface to cover.
|
| They could expand one day and add links to articles/projects
| other people have made, but I am not sure many of those exist. It
| is sort of a niche product.
| ecf wrote:
| Discord doesn't have threading for messages. It deserves every
| ounce of hate it receives.
| Zetice wrote:
| Yes it does?
| ecf wrote:
| They are temporary channels, not the simple and low
| friction version that Slack uses.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The Discord instances I've used do have threading. Maybe it's
| a configurable setting or maybe it's only available in paid
| versions of Discord. I have heard lots of complaints that the
| design makes it easy for people to miss that feature.
|
| More broadly, it seems to be a common problem in chat UIs,
| regardless of what particular product you're on. I think
| there is a segment of internet users who have been online for
| a while now and are used to web 1.0 chat rooms where there
| was only one way to send messages. They do not have the
| muscle memory of using threads. That's why you see so many
| dangling responses that should not be standalone messages but
| rather should have been part of the thread.
| Forricide wrote:
| You're correct, it's a configurable feature (not paid, it's
| been openly available for 1-2 years).
|
| Discord also supports forums, but most server owners
| disable one or both as they can take more effort to
| moderate/maintain.
| diath wrote:
| You can hover any message and press "Create Thread" which
| creates a separate threading for that specific message where
| people can participate.
| haunter wrote:
| >HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is
| becoming quite exhausting
|
| Yep you can guess comments all the time just by the title
| alone. There are certain topics that triggeres a lot of people
| here and no matter what the actual submission is about (they
| won't read the article either way) they just post their
| preoccupied comment. I mean when someone makes a throwaway
| "discordsucks" to comment that says it all.
| discordsucks wrote:
| Honestly, my comment was pretty balanced imho. Discord does
| provide great UX for what it is good at. That is gaming
| communities and day to day chatter and such. I even think it
| has a huge lead in that regard other than maybe being a bit
| slow on weaker hardware - probably cause electron. It just
| has inacceptable entry barriers for documentation purposes by
| collecting your data and severe limits on how much content
| can be accessed and more importantly retained. I spare you to
| repeat myself on why I think so. Especially open source
| projects shouldnt make it a requierement to hand over your
| data to a entity which has recently been fined for GDPR
| violations in order to use them.
| tchock23 wrote:
| Chatting with the creators and making friends is a great reason
| to create a Discord. But maybe don't push everyone there for
| everything?
| handwarmers wrote:
| I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much -
| imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas .
| Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for
| everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample
| projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the
| community to discuss ideas.
|
| But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to
| write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that
| need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord
| over docs.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The greatest communities in technology all have good
| documentation. There's no reason to play fast and loose
| when you can just do the job right and document your tools.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| Maybe Discord can be a starting point, and documentation
| can be written later.
|
| One way to think about documentation is that it is useful
| to help scale up support. But if there is no scale, it is
| less important.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That doesn't seem very unix philosophy to me
| handwarmers wrote:
| The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with documentation
| lol. It is actually the exact opposite of your know it
| all hypothetical "no reason to play fast and loose when
| you can just do the job right" fantasy :
|
| "Design and build software, even operating systems, to be
| tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to
| throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them."
|
| If anything, it is a lot closer to move fast and break
| things.
| susam wrote:
| I use a Matrix channel (which is bridged to an IRC channel)
| for this purpose. I host computing book club meetups in the
| weekends. While the meetup main page and notes are hosted on
| a website, I have Matrix and IRC channels where the meetup
| participants can hang out together, follow schedule updates,
| make friends, etc. All our communication is in text format,
| so these open protocols and platforms serve our needs pretty
| well.
|
| The group members have the freedom to use any free and open
| source client or one of the popular web interfaces to join
| the channel and talk to each other. Should something go wrong
| with the Matrix or IRC network (say, the network becomes
| user-hostile for some reason), it is a simple matter of
| moving the channel to another benign network. The group
| members only need to point their clients to the new address.
|
| In fact, such a thing did happen once in 2021 when Freenode
| went through major staff changes due to disagreements with
| how the network was being run. All channel operators (myself
| included) moved their channels to Libera in a matter of days.
| It took me only about 5 minutes to complete the migration and
| hand out the new channel address to the channel members.
| anthk wrote:
| Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they
| aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation
| source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made.
| Period.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made.
|
| Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest
| zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Discord themselves call them "servers". If you want to change
| public opinion, you'll need to start at the source. I just
| double checked to be sure, and yup, that button at the left
| says "Add a Server".
