IMO GUIs are always faster when it’s something you’ve never used before, or use very infrequently.
CLI is better if you’re used to the task you’re doing, or automating things. But for infrequent tasks looking up the commands (or looking at old notes to find it) is very slow and rather annoying.
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn’t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
I’ve heard this about Element from a lot of people and I have to wonder: Is that the mobile client or on an actual PC? Because I use it on my phone and it’s actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.
I gave up on matrix, was too complicated of a setup and the site was throughly unhelpful for newcomers. I eventually got it but, the permission system was somehow worse then IRC and due to the federation aspect of it you can’t modify the standard at all because then the other clients/servers can’t recieve you.
I think I will try Gomuks, since I now also tried Fluffychat, but scrolling felt weird and on a touchpad had the tendency to swipe left on messages to reply instead of scrolling down and I was unable to resize or close the channel info and channel list, or change its font size (there also appears to be no settings button). Maybe the CLI based clients will be more suited for me, since I also don’t mind using irssi for IRC (but it should be noted I also have no problems with graphical IRC clients like hexchat or others, which work perfectly fine on my machine).
On my phone I switched to Element X because Element would take up to a minute to sync messages. I’m willing to put up with the reduced feature set, as long as actual messages fucking arrive in time!
Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.
I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.
Never had issues using their search feature for dev discords. It’s keyword based; truly stupid simple and easy to follow.
And yes I’ve used irc actively. It’s delusional to think that is somehow easier to follow.
FREE with zero maintenance or resources required on my end since day 1
All messages and uploads are saved and searchable to anyone who joins a discord server. Some of my servers are from 2016 and all 100k messages up to this day are still there with each and every file untouched whenever I search for something. Same thing if I join a new server.
No other app has these two points along with the incredible amount of features and QoL Discord has. This is objectively true.
Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.
For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:
Ability to run it on my linux machine without using an electron client (npm is a huge mess of supply chain attacks and I refuse to run any software that is likely to contain dependencies from it)
Ability to run it on my AOSP phone which does not have any google play services installed
Ability to write software to back up messages without fear of a company changing their API and breaking my backup system
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.
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.
It’s been 8 years and they’ve done nothing and still haven’t.
My uploads from the day discord released are still there.
Is there any guarantee that they won’t? The same statement has been repeated for many such platforms and has proven to be completely myopic. Reddit has a 20 year history and they still managed to screw its entire user base. This argument is very weak is because it relies entirely on the benevolence of a for-profit company, to whom their profits outweigh the interests of their user base. All the alternatives mentioned here have a way to replicate and archive the data for future searches - they don’t depend on anyone’s benevolence.
The criticism that you have to make an account to use a search feature which many forums already do makes no sense.
I don’t know the exotic logic you rely on. But I can search forum posts from Google or DuckDuckGo without ever registering. Let’s see you search Discord messages without installing a crappy client (their web interface is lobotomized), registering and possibly giving up your phone number in the process.
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.
You are attacking a strawman. The target you choose to prove your point is Reddit? The company that screwed its entire userbase in order to cut off their competitors from data access - which is the reason why they don’t work well with searches? People don’t like Discord for the same reasons as Reddit. Both are silos meant to lock users in.
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.
This is laughably inaccurate. So, you’re just making up facts now? I do web searches on technical problems and search engines perform very well. Your claim doesn’t stand up in an actual test.
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.
There is a reason why Discord is not searchable online - it’s a silo by design. And they intend to monetize it someday. Doing that today will affect the growth of their platform. But some day when their growth slows down and once they’ve achieved lock-in, they will start restricting it. Even if you have reasons to believe that the current management has no reasons to do so, they will get acquired by someone else lacking the same sensibilities. You should be completely blind to not see this play out again and again and again. Reddit is the most recent example. If you think that it isn’t going to happen with Discord, then you’re just deluding yourself about the value you represent to a for-profit company.
On the other hand, those forums and IRC servers that you claim to have gone down, have backups and searchable archive because they are designed with them in mind. Longevity of information is not an accident - it’s by design.
Things shutting down and information needing to be found again is not a big deal.
You’re making up nonsense again. May be it’s not important to you. But they are important to FOSS projects and their users. They don’t just want to be able to pull up solutions to previously encountered problems - they depend on the traceability of the said information. You wouldn’t have made such nonsensical claim if you were seriously involved in a project.
Yes I and most of the world are willing to not cry about making an account for that guaranteed stability.
