I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.
That'd almost definitely turn me off from using that project. Whenever I'm assessing if a project is good enough to use, the first thing I check is the issues to see what bugs/missing features there are and what things users commonly need help with.
If I had to waste time digging through their discord to understand that when the issues page can give a quick overview, I wouldn't bother with the project unless it was something extremely unique and important enough to me to deal with such a mess.
Yep, it had this effect on me! Ultimately I did not get that device working on my debian desktop, though it worked without issue on the raspberry pi I also wanted to use it for and that was good enough. Would love to have this device (wireless xbox controller dongle) for my desktop too, but I am not going to hang out on discord to debug a computer problem unless I desperately have to. I can just plug in my xbox controller and use it wired.
> They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.
But their choice will make some people decide not to use their software. If I have an issue that I'm looking for support for, and discover that it doesn't exist outside of something like Discord, I would stop using that software.
It may be that there aren't many like me, or that the devs don't want users like me, but nonetheless, choosing a poor support forum will lose some users.
On Discord, if it's an active community, 99% of the time the person to respond first will be another community member and not an active maintainer. Because people are already on Discord, they'll see a channel light up and decide to drop in. Compare that to GitHub issues where pretty much just the maintainer will get an email and the advantage is clear.
I wonder why GitHub never implemented "does this other existing ticket already cover your issue?" suggestions like StackOverflow. That would probably help in a lot of these situations.
Then make a (readable) FAQ with the commonly asked questions. Any project that has a large number of commonly asked questions either has major UX problems or poor documentation, or both.
I suppose this can be at least partially explained by typical modern attitude "What is the most recent is most important. What have been long ago can be ignored". Let me give you examples:
- Chats in modern IM applications like Telegram or WhatsApp are sorted by the time of the most recent message in chats. Yeah, there are various workarounds like folders and pinning, but the default approach is "sort by time"
- The default for modern monitoring, Prometheus, does not bother with storing aggregated information for the long time. And mostly people are OK with this. Compare with old school RRD which retained aggregated data for a year by default.
- The common UI for photo gallery on mobile devices is the timeline. Other options like grouping by GPS location or folders are not easily accessible and feel like an extra not very polished feature.
And in a way this is a reasonable strategy to cope with too much data, too many things demanding our attention.
Now let's get back to issues vs discord. In the point of view that I have just described there is no need for search and discovery. If the issue happens frequently it is frequently mentioned and grabs attention and therefore get fixed eventually. Something that happens infrequently does not matter anyway. Eternal storage feels like a burden. Every issue that have been posted just keeps begging for attention and does not sink in the depth of time!
But even if I can understand this point of view I am an old-school guy and can not accept it.
> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.
> On GitHub, I had to log in and search their thousands of issues to find an error message, only to find it's like three closed issues without any replies and there's one troubleshooting step in chinese.
I don't see how this would be an issue exclusive with Discord rather than the project itself.
You don't have to log in or even have a GitHub account to search through issues. Hell, in many cases you don't even need to be searching on GitHub to find the relevant issue since they're indexed by search engines. Neither of these are an option with Discord.
Maybe GitHub issues are bad as a support forum, but the point that OP was trying to make (that Discord is even worse as a support forum) is still valid. On GitHub issues, you at least have a chance to find the solution for an issue yourself, on Discord you basically have to ask and hope that someone is nice (and competent) enough to answer your question.
Totally off topic, but I just got two Xbox Series Controllers working over Bluetooth flawlessly, connected to a Raspberry Pi, using xpadneo driver. Can highly recommend that driver.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am still using my crusty old launch day Xbox One and the original launch day controllers for it. All of the hardware is working great, and somehow I have a lot of those controllers. But that generation of hardware uses their proprietary wireless interface rather than bluetooth. There is a cute little $20 generic dongle you can buy for this, and it works great on for example the raspberry pi I use with steam link. For some reason though the kernel driver did not properly load on my debian system. This is where I encountered the discord based support chat. I did post some info there and got some suggestions, but I really dislike discord for working on software issues. Github Issues works extremely well for me for this.
