I see a lot of things that have a discord community.
Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?
Lots of users gush over Discord for some reason. My impression is that more technically minded people don’t really like it, but your average user uses it for almost everything and encourages more services they like to use it. Hence why many reddit subs moved to Discord - the mods didn’t necessarily prefer it, but they were sent an overwhelming number of requests from their users.
Thanks for the heads up, i guess I just a bit too old to have been part of the discord group.
In the country where I live, it’s all Facebook messenger. It’s a shame as o think a number of people don’t really care for it, but everyone and every business uses it so we are kind stuck.
Yeah I mean I don’t understand it either. Telegram is bad enough for me, can’t be assed with Discord.
It’s free*, insanely easy to set up, you don’t have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there’s a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.
Basically the same reasons subreddits supplanted forums.
Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.
easy to use
Doubt
Please provide your phone number to enter the room
Try Nitro!
I don’t care for the real-time communication aspect of it. In fact i find it unusable.
Am I supposed to just sit there and read random conversation and wait for a point to jump in?
Seems like it takes too much effort.
I mean, that is what IRC chat rooms were back in the day. Or any public chatroom from the 90s.
Realtime communication has its part. We use Slack at work all the time. But searching Slack is a horrible way of replacing missing documentation.
Especially when there’s multiple subjects being discussed on the same channel
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
This applys to so much more than just programming now, sadly
Fuck Discord.
Seriously fuck discord
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.
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
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!
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.
Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord’s doors.
Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it’s a crime
Does Discord now offer the ability to save/fav comments to find them again? When I used it the last time, i was amazed how everything just scrolls by without a possibility to hold on to something.
You can search through the whole history of a channel
How is that the same than a favorite? I can also use a searchengine to find a website, but a bookmark is sometimes better. I can also search through all tweets on twitter, but having some marked as favorites come in handy sometimes. I use favorites and save lists in youtube quite a lot. Even though I could use the yt search bar each time.
Since being forced to use this terrible communication method in my teams and groups, I’ve been copy-and-pasting good Q&A threads into text files that I push to an enterprise GitHub repo for perma-store. At least that way other engineers and myself can either use GitHub’s search or clone the repo locally, grep it, and even contribute back with PRs. Sometimes from there, turn into a wiki, but that’s pretty rare. My approach is horribly inefficient and so much stuff is still lost, but it’s better than Discord’s search or dealing with Confluence.
At my job we bought an entire different product (glean) and are paying them a ton of money every month just because they can search our confluence wiki effectively lol
Hear hear!
I too find my garbage heap notes file checked into GitHub to be better than confluence.
But I hate confluence so much I should probably bring it up at therapy sometime…
Thank you for your service 🙏🙏
Requests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶
I mean, it’s not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.
That’s true, but we had a work server there for voice chat
Wow. I’d be self hosting mumble for that. Or using Teams.
Teams was crap at the time on our laptops.
I would’ve preferred a company wide IRC chat, but whatever.
That’s like not letting Muslims on a plane because some are terrorists. What a lazy approach.
Better than being blocked as tasteless. Encountered that one the other day.
Not wrong lol, it’s a gamer chat. It tried to rebrand as a regular chat app, but the entire gamer aesthetic says otherwise.
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
No love for Mattermost?
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.
Hate this so much, very much into 3d printing (voron right now) and huge parts of the community are on discord it’s just an absolute pain to use
Do you have invite links?
Annex engineering requires phone number verification to enter their discord. Fuck that.
The phone number gatekeeping is annoying. I think ChatGPT requires it. I can’t use it because it won’t accept my phone number as I only use VoIP numbers. Never mind they used to be land and cell numbers I posted there. Same with some banking sites. No sms 2FA allowed because the gateway they use can’t jump to voip - the codes just never arrive.
Imo the discord works quite well. For mods the github repo us great and for most questions a diacord is enough. I like the fact that i can quickly share stuff and get answers. Forums always felt very clunky to me. I can use them, but the culture us often a bit shit, and then there are those that need registration to view posts or pictures. While those problems also apply to discord, i dont need a ton of accounts, i can somply join a server.
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…
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.
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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.
Agreed. Trying to find answers for questions probably already asked on Discord is impossible.
And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it’s not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.
Looking at you, Our Summer Car -_-
Pull requests welcome!!
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.
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.
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)
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.
I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible…
…but I also agree with everything you say here
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.
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
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.
I apparently am not most users.
No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.
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.
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…
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think part of that is that most forums have terrible search functionality.
Searching reddit via google is a meme for a reason.
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!
Because lots of people fucked spez
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
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.