The statistics of this entire discussion doesn’t agree with your statement. But let’s forget that for now. You’re not crying about making an account or stability of the platform because you’re foolish enough to believe in those. You don’t have the insight required to observe what’s happening all around you. I can’t wait for the day to come back and say ‘I told you so’. Because it will happen. Nowhere in history has it happened in any other way.
Ridiculous argument. There are no guarantees in this world besides death. Your favorite website can and will eventually go down yet that doesn’t mean I won’t use something even though I know it’s temporary.
I don’t know the exotic logic you rely on. But I can search forum posts from Google or DuckDuckGo without ever registering
There are forums that hide their built-in search feature for registered users only because it causes too much to run those queries for unregistered users.
You are attacking a strawman. The target you choose to prove your point is Reddit? The company that screwed its entire userbase in order to cut off their competitors from data access - which is the reason why they don’t work well with searches? People don’t like Discord for the same reasons as Reddit. Both are silos meant to lock users in.
I used Reddit as an example to show how bad google searches are yes. Your attempt at whataboutism is not appreciated. Good try.
This is laughably inaccurate. So, you’re just making up facts now? I do web searches on technical problems and search engines perform very well. Your claim doesn’t stand up in an actual test.
I mean we’re both using personal anecdotes. I’m giving you a perspective where it is not the case. Hard to digest, I know. And yes I stand by using Stack Overflow’s search instead of relying on Google for example. You don’t get terrible bloated results plagued by ads and clickbait. You’re quite literally wasting your time using search engines.
There is a reason why Discord is not searchable online - it’s a silo by design
I don’t think you understand how expensive it is to keep websites available to be indexed by search engines. The sheer amount of bot traffic making large volumes of requests makes running things much more expensive than they need to be especially if your product is free and without ads. Sure it’s a silo by design but that lack of public availability is what makes it cheap to run with the extra features I get to enjoy.
Even if you have reasons to believe that the current management has no reasons to do so, they will get acquired by someone else lacking the same sensibilities. You should be completely blind to not see this play out again and again and again
Yes and I literally don’t care. It’s the best platform for the role it fills currently and I’ll simply move on to the next thing just like everything else in life. I’ll keep enjoying it like I have for the past 8 years and not cry about it.
You’re making up nonsense again. May be it’s not important to you. But they are important to FOSS projects and their users.
All you have to do is ask around in the community everyone migrates to and that’s it. It’s a tiny annoyance and that’s genuinely my perspective. You get bothered by it sure, but I legitimately don’t care if Discord sped up development for most of the projects lifespan.
The statistics of this entire discussion doesn’t agree with your statement. But let’s forget that for now. You’re not crying about making an account or stability of the platform because you’re foolish enough to believe in those. You don’t have the insight required to observe what’s happening all around you. I can’t wait for the day to come back and say ‘I told you so’. Because it will happen. Nowhere in history has it happened in any other way.
At the end of the day all of the reasons you stated maybe <1% of people care about and most of the points have nothing to do with the chatting features itself. If I’m honest it’s basically paranoia and fear for the insanely low chance something goes slightly wrong. It’s like refusing to leave your house because you can spontaneously get struck by lightning. 🤷
Whatever solution you’re using I would bet most people would find incredibly annoying to use from a usability perspective. As it would lack the 8 years worth of features and QoL discord introduced.
So we have a philosophical difference and that’s that.
Agreed, but my point is with a centralized network the lowest common denominator wins. There is no reason you can’t have QoL features on an open network, and thusly let everyone have the features that they care most about.
Can you imagine what a shithole the internet would have been if email wasn’t federated an open? There is absolutely no way that whatever centralized bullshit would have spawned instead would already be either long gone or enshittified to the point of being useless.
Moderation is a requirement with anything involving people so I don’t see that as a discord specific problem. If anything it’s easier than a forum since I don’t have to deal with spam bots myself for the most part.
The channel wipe thing is fair. You’re right about that.
i dont see how it would be easier on discord, discord is literally known only for bot/hacked account issues. I’ve never seen a spam bot on a forum before.
Plus nobody is likely to target a forum, everybody is targeting discord already. And on top of that the discord banning/automoderation isnt great, i’ve heard its getting better though.
