It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls.
You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.
It’s not just your opinion. Discord is a black hole for content. There won’t crawlers for the content in these spaces. I’d like to see more activity in the ActivityPub & modern, self-hosted forum/blog spaces (where Atom feeds can aggregate), but history likes to repeat itself as we move from one closed, proprietary communications service to the next because there’s ‘no cost’ to join.
It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is bad if you want to create content for universal consumption but no one I know is truly using discord for that.
Pithy retort: that must be a parallel dimension to suggest Discord is good for privacy.
Letting ideas float around a chatroom is good but communities hopefully have motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity because we will lose them over time. Some places do a better job, but a lot of content is straight up locked out from the wider internet where users are required to give away credentials to a private American company just to get access to it; at least private American Reddit I could read without an account with answers to folks web searching for a quick solution. But we’re tech-savvy folk and know better, but it seems from even the Stack Overflow survey results yesterday that our industry is also trending in the wrong direction.
There's different notions of privacy. Discord isn't going to protect you from someone deliberately stalking your posting history, but it is more private in the sense that it is, first and foremost, comprised of communities who want to manage who participates. A Discord server is the equivalent of a local pub with a specific audience.
And in that context not being crawlable is very much a good thing because communities require spaces that are to some extent fenced off, nobody holds a meeting in a train station. In an age were publicly scrapable information becomes subject to automated surveillance or vacuumed up by AI systems it's not surprising and justifiable that people move to walled gardens.
Not to mention that a lot of discord chats are conversational. And the default for casual conversations is that they're ephemeral, for good reasons. When you have a chat in the analog world, you don't expect that to be scanned by everyone for posterity.
Sure. It's not a problem that people who want a casual chat with friends or interest groups use a platform for casual chatting. I say that even though I prefer the earlier world where everything was indexed and people liked to overshare on Facebook.
The problem is when you use Discord (or Slack, or IRC - yes, IRC is just as bad in this context) to run a community that's outward-facing. For example, when a large OSS project, or a foundation, decides to use Discord as its main support/hanging out channel. Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. Again, this is not about causal chats - your "offtopic" forum thread probably is better off being a Discord channel. The problem is when contributing to, or receiving support from, such community requires being active on a chat group.
Remember "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[0]? That seminal article from 1970s that, for some reason, just doesn't want to die? It was posted here just three days ago[1]. It actually talks about this. What it calls "elites" that naturally grow as an informal hierarchy in a group without a strong formal hierarchy - Discord, et al. are pretty much designed to create those. The people who are able and willing to keep up with the chat flow, following it all day every day, are the ones that become those "elite", and end up running the community.
>Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities.
depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project more of a strain than a collaborative effort.
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I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. Its much more annoying to log on and read the day's messages, but the number of relevant messages may be in the dozens that take 10 minutes to skim, not thousands that takes a part time job to parse. But even then it makes sense; for those super large OS repos, there are in fact people doing it as part or full time jobs
Take a look at Zephyr RTOS, for instance. It's all behind a fucking discord. It's a pain in the ass compared to something like Nordic Semiconductor's Devzone. The fact that I have to join a tech support channel for my job with the same profile I use to join 18+ furry roleplay servers (discord requires a phone number that can receive texts and I don't have a work phone) is a sign that something here is a problem.
well yes, that's always an issue with popular social media. That's why I make sure my 18+ furry roleplay account is different from the professional one.
> I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush.
For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people".
Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least occasionally active on IRC (later Telegram), and 5 people generating 1000+ messages between 09:00 and 17:00 on every regular working day. By volume, 50% could be casual shitposting, 30% interesting technical conversations, and 20% something relevant to the community - but 100% of it was a bonding experience.
No surprise that the people generating most of the chat backlog volume were also seen as the "core" / most involved participants.
1000 messages in a work day sounds like a lot even for a decently popular game discord. That sounds like it goes beyond "active participants" and more like "eternally online" people.
You already made your choice, but there is something worth considering on if you even want to be a part of a group (even if you had all that free time). I find it interesting that this post came up later after I came back to this comment:
>motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity
I think there were some sensitive documents dumped from Discord (where noone noticed them for a good while) to the public internet. So I'd say there is some truth to it being semi-private. The "Discord Leaks".
There are a few open-source projects that mirror the Discord help channels to a external website so that it is easily searchable. More people should do this in my opinion. Discord is extremely convenient and it is always very active, so naturally people will be drawn to it, but we should push for more alternatives like using matrix with a bridge to discord and indexers that mirror content to be more open and transparent. The problem is that its expensive and not everyone is capable of doing it easily, or they dont necessarily care or know why that's a good thing.
Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.
I mean this was basically clubhouse which people loved until it grew large enough that they had to build out moderation tooling besides "kick this motherfucker out of the bar" (like automatically enforcing "if anyone talking in this bar personally blocked you, you're not allowed to enter the bar. Fine for a local dive, disastrous for larger rooms, imagine being banned from a conference because one person blocked you - they didn't even have to want to ban you from the conference, you're just auto-kicked from any room they enter !)
Except it’s often used in a way that goes beyond chitchat and bouncing ideas. I was pretty active in a programming community a few years ago, and then they decided to move official chat exclusively Discord which I disagree with on principle & was not going to create an account. Some (not all) decisions I would have previously expected to see on the forum got discussed and decided within Discord’s proprietary walls which cut some users out that previously were a part of the discussion.
It often happens unintentionally, and it poisons communities. Back when I was actively participating, and for a time even running our local Hackerspace, I insisted on a hard rule: our IRC channel is non-binding, anything of any relevance must be also discussed on the mailing group, and only decisions made on the mailing group are binding. This rule was keeping the community from going nova - shedding outer layers of occasional participants, and collapsing into a core group of friends that's in constant contact.
Even with that rule in place, when I graduated and had to focus more on my work, I realized I'm slowly becoming an outsider to my own community, simply because I'm not able to keep up with the torrent of random conversations on IRC. Back then, there were no LLMs available to summarize the 1000+ messages people sent between 09:00 and 17:00. And even if they were, it wouldn't have helped, because the problem was, people who wrote those messages were bonding together, becoming closer-knit every day, while I was becoming more distant just by missing out on this.
It's what eventually made me stop participating - and from what I talked to other people in and around our Hackerspace at the time, I'm not the only one. Which is why I say, chat groups are, by very nature, poisonous to communities - including off-line ones. They need careful managing.
It already is indexed, though. Any member of a server can run a search over the messages. Granted, it's not a particularly great search, but it's there.
Content created for universal consumption was the dream of the early internet. It powered several generations intellectually forward at light speed (or backward in some circles).
Segmentation, paywalls clickbait and SEO are, unfortunately, the Monday morning reality we’re waking up to.
When I was researching some DVD menu stuff a couple of years ago I was able to read through long dead forums from 2002-2005 via google and get almost all of the information I needed from there.
When I was trying to resolve an issue with my hacked PS3's BluRay drive a few months ago I was able to deduce the solution from a fairly terribly maintained wiki from 2012.
When I was trying to reverse engineer a board game app from 2018 a few months ago I was barely able to find any information because the official Discord banned such discussions and the unofficial Discord didn't seem to exist anymore.
What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)
The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.
I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.
I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.
The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.
I host a Mattermost server for this purpose. It does what Discord does, just shittier, buggier, fewer features, and I have to pay a web host to have somewhere to run it. But it's -actually- private and our community owns the data, instead of whoever buys Discord next week.
I wish there were more self-hosting offerings to compete with Discord. RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix/Element all leave something to be desired.
Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that?
Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity.
The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural workflow to create a chat community around themselves that tie-in to their other social media.
I like Discord because it solved one of my longstanding complaints with forums: the perpetual forum-dweller who is an otherwise shut-in person who monopolizes the discussion and likely has other flaws that precludes them from being a voice of authority on a subject anywhere but in their little forum space.
Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
> Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day.
I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a place that's structurally makes a community be run by close-knit group of people with too much free time.
oh I certainly have. We call them moderators often, but there are definitely power users who you will see comment on almost every post in a particular group.
And since we're on the topic of Reddit here: well, you will definitely see the abyss stare back if you look into how many subs the largest moderators run.
What's the point of chat rooms? Well... you see in the beginning there was only grunts and aggressive body language (kinda like how emojis are used today,) and then well, you know what just read the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_communication
I use Discord to talk privately with my friends. Sometimes I get answers there on specific communities faster, but I agree that the non-searchability is horrendous.
This, at least subreddits are relatively stable, public and searchable. There is so much knowledge hidden inside huge chat logs of semi-public Discord servers which might disappear at any minute and is hard to retrieve, unless that server maintains a wiki or something similiar.
So then someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page.
Let's say I run a Discord community around some product/service, like a rendering engine like Octane. Two users have a meaningful conversation explaining how to increase light samples. Let's say that information is not documented online. There should be a nice way to summarize + post that onto a website that can be crawled.
