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”.
Wow another discord bad thread. Daring today aren’t we?
because it is?! if your goal is to have a non-indeaxable support forum, at least use matrix which is far far better than the horse manure that discord is.
Ah yes let me switch to a chatting app that is missing half the features from discord with a worse UI. Epic!
Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.
One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…
The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.
I’m at a point where I wish our support forum was at least on Discord, the majority of my community is pretty old but it spans down into a handful of Gen Z with more Millennials and Z coming in as the Boomers get out. Even so the main forum is a Facebook page. Splinter groups using WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. It’s not like the older gen is technically inept, for the most part, it’s just they’re entrenched and moving them would take a massive, easy to use software that is far superior to FB’s viability. Personally using Discord and it’s seamless jump from PC-Laptop-Phone is nice, admittedly I’m in the same mindset of those in my groups on FB as I haven’t tried anything else.
Why so much hate post about discord lately? What’s happened?
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This is not lately, it’s been happening for a long time.
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Nothing in particular happened.
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I’m gonna explain the meme: Discord started as a gaming communication software, after some time they expanded and discord servers are not used just for gaming. This leads to some software projects being coordinated in discord servers. However, discord is not a tool designed for this purpose, and because of that, OP had the reaction of this meme.
The disadvantages of discord when used as a community for software projects (as opposed to traditional forums, for example) are as follows (not an exhaustive list):
- Most importantly, discord doesn’t get indexed by search engines. So you can’t just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear. Some say that if something is said in a discord server, it hasn’t been said, because it’s not findable. You have to know in which server to look for, and then use Discord’s own searcher (which in my opinion is bad).
- Conversations are just a flow of messages. Recently they introduced threads, which acts more like traditional forums, with an OP, title and answers. However, most people still just use the chat.
- If you ask a question in a chat and nobody answers, people will just keep chatting and your question will be faded away, hidden by more recent messages.
Most importantly, discord doesn’t get indexed by search engines. So you can’t just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear.
That’s true. But also Google’s algorithm has been circling the toilet for years now. So even if you were expecting a Stack Exchange esque reference to a problem in a Discord server, there’s a much better chance that you’d get a bunch of SEO garbage inside the first couple of pages purely thanks to degradation in Google’s internal optimization.
If anything, I’d consider Discord’s opaqueness a benefit, as it keeps a lot of the spamming and automated manipulations out of these spaces. A good channel will have a Git space associated with it pinned to the main feed. And an active community will often have its own Wiki or equivalent to help organize FAQs for new users.
Its annoying in so far as its more transient than the older school repositories. But that’s the direction the entire internet has been moving for the better part of a decade. Not really the fault of Discord.
Well, if all the good answers are behind non-indexable discord servers, of course search engines will be filled with SEO crap. If I Google “how to parse HTML with regex” stack overflow comes as the first entry.
Wikis and FAQs are not at all unique to discord.
If the only benefit is that “it’s not reachable, therefore spammers won’t spam”, then it is shit. If an information source is not reachable, might as well not exist. If you don’t want spammers, you make things read-only, or whitelist/blacklist system or any other system.
No, the memes literally started like less than 2 weeks ago. If you ask a question and no one replies, it’ s generally because you asked a stupid question and no one wants to be the guy to tell you your question doesn’t make sense.
discord is totally the best thing. Anyone on the internet want to explain why I’m wrong?
It’s legit bad for certain uses like any platform, sometimes people try to use it for those things. Linuxbros don’t like the idea of Discord in general regardless, for them the platform takes president over whatever people do on it, and assume that since the platform is bad anyone who uses it is stupid.
I don’t really care about the platform if it has good communities on it, and I’ve found a lot on Discord which I haven’t found anywhere else. I’m on an electronic music production server where people share works in progress, help each other, big names in the scene use it out of genuine interest as well. I’ve shared my own stuff and connected with people in the scene across the world to share our project files and instrument presets etc. Don’t really care about Discord though and would gladly use any platform with a community like this on it. Saying “Discord sucks” and referencing legit reasons why isn’t going to convince me it hasn’t been useful for passions I have offline.
