Are they? How? This article doesn’t explain anything about functioning, just some design changes.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
plus doesn’t it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn’t matter…
lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it’s just like…this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.
I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?
I’m not sure it’s correct to call Discord spyware, but it certainly has privacy implications. https://nerdbot.com/2023/02/24/using-discord-consider-these-security-and-privacy-factors/
Why do you read Lemmy, while discounting the opinions and perspectives of other people here?
So the basics of what I’ve read is:
- Discord stores all messages and media. If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
- Discord does not SELL that data. Instead, they hand it over to the ad companies that are the shareholders of Discord.
- Discord has lots of security flaws that are abused by third parties all the damn time.
I know its different now because Discord has nitro and there are lots if good reasons to subscribe. But Discord ran without all if that subscriber funding and in that time they probably found ways to make money off of what resources they had at the time… Information.
Discord stores all messages and media.
I mean, how else do you think they can make it so all your existing chats show up when you log into your account from a different device? Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers. Discord doesn’t.
If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
That’s more problematic, and there should honestly be a law against that. Come to think of it, doesn’t that violate the GRDP? Either they have to treat their EU customers differently when it comes to this, or there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. In the former case, you might be able to force them to delete your data by using a VPN to pretend you’re in Europe.
That’s how Reddit works/worked. Probably lemmy too though I haven’t looked too close. Deleting your account doesn’t necessarily mean the content your account created is taken with it. Things not being deleted with your account is a werid thing to cite for spy ware, lots of stuff works like that and you can delete it, just isn’t automatically deleted with your account.
Discord having security flaws does not make it spy ware. There have been some pretty severe security issues but almost every one I’ve heard of has its roots in a gullible user running some sort of application on their machine or scanning a QR code with the Discord app which makes it extremely clear you are logging into another device… The only one I’m aware of that I found very concerning was iirc a werid video player vulnerability that could yank your token.
I highly doubt Discord is giving advertisers access to the messages on their platform. That sounds insanely illegal and also largly a waste of time cause if they are doing that it doesn’t work very well.
Alright, replies to my initial comment got me motivated to look for the receipts:
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages
- yes discord saves every message forever, to an extent that they are almost certainly breaking GDPR laws.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/
https://meaww.com/discord-who-owns-jason-citron-microsoft-acquisition-company-net-worth-10-b-talks
I heard this argument so long ago that basically Discord doesnt sell data but instead shares it with shareholders, which includes many ad companies, including tencent. They probably give this data to their linked partners like twitch and Microsoft. Discord still isnt profitable and they are a public company, they are expected to exhaust every opportunity to give value to those shareholders.
I can not find anything in there. I can not favorite messages to find them again. It is a hole where everything your write is virtually there, but practically lost.
