I fucking hate Discord. It’s a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can’t google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can’t grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.
All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.
I use it, but it’s basically “Free Ventrilo but not as shit.” I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.
It’s because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.
Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it’s relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.
It makes sense, but it’s sad nonetheless.
The problem is discoverability. And that’s where I don’t get why anyone in their right mind would use Discord for stuff like that.
Say, you have Github, a forum or even a subreddit for your project.
Somebody asks a question, you answer it.
Somebody else has the same question. Either they are intelligent enough to find it themselves or they ask and you just link your old answer. Done.
On Discord, it’s basically impossible to find an answer that is more than two screens full of posts ago. So you have to keep answering the very same questions all the time.
That’s the exact point. It’s not only that you can’t google shit, even within Discord itself it’s incredibly hard to find the relevant information. BTW, did I already say that I fucking hate Discord?
I’m starting to get the feeling that you don’t approve of Discord.
It’s great for real time discussion. It’s terrible for anything else.
It’s IRC, not a forum.
Fuck Discord! They’re named after an argument because their very existence is offensive.
I love discord… For my group of friends and communicating with other developers (internal project communication, not user communication.) It’s ass for literally everything else.
It’s also an issue with Reddit/Lemmy though, there’s a good reason why old forums have long, in depth discussions and all alternatives don’t, people have to keep recreating discussions on subjects because they don’t get bumped to the top even if they’re popular.
I think part of that is that most forums have terrible search functionality.
Searching reddit via google is a meme for a reason.
Because lots of people fucked spez
Sure, that’s an issue with all forums.
What I’m talking about is on Reddit and similar platforms unless you already replied to a discussion and someone replies to you directly you don’t know that the discussion keeps going.
On forums you see the discussion getting bumped and if you ask a question by creating a new thread and it’s already covered in an existing thread, people will refer you to it and you can continue adding to an ongoing discussion instead of the Reddit solution of being referred to a previous discussion that can’t be expanded because no one will know if you ask for more info in it.
Just look at ADVRider for example, thousands of pages of discussion on motorcycle models that haven’t been in production for over 10 years, that’s a shit load of knowledge all in the same place!
Yeah, discoverability is a huge issue on Lemmy, but it’s much better on Reddit.
When I google some topic, there is a big chance that the first few results will be Reddit. Doesn’t really happen with Lemmy (yet). Hopefully they find the time and budget to work on this in the future.
Live chat is a good choice for friend and making urgent decisions in software. I’ve been watching projects more and more use it for their discussions, issue trackers, and Q&A solutions and it just makes me sad. Live chat isn’t good for anything that will need to be revisited in the future. But still I see more and more communities moving to live chat solutions for their whole community.
And that’s not to get into any of the problems with Discord specifically. I don’t love giving control over community hosting to any individual company. We’ve already seen the results several times. Google groups? Facebook groups? Reddit subreddits? All have demonstrated the problems with hosting your communities on a singular platform. Google groups is straight up gone. Facebook groups require you to sell a small part of your soul to participate. Reddit has been outright abusive towards their user base lately. Discord is vulnerable to all these problems
Which might be seen as a positive by some people (not me).
It encourages social interaction. Every answered question becomes a valid option to ask again just a short time later. And to answer again.
It also takes the burden to search from those who have questions. Just keep the chat flowing.
Maybe it’s a bit like asking people on the street for directions, instead of using your phone. Less efficient and accurate, but you might get a smile in the process.
Or you might get a “Just use your phone, you idiot. I’ve been answering the same question all day.”
This is at least what happens a lot on these discord channels…
I apparently am not most users.
No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.
Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don’t require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.
They still require accounts with US-based megacorporation (with obligations to say, ban access to Syrians civilians due to sanctions). If your project can do better, it should.
This comment is ancient wtf
I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible…
…but I also agree with everything you say here
Now that it has threads and features for communities I think it’s pretty decent.
The search tool works pretty well that’s usually what I use, or just check the pinned messages that links you to a GitHub or something with a FAQ
Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently “migrated” their Github discussions to Discord… I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!
Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.
The fuckers deleted the discussions!
This is a very Facebook-like thing to do. They are openly hostile towards everyone, including their users and advertisers. Shit stain of a company that constantly makes the worst decisions.
RTFD, or something like that.
I think you mean RTFM. But in this case it’s WTFM so I can RTFM.
No, i think op is saying RTFD as in “read the fucking discord”
Ah, in that case we need something like MTFDS, make the fucking discord searchable.
To be fair, a discord comment from five years ago is still more helpful than Amazon AWS’s actual documentation.
at least you can google Amazon’s wrong answer, there’s no way to Google a right answer that’s locked away in a Discord room …
I’m 50 and I have a 23 year old “RTFM” t-shirt.
This context needs to be on the shirt.
I’m usually on the documenting side of things. If something like this starts unfolding, I produce text or HTML files anyway, they go on github/lab/whatever, and I wash my hands of what happens next.
In the end I write documentation mostly for myself. When the company can’t figure things out over Discord or whatever ephemeral chat interface they use, I get called anyway.
