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).
Bullshit. Its on a quest to monetize the platform, thats all its doing.
If it wanted to be a better communication platform it wouldnt be adding all this pointless superfluous shit that exists only for nickle and diming.
Taking lessons from Valve and steam, I suspect.
I genuinely don’t understand how these companies go “Okay, we have a very elegant, simple, sleek, and fast interface here…Heres what we should do, we should completely fuck it up, make it slower, and make it require more resources for absolutely no reason”
Is this an old meme? They revamped their UI and I think it’s (Steam) very intuitive now. I do remember when they had like 10 different styles of drop-down box on the desktop app. But, I don’t see that now.
I mean, it is a company that employs people that gives away its product for free. Aside from Nitro, would you like them to monetize your personal info and sell it to 3rd parties?
idk how else to put it, but discord feels like an information black hole with adhd
Fuck Discord. It stole entire communities from us. It is the opposite of privacy. And, subjectively, their client applications are just a horrible mess.
Also it used to be fast, but got bloated and lost its greatest advantage. They abandoned every design choice that made them popular in the first place.
My discord client (the official app on both PC and android) are blazing fast.
The UI/UX is a convoluted mess. Whenever I say this elsewhere I get downvoted to oblivion and people tell me you just gotta learn it.
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
There’s not even a useful intro the first time you launch it. Yea, it shows you what the buttons are for, but never explains the concept behind things. Guess you’re supposed to intuit that stuff?
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
Counterpoint: vim is very well liked for it’s UI, but there’s a very steep learning curve.
To your point, though, the learning process ideally ought to be seamless and linear; each new thing you can do with the application should be mostly obvious given what you already know about the UI, not force you to learn everything from scratch or do work to learn it (unless you’re into that kind of thing). I don’t think Discord is the worst offender of this rule, but they could make it better.
I do agree with this, however I also have to say being someone who’s been on the canary branch and has the newest version of the new UI once you learn it it’s so much better mobile wise doing literally anything it just makes sense and goes with the mobile flow a lot better then the old ui was, plus it has a side bar which is really nice… The beginning new ui with the guildbar at the bottom was atrocious though, so glad they scrapped that model.
Sorry how did it steal communities? If communities migrated to Discord, the communities saw value in using it.
It was a great messaging app, before all the extra bullshit was added to it. The focus was on doing one thing, and doing it right. Now they do 35 different things, and abandon them in favor of mtx for profiles
