One of the stupidest trends of all time.
There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.
All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they’re all just as bad for it.
Forums are where you’ll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.
IRC at least you have text logs, but I agree.
Where’s lemmy in regards to this?
Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it’s threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There’s only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don’t have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more “boomer hobbies” and it’s ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There’s car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you’re shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
In regards to the advrider comment, I don’t find those ridiculously long-running threads all that convenient even though they are very useful. In your example the WR250R thread could have multiple subtopics being discussed at once in the same thread which I find frustrating.
For example, one guy might ask about tires and while that’s being discussed another guy shows up asking about a big bore kit to make more power. Now there are two discussions happening at the same time and all I can do is view the thread chronologically. Then someone else shows up asking what oil everyone uses. Then someone new joins and says “Hey it’s not possible to go back and read through all 2300 pages in this thread, what GPS are you all using?”
Like sure it’s great that all the information is in that one thread but navigating through it only in chronological order can be super frustrating.
we just need IRCv2 which should add chat history
How do you replicate a conversation like this in a IRC format?
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
I only want the documentation if you have to fax it to me
Whatever, Mr. Stallman.
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
Documentation is bad enough. But it’s worse when that’s the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.
Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was “calls” and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.
I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it’s over complicated and feature creeped electron shite
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord
Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once
At least mods help mask all the other missing features
Discord didn’t, and still doesn’t, require a download. Easier for people to pick up and easier to use on locked down computers.
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for “free”, will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It’s been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it’s doing to indexable information and it’s only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight…
If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn’t count.
Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.
Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.
Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.
Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what’s that? you’re looking for a fix to an issue you’re having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we’ve already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
