Also, putting documentation in a format that has way too many features so just reading docs takes up 40% of CPU usage. Yes ,fuck you for using gitbook, i hate it so fucking much
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Sounds like my situation. Running a program, it has an error and crashes. Support page says ask in discord. I do. Crickets. I ask again a day later. I get told off bc I asked once already and the devs know. I ask how I’m supposed to know that since literally no one replied to me. I was further chastised that I should know that they know. I gave up.
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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 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
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
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.
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 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 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?
I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.
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…
You’re probably right, but I can think of a couple other 3d printing projects that have the same issue.
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 printer is this so I can avoid it?
Poor bastard. I feel you. 💐
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.
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.
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 🙏🙏
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
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.
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 -_-
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.
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.
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.
Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platformdeleted by creator
Totally agree, please let the doc be doc, not a chat.
PS: what were the original subtitles of the screenshot? :)
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.
Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don’t require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.
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 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.
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.
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…
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
I apparently am not most users.
No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.
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
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??deleted by creator
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
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
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?
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
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.
