4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
That lazy culture is exactly why discord is bad for the job. I search for solutions first, instead of barging in with a question that may have been asked and resolved a thousand times before.
Discord has a search feature 🤦you still don’t have to interact with anyone…
I can’t understand how the people advocating for Discord in place of support forums can be so tone deaf about the core complaints others have about Discord.
Discord’s search feature is worthless to me and a huge section of others. The search results don’t show up on web searches. Web search indices are important because they aggregate information from many sources. Forums like Discourse don’t have that problem. With Discord, you instead have to install a shitty electron app and register an account just to do the above mentioned search. Sometimes, they even force you to give them your phone number. No - I don’t want to do that for every software problem I need to resolve. Even plain mailing list archives are miles ahead in that aspect.
Meanwhile, the community discussions are stuck inside a proprietary silo that appears convenient until the company decides to profit from it through eventual and inevitable enshittification. At that point, the rest of the world will be left looking for a way to free those discussions.
It’s been 8 years and they’ve done nothing and still haven’t. The criticism that you have to make an account to use a search feature which many forums already do makes no sense. My uploads from the day discord released are still there.
There were many times I couldn’t find a Reddit thread using a web search whereas I could immediately find it using reddits built-in search. Most of the search engines aren’t actually that good because there is too much noise in most web browser results these days.
If you know the exact website or app where the discourse for your topic is happening then 99% of the time you have far better results just using that websites built in search instead of the trash results modern browsers give you.
May I remind you that situation you’re describing already happened countless times since the days of free forum boards and irc channels going down. Yet we’ve always managed to keep things going. Things shutting down and information needing to be found again is not a big deal.
If anything I’ve seen more information lost by people hosting things themselves than the 8 years discord has kept things running smooth. So many niche communities on public forums, irc channels, etc, all self hosted and gone. Yes I and most of the world are willing to not cry about making an account for that guaranteed stability.
