person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!
This, exactly.
Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.
It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen, and buggy af. It’s barely gotten any better too.
i mean, it’s far from perfect, but as someone that’s been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven’t found it.
Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They’re entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.
Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its… fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.
The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds…
I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.
I left that server right away.
They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
Greatly improved usability, while still greatly hurting searchability, in that common bugs are still hidden away from indexable sight.
Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I’ll never have a discord for a project because I don’t want to answer the same questions over and over.
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.
Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.
Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
Honestly a lemmy community wouldn’t be a bad format. It’s basically a forum
Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
Matrix was confusing. Lemmy wasn’t. That should say something because Lemmy is already considered confusing by a lot of people.
Honestly the only confusing part for me now is choosing the right instance. This one thing is quite difficult
I think in a weird way one of the problems is the feeling that you have to get it right the first time. I think we need to obviously make it wayyyy easier and less intimidating for people to find instances to sign up at that are a good fit for them, but also I think we just need to send way more of a “get it wrong, treat your first account as just a fun diversion, don’t feel like you need to find the perfect home immediately” vibe. Not every social media account needs to be a permanent investment, it can just be a momentary passing version of yourself along your way from one place to another.
I think a lot of the subconscious anxiety is about trying to nab the handle you like to use on a popular up and coming social network before everyone else jumps on and takes your precious name… but there is no rush here. Your handle will likely sit untaken on more fediverse servers than you can shake a stick at, indefinitely.
I think another hinderance is that the people asking questions get ignored, dismissed or shouted at, even if they tried whatever it was they tried. The Linux community doesn’t do this as much when someone who tried Linux runs back to Windows, thankfully, but if you’re a Chromium user who tried Firefox, or a Bluesky user who tried fedi, and found that the former of those was better for your needs, prepare to have angry nerds flaming you for your blasphemous act.
But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them.
Software takes time to improve. Matrix is a complicated project and unlike Discord it’s also federated. It’s possible that some things will always be harder with Matrix. But even if it improves a lot (which will probably take years), people might find other excuses to not use it. For example Discord might still be more popular.
I know Matrix takes effort to use. You have to understand what a homeserver is, how fediverse works, etc. I had to go through even more effort to set up my own server. It was difficult and took a lot of time of reading the documentation and tutorials. Some of the problems I had were ridiculous. Then to get people to use my server, I had to guide them step by step on how to create an account, because you can’t just send them an invite link.
But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them…
….But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.
Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?
Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.
We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.
Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.
I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.
Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.
Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.
The problem is that people don’t care about freedom, security or privacy. If they cared, they would only choose software that gives them those things. They would use Free Software. Even when it’s not always convenient.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
Even if we make Matrix way better, Discord users will still use Discord, because to them everything is fine and there is no reason to switch. Learning to use something new is always inconvenient. I doubt that all Windows users are unable to switch to GNU/Linux. They just don’t think it’s worth the effort, because to them there is nothing wrong. Being spied on and restricted is ok as long as all their proprietary games work.
Also people don’t want to make a new account to ask one question. Discord let’s you pop into a server, ask a question, and leave with ease.
Until this is enabled in some other platform, people won’t switch away from Reddit/Lemmy and discord. People don’t want to make accounts and that’s why these services took over.
Hmm, now I wonder why lemmy does not have this “temporary user” kind of thing, where you can join with simpler form only to participate once (with restrictions, ofc)
Some speculation on my part:
- There are other higher priority items for the developers.
- It’s open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
- Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.
Despite what @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don’t want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.
You can of course still find many Discord servers that don’t, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it’s not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.
You can, you just comment in a community you’re not subscribed to, same as Reddit.
On Reddit / Lemmy I just post to the power tools subreddit if I have a question. But in the forum days I’d need to find a power tool forum, make an account, post, remember to check for answers outside of my daily browsing, then never use the forum again.
i feel like discord is much better at fostering a community and less good at being a resource or repository of information. like in a discord you talk directly to individuals so you get to know them and become friends. if you are new you can just pop in and say hi and start making friends, it’s very organic. other platforms are much worse at this. I feel this is a big reason people use it.
Making a discord channel is instant and free
This is because discord is close to the top of the enshittification funnel.
Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort
I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.
The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.
I don’t get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can’t find anything, I can’t tell what conversations are over, I can’t figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it’s completely devoid of anything of value, if it’s too big everything of value gets buried.
I’ve tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.
That’s was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.
Made me never want to step into discord again.
It’s great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I’ve always found it painful
But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so…
It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.
I tried posting an image using the app on my phone but it kept ignoring it. Somehow I magically hit the right button and it included it in my reply. I had no idea.
The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.
It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.
What do you mean find anything?
Discord is used like this:
Text message: you wanna play today? Yeah.
Discord: here’s the server address. Thanks
Discord voice chat: I made us a bunch of supplies. Cool I dug up a diamond.
And if we were talking about hooking up with our friends to play Minecraft, that’d be a great point.
Everyone is like "discord is a bad project discussion and documentation space! "
Which could be read as “it’s very hard to cut this steak with a plunger!”
People are complaining about using a tool incorrectly.
Yeah that’s what I use most to see if people have asked the same question I have then I jump to the discussion they had and that leads me where I want to go, but I do get it would be really annoying for someone who isn’t logged into discord or uses it to chat with friends
Forums do it better, can be indexed by a search engine, can be bookmarked, and can be archived using the wayback machine or a similar service. Important information shouldn’t be buried in chat logs. And discord’s forum feature was an idea they tacked on and is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Old is when you don’t try to understand the interface anymore.
