What? Discord search is great. You can search by users, channels, text string, attachment file type, date, etc.
Ok, so say something is up with my car and i want to look into fixing it. I’m not in any car discord servers, so how do i find what is up with my car with? I can search all the dates and users i want, but i wont find anything useful. 10 years ago i could have just googled my make and model with with problem and the first link would have been a Saturn owners forum i never heard of with a thread detailing the problem thoroughly as well as estimates of how much i can expect to pay to fix it. Discord is just a modern IRC; it’s great for talking with your buddies in real time and having that all be logged, but it’s a terrible way to find information.
Lol yeah, now when you search google for stuff like that the experience is:
You find a website with a link to an owner’s enthusiast discord for your car’s model.
But then once you join you have access to one channel called #rules
Then you figure out you have to react to that one message in that channel with a tire burning out emoji and you get access to another channel called #introductions where you have to describe yourself and your car.
Then if a mod thinks it’s genuine, they’ll let you in to the other channels.
You finally get in and search for your issue. Your issue is really specific, but you don’t know the technical terms to search for, so your keyword of “brake squeaking” pulls up all a massive unorganized list of results purely sorted by post date of anything including those keywords, no way to sort by relevancy or popularity, so you scroll, and you scroll.
You find one message that is close, but you need more info. But before you can post in the #help channel you have to make 3 posts in #general (to fight spam of course).
Finally, after succeeding in the requirements, you copy a link to the message you found in search and post in #help.
A mod tells you to use the search, that question has been answered. You explain that you already did but you’re not sure exactly what to search for. You are now banned
Discord’s walled garden and conversational approach is awful for gestalt knowledge storage and access.
I hate Discord for the reason you mentioned but I remember having to jump through hoops on forums too. Shit sucked, but at least it was searchable and readable without having to do anything
All the others have good examples, but I mean something different.
If you search in a forum, you most likely get a thread dedicated to only your problem or something very similar with lots of matching answers (best case)
In Discord you find a question by someone with your exact problem and then 40 messages about other problems, cause there is only a single “problems” channel. This is a god awful experience.
It works until you wanna search for something that’s somewhat similar to a common word. The other day I wanted to look for a discussion I’ve had about OpenAL, went to search for it and it showed everything with the word “open” in it. There’s no further control so you’re just at the mercy of what the search thinks you want, and this happens way too often.