Also I’ve hosted a weekly dnd sesh on Discord for three years now after we went through basically every other platform through trial and error. We had no loyalty to anything and Discord has just been the one that works. Super great for organizing a campaign we run through a virtual table top platform.
A lot of the FOSS alternatives are way better at a technical level, I use Matrix for our friend group’s privately hosted chat server every day. Haven’t found anything comparable to the communities I’ve found on Discord though.
Is appending -bros to anything you don’t like lingo du jour amongst the gen alpha 12 year olds or something?
you don’t realize this, but it’s actually your comment that identifies you as very young, not his.
If we don’t care about FOSS or privacy or whatever, Discord is good as a chat service, but it really isn’t a replacement of something like a forum, website, or wiki.
Good place to ask a question, not a great place to look for the answer to a question yourself.
it really isn’t a replacement of something like a forum, website, or wiki.
Discord adds streaming channels and effortless multimedia which is huge. What I do on Discord isn’t possible on these other examples.
It depends on what the goals of the project/group are.
Roughly 100-(1/∞)% of the time I don’t want anything involving video or sound, but I could see some projects/groups where things like streaming or audio would be useful.
I don’t have an issue with discord itself, it just seems to be being used as the default for nearly everything now, even when it shouldn’t be.
Ignoring the foss issue discord just needs slightly better fuzzy search and it would be amazing. Right now I’m usually able to find related discussion but it takes a few different keywords and I know that there’s probably something im missing out on because a single character is different…
From my experience with discord, more than one conversation is often happening at the same time in the same channel. For servers that are active enough, this can be as fast-paced as the chats in live streams.
Trying to parse if the answer that “OrthoDonkulous” gave is for the question that “Headshots247” asked, that “ProgrammerSox” asked, or that “BelieveUsFoetusJesus” asked is sometimes difficult.
It’s an information blackhole. It sucks everything without any way to find it again. Even the forum and threads options they recently introduced, specifically to address this use case, are severely subpar compared to decades old alternatives.
On top of that, it’s a proprietary walled garden platform. If Discord decides to do anything against the communities for profit seeking there’s nothing, no one could do. Leaving hundreds of software projects without recourse for search, scrape, archive or retrieval in any way for all the knowledge deposited there.
If the forum features were used properly it’s not really any different than a traditional discourse forum board. Also being proprietary isn’t always a bad thing, and this is coming from an open source enthusiast. There are alternatives like guilded and another one called riot (not to be confused with riot software).
Edit: anyone want to explain why the down votes? I’m not wrong, you can create forums, pin posts, create forum categories and tag posts, it’s not a black hole if you take the effort and not make it a black hole. People just like to bitch and moan because “discord bad!”. Fuck off with that shit.
It sucks everything without any way to find it again.
What’s the use case here exactly? Some servers are disorganized af and trying to use the platform in the wrong way. The search function seems to work fine for whatever I need it for though.
Point is you shouldn’t have to join any servers or make any accounts to simply find the info on a search engine. If a website like say reddit.com asked me to make an account just to view some link I followed there I would just nope out and curl the archived copy and grep for exact query, rinse and repeat until information is absorbed. With discord that’s not an option and that sucks.
Ok Discord bad. What’s good?
Revolt looks pretty promising. https://revolt.chat/
Just wish they would do something like federate logins. I know with chat it doesn’t make sense to federate everything, but logins would be a really huge selling factor.
- Any of the issue tracking software (GitHub. JIRA, GitLab etc.)
- Any of the documentation software (readthedocs, GitHub wiki, Antora etc.)
- Any of the forum style software. Even a Lemmy community would be a million times better for this purpose than Discord.
Discord is probably the best app to chat/call with your gaming buddies but it’s a shit application for issue tracking and documentation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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 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.