I guess what I'm wondering is, what are people trying to prevent or protect by moving to Discord?
On one hand, I don't see Discords as any different to web forums, except with no personal control and the knowledge barriers removed. In that way, they're not really different from the defunct AOL communities or Yahoo Groups of yesteryear, outside of their inability to be conveniently scraped or archived. Can you port your Discord channel to a different platform or self host?
On the other, it seems like the people who like it /really/ like it. But then again, people have always liked being gatekeepers, even if they don't really hold the keys and it's not their castle. But that surely isn't all of the appeal?
> I don't see Discords as any different to web forums
A rather huge difference is that you have to sign up in order to use Discord. You usually don't in order to search web forums. Signing up for something is a pretty huge ask.
- More people get notified immediately on Discord, and then everyone chimes in. When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue. It becomes even more of a community effort to find solutions.
- It's much easier to use a single account for multiple purposes. If everything is on Discord, then a single account is all you need (vs a separate account for GitHub, GitLab, random bulletin boards, etc.)
IMHO, Github issues vs Discord is a false dilemma. Searching in Discord or searching through hundred of issues with months of comments are equally bad.
A place to report issues and a place to discuss have their use, but any project needs comprehensive documentation and a FAQ page. Yes, many won't read them. But also, many will.
> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.
Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
It has been some time so I have no clear recollection. Usually I hate waiting for replies though so I imagine I would have searched if I saw how. I cannot recall how that went.
One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users.
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se.
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Most internet community rules seem to spawn from a fear of authority. A mutual fear from the rank-and-file and the rulers. Endlessly debating a million little rules is safer than questioning each other's judgement. Authority resolves both those situations efficiently, but it demands a morality: a fair standard applied across all people.
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
People should be reminded that rules are more of a guideline than a strict plan to follow, especially in the online world. Banning people is a crucial part of forming a community, and you should feel no shame for applying it where necessary to guide the atmosphere towards a better place.
It's even worse because whoever has enough free time to lurk and misinform also has the free time to network, so those people won't get necessarily banned but sometimes also be rewarded for being active in the community.
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
I swing the banhammer early and often without remorse.
If you don't learn after being reminded, there is no use keeping you around.
1 bad person can ruin it for everyone else - not having that.
I believe in second chances but not in online communities.
Doesn't the same thing happen with old school forums? There are some avatars I remember (I don't remember their user names) on certain product's forums who I know I can't trust, and they show up in every third thread I find on Google. At least they never change their avatar, if they did I might fall for their BS again.
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
I feel like it's different on more asynchronous mediums than just chats.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
That's because those platforms provide instant gratification, which attracts people with too much time. Busy, conscientious people are not going to loiter around and repeatedly answer questions that newbies ought to be able to solve on their own with proper tools (i.e., not Discord, Slack or IRC).
I joined the Bun.sh Discord a couple days ago to ask a question, and it got drowned out a flood of other questions or simply people hanging out making jokes. I think this is what you're talking about.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it?
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
That's being generous. "Nothing better to do" also translates as "works as sales / business development for the gigantic expensive legacy tool you're trying to work around". End of the day, when one guy is spending all their time on your Support, and you don't know why, and they're persistently nonconstructive or just plain making shit up[1], you have to start asking, "why does this guy care so much?". Shortest answer is often "Cuz he's paid to".
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
That is presumably what they want though when they say they don't want (better options) getting bogged down in support - they mean they don't want to be the ones dealing with it, surely?
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).
I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.
So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.
Amazon is absolute garbage, no idea why people praise it so much.
Scams all around and garbage products - ill take a bad return policy any day over that.
> Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things
> I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human
The lovely self-indulged and intimidating in voice so-called artificial intelligence Max assistant ham-fisted on Orange help line, right next to the "would you like to authorize yourself with your voice in future- it's totally SAFE" message. How I despise that thing. They even trained it to avoid "connect me with human" line as much is possible.
Whenever I need help from that ISP and I'm facing a perspective dealing with this thing, it feels like I should just shut the hell up, leave the money, sign newest service contract without any word because the rest doesn't matter for them at all.
I do understand this assistant (and similar ones) probably does the perfect job dealing with this kind of customer who calls them with trivial issues. But that puts those people whose issues are more complex and who do really need to talk with human consultant ASAP on a hell-hole loop fencing with an algorithm.
Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing.
So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?
This. I wouldn't want to risk to depend on software where it's literally impossible to Google issues. That would be self-destructive on a level I don't want.
I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords.
> first read the error message clearly and try understand it,
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there”
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
Some degree of informational amensia is a good thing. We've all hit the "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more".
Could be a bias too. I really dislike Discord. I'm on too many discords. It's just one of those network effect things that I wish wasn't everywhere.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
> I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
HN has a particular culture that dislikes social media and due to the nature of these sites, once a culture is established, it attracts more of the same since everyone upvotes the dominant cultural position. Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. Listen to your users.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
Sure if your customers want to use discord and you're ok with putting your community there, then go for it.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
I try not to argue against my users for "what is best for them." If they overwhelmingly want Discord, I'll give them Discord. The goal is to be ready to jump ship if need be, and there's a few ways to do that.
There are a lot of contextual questions raised by that though - are the people who interact with the project the community? How many people are being interacted with? What are the goals of said community?
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
It's popular because it's familiar, but also people because are so impatient they want real-time and fast responses to their questions. But then you get a flooded channel of questions being drowned out by memes.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
Is it possible to somehow bridge discord and, say issues on GitHub or another forum so that people can use discord but the information is just pulled from other sources and they're redirected there?
It's kind of incredible that this even needs to be said.
Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord.
It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information.
Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.
There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients
That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
I'm not familiar with the codebase, but from my understanding it saves messages in a database [1], then periodically send out a formatted email to people who subscribed to the thread/group [2]
Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it)
I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts.
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
Readit News
If I had to waste time digging through their discord to understand that when the issues page can give a quick overview, I wouldn't bother with the project unless it was something extremely unique and important enough to me to deal with such a mess.
Have you ever seen the GitHub issues of a halfway popular repo?
Once a project is big enough to attract all the low quality users, the same question/problem will be asked/reported over and over again.
The maintainers will have to deal with a mess either way. They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.
That's true for Discord too though.
I don't know, this sounds like draining all the water in all the oceans on Earth just because somebody pee'd in your local pool.
Then set up a mailing list (Google Group?) which will be searchable, and send out a regular FAQ message to it (like in the Usenet days).
Making things easier to find via search is one way to deal with what you describe, and Discord/Slack/IRC does not allow for that.
But their choice will make some people decide not to use their software. If I have an issue that I'm looking for support for, and discover that it doesn't exist outside of something like Discord, I would stop using that software.
It may be that there aren't many like me, or that the devs don't want users like me, but nonetheless, choosing a poor support forum will lose some users.
I guess so, but to me discord seemed a rather awful choice.
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- Chats in modern IM applications like Telegram or WhatsApp are sorted by the time of the most recent message in chats. Yeah, there are various workarounds like folders and pinning, but the default approach is "sort by time"
- The default for modern monitoring, Prometheus, does not bother with storing aggregated information for the long time. And mostly people are OK with this. Compare with old school RRD which retained aggregated data for a year by default.
- The common UI for photo gallery on mobile devices is the timeline. Other options like grouping by GPS location or folders are not easily accessible and feel like an extra not very polished feature.
And in a way this is a reasonable strategy to cope with too much data, too many things demanding our attention.