> I produce text or HTML files anyway
I do extensive in-code documentation. The compiler discards all comments so I don’t worry about commenting my code. Source code is for humans to understand and write anyways.
Also writing documentation in-code like JavaDoc or equivalents has always seemed great for me. Then you can have your toolchain generate the written documentation directly from that, and it can be updated easily based on what’s actually documented in the code (but that does require that people keep that updated)
Oh, yeah. My source code is like 60% comments by weight (or more). Although I typically produce separate standalone documentation for management or semi-technical staff. You know, people who know enough to possibly break something, but not enough to fix it afterward. I find it useful when trying to train new people too.
User-facing documentation is a completely different thing, yes.
I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers
And the people asking basic questions probably don’t want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.
And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it’s going. Further people who aren’t deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.
Very complex questions should be discussed on traditional forums.
True, that would make it better to find the answer. My experience with traditional forums though is that I have to sign up to a brand new website and make a post only to not get a response, and because it’s a brand new site I have to keep checking it for a response every day.
Brand New website? Most major topics have well established communities on old school forums 🤔
New to me
I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.
This year has been dramatic. I’ve seen a big increase of users with quality content doing deletes in protest of Reddit. And the shift to sites like Lemmy that are not as favored by search engines.
Reddit should have gone the other direction, become a non-profit, eliminate advertising, go back to open sourcing the code like they used to, and run on donations. Cut their staff of people that had anything to do with advertising and trying to market the platform.
This applys to so much more than just programming now, sadly
Fuck Discord.
I just tried asking a question yesterday, and realized there’s basically no way to save / bookmark / whatever a specific thing… it’s seriously just a fucking chat room.
Yeah it’s literally just that. I still have no idea why it’s used as some kind of database by so many
It’s great for what it’s intended for, a gaming voice/text chat server.
Yeah I don’t get the hate for Discord here. If you use it for customer service or as a substitute for documentation, I can imagine it being annoying. It’s like using Excel for absolutely everything. Excel isn’t that bad, it’s just the people that use it badly make it so.
No don’t, it’s a good chatting service, much better than Messenger for one. Fuck users who misuse a chat app as customer “service” rather than writing documentation!
Seriously fuck discord
So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it’s just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I’m really interested in and I can’t say it doesn’t work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??For open source, I almost always found IRC was a black hole of information. All kinds of developers discussing things that never made it to search engines. It’s a long tradition.
As a dev, far easier to answer questions about my code than write up documentation, so makes total sense to me
With discord at least you can usually search chat history for your question and find someone else asking it in the past
I wonder… Might be able to write a language model based crawler that goes through a discord server and pulls out all the useful information to generate documentation or at least a FAQ
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That’s a very interesting observation, I have to admit that even I sometimes am too lazy to read documentation from top to bottom and prefer asking a question to someone that already knows. Though I think it can also be attributed to how good a certain text is structured, quality of documentation should account not only for completeness, but also for laying out the information to be easy to parse and highlight the most important parts, which is maybe why I feel “documentation fatigue” in some cases
Also “I’m so sick of this question” well then put the answer somewhere that’s indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.
I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.
No, I don’t want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.
Yeah I can’t stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub
There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
But then there was also a man who was sick of internet search engines finding actual information. His name was Jason Citron.
Kids these days:
StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice… Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there’s still someone who hasn’t gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.
Always has been. Old forums were full of this.
Yeah, StackExchange solved this problem. Concrete example, moving from ubuntuforums.org to AskUbuntu.com was a life changer. The time to find correct solutions dropped through the floor.
I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.
What printer is this so I can avoid it?
It wastes everyone’s time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don’t have instant access to answers
Why would any sane developer want to use this system to “document” their project? Written docs have worked well for a million years and there’s no need to change them.
You can even include them in your version control system and allow others to suggest changes
And you can include separate ones right there in the root folder where the script lives. README.md renders out beautifully on GitHub.
What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?
I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.
You’re probably right, but I can think of a couple other 3d printing projects that have the same issue.
The instructions on the Web are pretty good, unless you start messing with Tons of mods, but thats your own fault.
True, but they have access to so many better ways of documenting stuff…
Poor bastard. I feel you. 💐
The only real alternatives to Discord is Matrix and Revolt. I am on both and there are a good number of people on there but they aren’t too active. Wish they would be more popular and widely used
I think you’re missing the point here. The solution to the “documentation on a chatroom” problem is not putting documentation on another chatroom.
The lack of indexable pages is a killer, what a waste of human time to be answering the same basic questions because every previous answer gets sucked into the black hole of a walled chat room with bad search.
Ah I see what you mean. The point completely went over my head. Yes, I definitely agree that documentation should be on GitHub or something so it’s easily and openly indexable.
No love for Mattermost?
I’m not 41 yet, but even if you csn somehow make a chat room app replace the functionality of code documentation or a few simple example code snippets… should you? You’re also hosting on GitHub and not on MEGA, even though you could…
