They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
deleted by creator
With an asterisk.
Free* is never Free
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn’t be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don’t hide your support behind a platform that can’t be searched from the web. It’s not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I completely agree, fuck discord
On the other hand, after looking for and failing to find an issue I’m facing, discord servers usually have way faster response times compared to forums.
I think this is the main disconnect for people.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they’d actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they’re better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.
We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We “solved” this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.
Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder’s team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of “collaborative editing”: sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with “I looked for X on Confluence and didn’t find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?”
So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between “what experienced people want” and “what beginners want”, but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.
This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.
I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.
The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.
A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.
People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.
The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.
RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.
If there is one belief that I’ve held for long is that we Free Software would be in a better situation than it is today if we simply dropped the whole idea “community”, “done by amateurs” and “volunteers in their spare time” and really start treating the whole thing as a professional industry. This whole xz crisis further exacerbated this belief.
Almost everyone takes this work for granted and this is why is not properly valued. We should raise the bar at all levels: someone who wants to contribute in a project needs to show that they can deliver everything, maintainers should not accept “half-baked” proposals because “it is better than nothing”, developers should be more than comfortable sending a quote with a proper rate to someone that requests a feature.
And if those people don’t want to do any of that, then let go see how much the commercial alternative would cost them.
I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.
That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.
For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.
My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.
If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.
So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.
I couldn’t agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it’s being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
You found out about Nostr yet?
If a service ever says discord only when I try to login, that service no longer exists. Find an alternative or make do without it.
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It’s totally understandable.
Vote with your feet. Have to leave the platform if you want to stick it to them.
Easier said than done. All your friends on discord? Can’t leave.
“All your friends on discord? Ok, just go use this other random service and still have your friends on discord”
You’re not very bright, are you?
use the service, and tell them to use it. just like how they made you use discord. and you can whine every time they refuse.
Fair enough.
Maybe everyone agrees it sucks and all change?
Turn it into a group ‘stick it to the man’ effort?
I don’t have friends,.no problem for me 😋
Also,.I’m old and just text my friends!
I never ever understood and still doesn’t understand why people like Discord. It’s not indexed, it’s a constant background noise. It’s absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
The sheer amount of features and stability.
I don’t know anyone who’s used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn’t indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
The usual answer is “people are stupid”, which can’t be true - people spend lots of effort to be less stupid, and when interacting with those people in unusual and unexpected ways you might find out they are much smarter than they seem.
The correct answer is that people don’t know what they can do with computers. So they accept any bullshit.
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
I never stopped using irc (I know I’m old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can’t find any communities that aren’t turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I’ve found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I’d like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don’t even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
“RTFM” but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they’re implementing ads, it’s not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It’s not likely to be blockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
If it’s downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It’s impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn’t even been able to keep users from doing it; they’ve had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It’s your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
Will filtering elements not work?
In 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.
I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.
Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.
mmmm, i hate discord, anybody have any good self hosted recommendations? Preferably, fully featured, or featureful, and not some random garb.
Flirting with matrix, the concept fucks. I just haven’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet. I know there area few others, like revolt, which is kind of a mess, and various others in the same category.
Soumds like revolt might be interesting to you.
i’ve messed with it, i know you can technically self host, but last i checked that’s docker only, which is not what im looking for. I want something more stable than revolt, with more features. And i’m not married to the discord UI personally, so anything that does a better job is welcome lol.
TeamSpeak 3 now has a UI similar to discord.
Kinda surprised TS is still around. It’s all we used in the ‘00s for gaming, but slowly lost relevance thanks to in-game VoIP and other popular solutions like discord.
Mumble is better
hmm, interesting. Teamspeak was never really something i’ve bothered looking into. Might give it a look, though to be clear, im not interface picky, i hate discord, through and through, it’s awful.
Needs a license for larger concurrent user counts, which is probably why it fell off in favour of Mumble and then Discord.
yeah this is my main concern, anything with licensing can change at a moments notice, just look at vmware lol.
I do use mumble though, it’s great, just a little feature lite. But what it does is perfect so can’t really complain.