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Channels and servers are different things, and both terms are
| used for discord. A channel is just a single text or voice
| space where discussions can happen. Many projects will have
| multiple channels each specialized to a single topic. The
| whole collection of these is called a "server". The docs also
| use the term "guild" for the same concept, as the API docs
| explain [0].
|
| [0] https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
| xigoi wrote:
| Doesn't change the point that a Discord "server" is not a
| server.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here.
| Calling the process that handles communication between
| users a "server" was already common practice back when
| IRC was standardized in 1993 (where discord gets the term
| from). It even appears in the original jargon file, so
| that definition was common long before even that.
| xigoi wrote:
| Yes, I don't disagree with this definition. But a Discord
| "server" is not analogous to an IRC server.
| charcircuit wrote:
| An IRC server has a collection of channels. A discord
| server has a collection of channels.
|
| It is simple as that. IRC servers don't refer to a single
| physical server either since IRC servers supported
| federation allowing multiple servers to act as a single
| server. There is no need to be so strict on the
| definition of server considering how loose its usage was
| already with IRC.
| trolan wrote:
| > a computer or computer program which manages access to
| a centralized resource or service in a network.
|
| I think by definition you're wrong. By layman's terms
| you're wrong too. A server serves things, either content,
| chat text or your meal. Discord servers serve a
| collection of text channels located on a centralized
| resource.
|
| Now, for the real lesson: take yourself and everyone else
| less seriously.
| xigoi wrote:
| A Discord "server" is neither a computer nor a computer
| program. All "servers" are serviced by a single program
| distributed across many actual servers, presumably
| without any direct mapping.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| From what Discord employees have previously said, a guild
| server is a single Erlang process that's usually fixed to
| a single host. Voice is handled separately, but again by
| a single process assigned to that guild server.
| handwarmers wrote:
| The future is now, old man.
| anthk wrote:
| That's not the future. That's old software using 20x more
| resources than usual.
| philippejara wrote:
| We may not like the "future", but old software using 20x
| more resources than usual has been the future for a
| while, just look at electron apps the growing trend of
| home computers becoming thin clients over webapps and
| cloud computing. I despise this trend as much as the
| anyone else, but I can't see how it isn't the future we
| are heading towards.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Still better by 2 orders of magnitude than Slack. Slack is
| shit and it's evil.
| rchaud wrote:
| In a few years' time, Discord will start adding in Jira
| integrations, just you watch.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Slack is indeed terrible but it doesn't resolve Discord of
| it's shortcomings as a forum
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I like that Millenials have finally gotten old enough to
| forget their own experience and repeat the age old tradition
| of blaming everything wrong in the world on the next
| generation.
| trolan wrote:
| Help me with my education. I'm just a lowly 4th year SWE
| major and we haven't covered definitions of servers yet.
|
| Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to
| provide services (such as access to files or shared
| peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in
| the network
|
| And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic
| device that can store, retrieve, and process data
|
| How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to
| provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes
| content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is
| running in its own container for you to consider it a server?
| It serves things.
| brianjking wrote:
| I'm just into this epaper watch this blogger writes about. Anyone
| have any experience with them?
| bartwr wrote:
| As a user of a product, I do _not_ want to be a community of
| random people and flooded with unproductive discussions.
|
| I do not want to be refreshing mostly-synchronous chats and if
| missing a day, missing important information.
|
| I want companies to respect my time and attention.
| okwubodu wrote:
| Discord is the most prevalent and lowest friction communication
| app for the highest portion of the relevant audience, and will
| only become more so with every new (younger) developer cohort.