You could even automate this with GPT. It could constantly scan Discord for back-and-forth context-specific conversations and push summaries from them to a website. Then users could upvote or downvote them into oblivion asynchronously.
>someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page.
it's not impossible. And ultimately many discord groups will try to have channels dedicated to keeping a list of guides (usually some google sheets maintained stuff) that are slightly more publicly visible. But it still comes down to the will of the people to maintain that and make is accessible.
Main barrier with your approach is that I'm not sure how scrapable discord is. It (to my knowledge) never had an API that did more than let you automate posting and maybe scan recent comments to reply to.
I absolutely despise Discord. I understand that it’s essentially a chat room for communities where content is ephemeral, but so many communities use it slightly differently. For example lots of communities use it to provide help to other users but then complain when users ask the same questions over and over. (See Python discord)
What I like about Reddit or any forum is the ability to search for a topic or question you need help with and then see people discussing it and resolving it. Forums are a great Archive for discussions like this.
Where discord plays a good role is in fleeting chat. Water cooler type chat. Discord is fun if you’re heavily involved in a community, you can spend many hours a day in your favourite discord but for someone like me who just likes to pop in a now and again, it’s borderline useless.
I suppose what I’m getting to is that, for me, discord is for low effort throwaway chat, Reddit or HN for that matter is better for discussions that should be read again by interested minds.
I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.
Discord knows better, this is by design. Their investors would run screaming if they knew what was in those chat logs. The lack of searchability is their biggest defense against being hauled in front of Congress because the public just isn't aware of how much of the platform is extremism.
That's too bad, because a lot of open-source projects have moved to Discord, and it's an absolute pain that every time I want to search, I have to 1. login and 2. join yet another Discord server.
I find it easy to mute and put the ones I don't frequent often in a folder and only go there when I need to. I only actively visit and contribute to 2 Discord servers but that number might grow if the reddit communities stay dark (and I don't blame them for doing so).
I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use. It hurts my brain that CNCF and Kubernetes use this as a platform. At least in Discord I can search thru years of content and discover a discussion instead of asking the same questions over and over.
> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week.
Gitter had terrible search, but one advantage Gitter had over Slack and Discord is that it required no login to lurk, and chatrooms were indexable by search engines. You can still do so with Gitter's switch to Element, although Element leaves a lot to be desired on the UX front.
> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use.
But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.
>But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.
If it's inevitable, the service doesn't matter. YCombinator can one day do to HN what Reddit did to itself, but I'll still enjoy the community while it lasts.
It's better to work more on a "good enough for now but keep backups in mind" state rather than "there is nothing perfect so I won't go anywhere" state. If your mindset is the latter, why value online communitie at all to begin with?
What I mean is that it's inevitable for a closed-source, proprietary solution like Discord. The service does matter, and there are better alternatives to Discord for online OSS communities.
Sure, just like how there were better alternatives for Facebook, and Twitter. Even when they were at their peaks. I think we've seen often enough in history that the best, most technically impressive tool is rarely the most popular one.
If you have the power to move the people you can help try to fight that aspect of society. But at large we can't even lead the horses to those theoretical oases (let alone make them drink)
I think you're missing the context of the thread. An open-source project doesn't need to choose a tool that competes with Discord in popularity -- popularity is not important here. The aim is not to attract millions of users, the aim is to provide a valuable and sustainable resource to its community that it can link in the project's README file. A tool like Discourse or Zulip is more sustainable than Discord because they are open source, history is exportable, and the software is trivially self-hostable in case the managed hosting solutions don't pan out.
It's different in that IRC is designed & understood to be short lived real time chat. Who cares if I can't find that type of content via Google? Discord is being used as a permanent info repository, like a replacement for discussion boards, wikis, etc. This is the type of info I want to search for.
LLMs perform lossy compression on knowledge, so they're not a good replacement for indexing and search. If anything, you want to have the latter, and expose it to LLM as a tool it can use, regardless of whether the LLM was trained/fine-tuned on that same content or not.
> It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls.
To be honest, for the good. Discord search in "discord forums" sucks so bad it's almost unusable. Let's keep using Discord for instant messaging and voice.
Still open to any alternatives. But as we saw from the thread earlier in the week, none of the answers seemed to have achieved that network effect yet.
No real point in an indexable community if the community has no knowledge.
i keep seeing this sentiment about things moving to discord here, but my experience is i dont see that happening anywhere. i suspect there is some kind of experience bubble you are in. i really never hear about people using discord except for games.
You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.