Most importantly, they’re searchable on the internet.
Discord isn’t even really searchable on discord. It was never meant for this kind of stuff and it shows.
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.
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.
If you thought Reddit or Lemmy mods were bad, wait until you deal with a forum admin on a power trip.
They’re the same people. If someone is on a power trip, it suck regardless.
Mods don’t do shit anyway. You could remove them and every community would immediately improve. Doing absolutely nothing in this case will be better than what’s going on now
I always find it weird when people complain about getting banned by “power tripping mods”. I have only had a few encounters with a moderator who I thought was being overly obsessive about arbitrary rules. Most of my time, I did not care to resubmit contents to a group who did not want to see it anyways. The few times that I did, I carefully tried to address the moderators objections and my repost was allowed.
Sure, there are definitely some idiots who are obsessed with their perfect view of what should be said on a forum, but most of the time that I have seen, it is a user who cannot act right and doubles down on their stupid when they get called out on it.
Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site’s greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what’s going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you’re never going to catch up and still give a shit.
Problem with reddit is that everyone thinks they’re a comedian and people just upvote the same repeated jokes over and over. You still have to wade though tons of garbage to find the good stuff, and thats after filtering tons of shit with RES. Reddit was great at one point but it got exhausting.
If you nested the comments by time and layer instead of votes and layer it would reduce the amount of attention seeking behavior.
You can collapse whole comment trees, though, which cuts down scrolling time.
Never really put my finger on why, but that must be the reason I’ve never been active on any forums, just lurking, but I’ve always been very much active on Reddit and now lemmy. Combine that with the need to register an account to all the different forums and the fact that you can’t catch up to all of them from a single front page.
Forums never went anywhere. It’s just that the techno hipsters found something new.
It is. Slack and Discord didn’t kill forums, Reddit did. Because Reddit is a mega-forum. Instead of creating a specialized forum somewhere on a website you need to maintain, it’s easier to just create a subreddit. Bam, new forum!
And we’re discussing the disappearance of forums on a forum…
Reddit/Lemmy is like a forum, but bad. They don’t have a good way to see unread additions to a thread, making long discussions impossible.
Uh. Ever try to follow along in a forum when people start quoting each other and then having side conversations? The old forum layout sucks, Lemmy and Reddit with their parent-child thread-based systems are infinitely better.