|
| The average 16-34ish year-old probably-male developer that owns a
| PC with a discrete GPU almost certainly already has Discord
| installed, and does not perceive any undue burden from being
| "forced" to use an app they already use regularly, for better or
| worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327674/discord-user-
| age...
|
| In my opinion, the best solution is Discord getting ahead of this
| and letting admins make in-server threads visible to the
| clearnet.
| mepian wrote:
| Discord's search is astonishingly horrible. Users have been
| complaining for years about it, and it's not improving. This
| alone disqualifies it from being useful as documentation.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| I came here to say this. There's so many things wrong with it:
|
| 1. If a user left the server, you can no longer specifically
| search for stuff they posted.
|
| 2. Even if a user is still in the server, it can still be hard
| to search for stuff they posted because Discord search seems to
| only sometimes know about all the current users.
|
| 3. It breaks if you search for something with a lot of hits,
| and try to go back to the first page (i.e. the earliest hits).
| For example it's not possible for me to jump to my first
| message in some servers.
|
| 4. Can't search within specific threads
|
| 5. Something about how the text search works itself has
| bothered me in the past, but I can't find a good example of
| what's wrong with it at the moment.
| drabiega wrote:
| Discord's text search isn't exact, which can be a big problem
| sometimes. For instance, I was in a discord for a game mod
| recently which had questions asked about the terms 'element'
| and 'elemental', which were two very different topics. You
| simply can't narrow your search down to just one of those.
| Even searching for "elemental" brought up every usage of
| "element".
| esafak wrote:
| Because they expect you to lurk all day and chat, not search
| and get back to work. Engagement (wasting time) tends to be a
| desirable quality at these kinds of companies.
| gochi wrote:
| I see a lot of talk about Discord being the latest evil, but
| really nobody is actually tackling the underlying problems that
| causes people to use Discord for reasons it's not well suited
| for.
|
| Open source projects will rely on Discord for more than ephemeral
| discussions because they're too swamped to dedicate resources to
| proper documentation or a readme. It takes too long to keep
| information up to date, nobody wants to write it, and those that
| do want to write it tend to not be great at really understanding
| the project. "Edit on Github" links work for larger projects
| almost exclusively it seems as nobody uses it to help out smaller
| projects struggling with docs. Documentation is a hard problem!
| It requires all hands on deck, yet people treat it like one
| person can go off in isolation and come back with great docs like
| a novelist. So they pin a comment on Discord for FAQs, they
| section a channel off for admin-only docs in progress for stuff
| they eventually move to a Github wiki of sorts.
|
| Also interestingly enough, the project he links does have a lot
| of documentation, even has wikis full of links. They're adequate
| enough as docs. So I don't know what he would even have to go
| into Discord for. He can submit Github issues as well to the
| multiple repos they have linked.
|
| I don't believe businesses are exclusively moving support to
| Discord, but again the ones that do rely on Discord are already
| using it for ephemeral discussions so they just add in casual
| support to the mix because they are not going to opt into
| extremely costly support systems. It's easier,
| counterintuitively, to provide support through Discord than it is
| to run the likes of Intercom especially at a smaller scale. How
| else are they supposed to prove direct support for people who
| don't want to search through the Github?
|
| Now that two core problems are out of the way, we can talk about
| why Discord thrives. People are ok with Discord being ok at
| everything but not really excelling at those tasks because they
| want a hub. They want a place with one account they can get
| support for an open source project, and then talk to their game
| friends, and then look up job applications in another server.
| This is why they don't care about the official site or sending an
| email, Discord is good enough.
|
| All this to go against the grain and say: Discord is fine as
| documentation. Not enjoyable to use for that purpose, but fine.
| Do yourself a favor, and contribute to some docs.
| vikmals wrote:
| I've joined the project discord he's ranting about, seems like
| all the questions he asked could be answered by following
| through the docs or actually reading the code (or by using the
| search function on github). Discord is just a place for asking
| questions and having someone else to do the research because
| most people are lazy.
| jasmer wrote:
| [dead]
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