Now let's get back to issues vs discord. In the point of view that I have just described there is no need for search and discovery. If the issue happens frequently it is frequently mentioned and grabs attention and therefore get fixed eventually. Something that happens infrequently does not matter anyway. Eternal storage feels like a burden. Every issue that have been posted just keeps begging for attention and does not sink in the depth of time!
But even if I can understand this point of view I am an old-school guy and can not accept it.
IMO for projects that need a place for support questions but don't want to use issues, they could use the Github "discussions" board feature.
> On GitHub, I had to log in and search their thousands of issues to find an error message, only to find it's like three closed issues without any replies and there's one troubleshooting step in chinese.
I don't see how this would be an issue exclusive with Discord rather than the project itself.
On one hand, I don't see Discords as any different to web forums, except with no personal control and the knowledge barriers removed. In that way, they're not really different from the defunct AOL communities or Yahoo Groups of yesteryear, outside of their inability to be conveniently scraped or archived. Can you port your Discord channel to a different platform or self host?
On the other, it seems like the people who like it /really/ like it. But then again, people have always liked being gatekeepers, even if they don't really hold the keys and it's not their castle. But that surely isn't all of the appeal?
A rather huge difference is that you have to sign up in order to use Discord. You usually don't in order to search web forums. Signing up for something is a pretty huge ask.
- More people get notified immediately on Discord, and then everyone chimes in. When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue. It becomes even more of a community effort to find solutions.
- It's much easier to use a single account for multiple purposes. If everything is on Discord, then a single account is all you need (vs a separate account for GitHub, GitLab, random bulletin boards, etc.)
A place to report issues and a place to discuss have their use, but any project needs comprehensive documentation and a FAQ page. Yes, many won't read them. But also, many will.
Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
(Full disclosure, I've been that guy)
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
I'm not defending Discord as a solution though.
However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).
I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.
So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.
I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.
The "chat" button disappeared from the help & contact us, and to talk to real person you need to go through bunch of jumps.
> I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human
The lovely self-indulged and intimidating in voice so-called artificial intelligence Max assistant ham-fisted on Orange help line, right next to the "would you like to authorize yourself with your voice in future- it's totally SAFE" message. How I despise that thing. They even trained it to avoid "connect me with human" line as much is possible.
Whenever I need help from that ISP and I'm facing a perspective dealing with this thing, it feels like I should just shut the hell up, leave the money, sign newest service contract without any word because the rest doesn't matter for them at all.
I do understand this assistant (and similar ones) probably does the perfect job dealing with this kind of customer who calls them with trivial issues. But that puts those people whose issues are more complex and who do really need to talk with human consultant ASAP on a hell-hole loop fencing with an algorithm.
Maybe that's the goal? To discourage the return of merchandise? They think customers rather write off the loss, than waste half an hour.
So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
That's actually mind-blowingly horrifying.
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
At least part of that is that the search in Discord is horrifyingly bad, and isn't available via search engines.
I don't mine Discord as a place to ask questions / discuss; but it's far less dysfunctional when combined with a wiki.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
That's what made Reddit so popular.
What if the forum offered the following three options for sign in:
- Sign in with GitHub
- Sign in with Apple
- Sign in with Google
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Discord is bad because if I don't like the default client, I can't use or build another one. I can do this with IRC/XMPP/Matrix.
What forum owners want is to not have to deal with idiotic user logins and spam.
Both sides think Discord is good enough even though it isn't.
The problem is that everything else is so much worse.
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
The people who have choosen to use Discord rarely care that others abhor it. And it really sets the mood: this is not a community I am welcome in.
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
if all you have is discord that's what you'll see
if you have a forum/gh-issues there are a lot of visitors who won't bother you but will get their answer
Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information.
Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.
There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients
That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
More details here: https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory...
I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2]
[1] - https://forum.dlang.org/
[2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/
How does the integration work? Can you post to the forum, and it's then mailed out.. ?
Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it)
[1] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/w...
[2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/s...
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.