Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don’t want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
Yeah, it really bugs me that it’s basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don’t reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it’s about 50-100 ish people interested in it. But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
Heck, even with a handful of people anything longer form feels like a chore. I’ve been the admin of a tiny friends only server for a good few years and even in there it feels hard to keep track sometimes when there’s more than a single laser focused topic.
And every gamer and his dog have their own, so communities are adhoc and lackluster. It does the opposite of what forums used to do.
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and found it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I’m happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I’ll give it another go from time to time
Edit: grammar
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Ya this is true and that sucks and I don’t see a way to change it. Would be nice to go back to get all this info back on forms
It takes seconds to ask a question and receive an answer in discord. It’s entirely likely that my problem was never discussed on a forum post from 10 years ago with 15 pages to sift through.
I’m always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can’t imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they’re trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it’s so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
EDIT: don’t get why the downvotes. It’s a question, not a statement.
Good point, and I think there isn’t a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It’s not an improvement IMHO.
Discord does not allow you to search well. Discord’s search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).