Discord enables so much that’s never been so convenient before. Can’t say I like the company, but it’s pretty much the best at what it does.
I don’t care if people use Discord to talk, it’s only when that’s where the documentation, faq, etc. is.
I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.
I would take a busy forum any day.
Discord has threads and forums now. Most servers aren’t going to that many messages. I don’t think it is a real problem in the context of floss projects.
Until discord makes their search bearable to use, I would still rather use an actual forum over discord. It’s so irritating when I have to perform multiple searches to look up conversations people had on a topic because the stupid search function takes word order into consideration for what messages to show you. And since discord servers aren’t open to search engines, those can’t be used to alleviate that issue.
I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.
The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.
I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.
The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.
I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).
This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don’t understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to “discord channel organizer brain” kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when “everything” can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.
It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?
Did I mention I hate discord?
I think discord works for up to perhaps a dozen people. Big servers are pointless to engage with, they flow too quickly to be useful.
I would rephrase this to: the people who designed discord and the stupendous amounts of investor money facilitating such a huge rise in discord adoption (keeping subscription prices relatively low, not going aggressively for monetization out the bat) don’t really give a shit if discord doesn’t really work for groups of more than a dozen people, nor how healthy for users it is (especially minorities of them). They care about how many people are using discord, that is all.
It isn’t a great place for ughh …somedays what seems like 95% of the hobbies I love centralizing there communities on.
Obviously discord type communities have their place (I don’t like discord, but fine, I am a grumpy piece of shit) but what concerns me is how much energy is being put into this powerslide of community after community moving over to discord (or more usually, new communities just forming on discord and never going anywhere else). It feels like a distortion, like the hype is a misconception about discord being the best future for every facet of digital community structures (owned by one company, based in the US…) rather than an awesome new spin on IRC, voicechat and lite community organization all rolled up in a package that made it a fresh alternative to all those federated lemmy and kbin instances (that all had years and years of open threads you could search through and read like a normal ass website)…
I feel discord does really well because the way it structures it “servers” really focuses around individuals rather than groups. Which then creates an incentive for a certain type of person to “grow their server” bringing more activity onto discord. This is confounded by both a) you join all channels on a server, 2) the ability of individuals to “mute” servers or channels; combined it means it fills up with a bunch of idlers in a way which is worse than IRC as it’s unlikely they will ever read the contents or participate beyond asking a question then leaving.
I don’t think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I’d love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for “long form” topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.
Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like “how do I do x?”.
I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a “simple” question which wouldn’t be a problem on a forum.
The problem with the concept of “Quick one off questions go to discord” concept is when the second through infinite people have the same question or issue. Discord isn’t crawled by search engines, and it ties up support staff/developers with answering repeat questions. Nevermind the time zone issue.
Like, I get that conversation isn’t as dynamic, but you can always schedule a time to chat dynamically.
I hang out in the Python discord quite a lot and it seems to work well for this purpose. I will say that Python’s core library and many of the most popular packages are well documented, so it’s definitely not a case where discord is the main source of knowledge and that’s a good thing. However, a lot of people on there are new to development and don’t know where to start, so we answer their beginner questions while teaching them how to search the docs for answers.
The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.
To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.
I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a “simple” question which wouldn’t be a problem on a forum.
Right, there is nothing wrong with discord type services other then the fact that I hate them and find them annoying and impossible to engage with, but that is a personal opinion I can just sit there and deal with if communities also have other places I can interact with them online but again for the overwhelming majority of them…. they don’t.
My whole life I have been very much a “social butterfly” engaging in lots of different hobby communities and enjoying learning and reading expert conversations on niche things I never knew about. In the last 6 years or so, more than anything else Discord has been destroying my capacity to do enjoy doing that. I join a Discord server about something I am passionate about and I just can’t find the interesting conversations anywhere (even though the topics are extremely interesting to me) and I end up zoning out and disengaging with the community. I also need an account to search old conversations which feels VERY VERY wrong to me.
My point isn’t “woe is me” but to stand up and sound the alarm that we are rapidly losing agency, searchability and general knowledge curation capacity systematically across digital communities as the Discord tidal wave envelopes all. It has and will do massive longterm damage to the health of internet communities.
I mean, for goodness sake my damn workplace was trying to unionize (hell yeah) and we had a great signal chat that was very focused going on (not perfect by any means) and then a couple of people who like Discord got EVERYTHING to move to Discord and…… guess how effective we were at organizing our ≈110 person company?
Spoilers, we weren’t, at all.
It just crushed me to see people trying to agitate and encourage people to think outside the narrative of what the boss says is possible or how people’s relationship to work has to look like according to the boss, but there was zero creative or imaginative power to conceive of the politics and consequences of the tools we were using to organize or thought into how a communication tool fundamentally impacts the kind of conversations that happen in favor of others. I get that it wasn’t the primary question, but it seems to me like a far more relevant question than people gave it credit for, especially since our solution was “use the popular social media service being massively subsidized by investors in an attempt to develop an unassailable monopoly on the industry” which seems like not a great place to build the future of worker power, especially since Discord is a U.S. based company.
I worked before in a startup with 30~40 members.
Discord was awesome for communication an administrative bulletins, you could check at a glance everyone who was online and join calls in a single click.
Also we had text channels for specific projects, and for a in-depth discussion of a specific thing we created threads in the same channel, anything of importance could also be pinned down.
With that out of the way, I think if done correctly, It works just fine, It’s a different medium than a forum, since the last is used for future reference, and the former is for on-demand discussions.
Also any platform can be shitty If the wrong person is holding the reins (i.e. Github issues boards)