If you want to get to know Teamspeak, you could start by trying to share a file with someone on the same server! Good luck have fun!
yeah, i might give it a shot if i find nothing else interesting.
IRC.
IRC has been in the back of my mind, not familiar with it other than the fact that it’s ancient as fuck, and it works:tm: so. I’ll probably consider it at some point.
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
mmm, when i click on a website and the first button that appears is “contact sales” i’m sure it’s a good product.
Agreed
maybe i’m just a little too open source pilled, but if i click on a page, and it’s not immediately apparent to me what is going on, immediately ignore everything on the page, because IMO, if you don’t think your front page is important enough to explain what your product actually is, i’m not going to be acquainted enough to ever use it lol.
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can’t imagine enough people put money into it that they haven’t just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It’s hard for me to exactly call it greed if they’re just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
We have no clue if they’re profitable since they’re private… but given they’ve laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they’ve been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren’t devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn’t profitable.
I mean they’re almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You’re telling me we aren’t in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn’t have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that’s too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
Exactly. Everyone wants an ad-free platform that’s free to use. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
I don’t think paying will stop enshitification.
Line.
Go.
Up.
It’s not a publicly traded company smh
They’re probably trying to IPO like Reddit.
Maybe they are, but they fought off a Microsoft buyout only a few years ago, seems if they wanted to sell out, they would have done it then. Meanwhile, we don’t have financial figures (since it is a private company) but reportedly they are profitable Regardless, it’s just speculation and the “line must go up” meme generally refers to increasing share price to enrich investors and c suite, which… Doesn’t make as much sense for a private company who’s shares do not trade on an exchange.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord’s format.
Quests will show up tastefully in Discord where you can opt-in to stream your game to friends and win rewards for playing.
Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.
Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.
Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.
Spacebar, Revolt, Matrix in ascending order of completeness and descending order of Discord-likeness
I personally use Matrix. I haven’t gotten very far into using it but it does have groups, text, calls, and encrypted messaging so I’d say check it out.
Element/Matrix
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
IMO the easiest solution for the usecase would be Signal
I know it’s still in development, but check out Revolt . It’s basically Discord, but open source.
i looked into revolt and pretty concerned with these two stances of the project
We don’t think federation is beneficial to Revolt
We have a variety of monetisation ideas lined up internally, with these, it is not my intention for us to paywall features and I find it unlikely we would ever do that considering it would contradict what we’re trying to achieve.
like, to me it seems they want to get communities invested and then later monetize in ways those communities don’t yet know about?? idk that sounds extremely sus. especially when competing instances will fight against network effects with no federation.
I can sort of see why a chat client wouldn’t have a use for activitypub/federation, with the possible exception of identity sharing once that starts to take off.
yeah, i agree that i don’t think federation of something like this would be through ActivityPub (matrix has its own). i guess it just feels unfortunate that if users want to access communities across multiple instances, users will have to have separate logins and identities for each one.
Yeah, identity is a real problem, but someone posted a proposal to solve for that that looks perfect for this sort of thing. Wish I remembered what it was called, but basically each account could attest for the others via export of encryption keys/signatures so while you has multiple ‘accounts’ there was only one identity which was pointed to in the signature blob.
The tricky part would be getting everyone (matrix, lemmy/kbin/mbin, pixel fed, and masto) to conform to a single identity standard. If one existed, I could see them implementing it, but we’re not there yet.
hmm that sounds really interesting! if you end up remembering it and also remember to respond i’d love to know lol. yeah i hope if something good enough comes along two platforms will implement and then others will just follow suit.
like, to me it seems they want to get communities invested and then later monetize in ways those communities don’t yet know about
Entrenchment is the LotR ‘One Ring’ for Enshittification.
1st. implementing activitypub or any other federation protocol is quite a task. also in my opinion it does not need to be federated. there are basically no benefits, except convenience for the users.
2nd. it’s open source. if you don’t like the way it’s monetized, fork it and make your own. it’ not foss.
that’s all very fair, i guess i was just hoping federation was at least on a long term roadmap
I’m down to distributed social networks and irc.
I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I’m just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.
Feels good to never have used it lol