I follow a niche community and the recent bans for their board is all spam bots even in 2024. I don’t want to put up with that nonsense and discord actively tries to curb that so the choice is easy.
you already said that, but like, what does it mean
What forum/s are we talking about? What discords are we talking about? What kind of botting are we talking about? Are the forums actively moderated? What’s the moderation experience like? Etc…
The big problem here is that discord is the only thing between you and managing your server, either they do it right, or they don’t (which is what they usually do) With a forum, you are the only person between the two, but you have full control over it You want to set up a basic entry gate to prevent bot accounts from sneaking through? Trivial. You want to set up message rate limiting? Trivial, you want to set up some clever detection and sequestering mechanism? Trivial.
With discord you’re either using bots, which suck, or you have to pay for, or you just pretend that it isn’t a problem and let humans deal with it.
The search has issues but I don’t fuck with irc channels because there is literally NEVER anyone there. I don’t understand IRC, either. I’m young, sorry
IRC would have been the best tool if it did session logging instead of requiring the use of bouncers. IRC is text-only, nonproprietary and completely distraction-free.
But you don’t have to use IRC. There are more modern federated protocols like Matrix and XMPP that do session logging. There are quite a lot of FOSS communities on them that are very active.
However, the main complaint here isn’t about Discord vs other chat protocols. It’s about the use of Discord as a community support forum. Unlike forums like Discourse, Discord messages aren’t searchable on the web. If a person asks a question on it and gets a solution, it’s then lost forever. Another person with the same question has to ask again. It completely defeats the utility of FOSS - of reusing someone else’s solutions.
I don’t think it is better at all. Unlike Discord, which might allow you to exist without a phone number, Telegram requires it right upfront. And it removed the ability to register from desktop, at least without spinning up an Android VM.
the irony here is that discord quite literally has quantum state messages/posts, unless you NAIL the search perfectly, you’re gonna get everything but the exact message you wanted. I mean sure the keywords make sense, but try searching for two or three keywords in a server with tens of thousands of message, or better yet, not knowing what specific keywords to use.
i can’t tell you the amount of times i’ve tried searching for an embed with words only to realize that apparently, discord is completely incapable of searching through embed names.
Discord is alright as a chat platform, would actually be better if it were a universal platform base, like matrix, or get this, IRC. Not being stuck on a shitty broken electron app would nice from time to time.
“I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to three days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network eight connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I’d like to see him try.”
Plausibility Level: 5/10 Gibsons. Classic overweight, underappreciated IT guy…who runs and is secretly stealing from an island full of deadly reanimated dinosaurs.
To all the decaf haters: If you drink decaf, you actually like the taste of coffee without needing the caffeine. That’s someone with taste, in my book.
Opinions, such as “all methods of decaffeinating coffee are blasphemy” are subjective in their very nature. What makes this more obvious is that the definition of blasphemy is entirely subjective and can’t even begin to be assessed objectively until at very minimum a religious dogma is declared for the basis of evaluation.
Okay… Which one? It’s pretty clear that decaffeinated coffee violates no religions that I’m aware of… And in fact for some religions would be the only allowable way to drink coffee. And if you argue that I just meant in general that it is a slight on to any God then how would you interpret that as anything other than humor or sarcasm?
Do you always feel like a victim or is it just when you aren’t caffeinated enough?
That’s not how legal systems work… Plenty of things are legal in one place and illegal in another. No Christians are worried about blasphemy against Zeus or Jupiter. Like wise a Zoroastrian is only concerned about blasphemy against Ahura Mazda and not Allah.
I’m claiming that the accusation or blasphemy presupposes a frame or reference. In this frame of reference, you can make objective statements. Not that this frame of reference is absolute.
In your line o reasoning, velocity would be subjective.
This is the silliest shit I’ve ever discussed on the Internet. I will say kudos to you for keeping things mostly amicable. It’s been awhile since I’ve had an argument on topicality and it’s been entertaining for me. Thanks my friend, best wishes.
Yeah, well for many of us it's decaf or no coffee due to health issues. You acting like it's a foolish, childish thing is just tribalism/elitism.
And for what it's worth, I'd put my decaf vs your coffee in a heartbeat. A good roaster with quality beans is great coffee, decaf or no. Just like Hoffman said.
You say "no one knows coffee better than he does", while blatantly disagreeing with his entirely empirical points in his video on decaf, that it can be made by several processes, all of them are fairly good, and the result can be masterful?
I live in a hockey capitol. That makes me nothing like an expert. Same for you.
Okay, so you make brilliant decaf. That means your point in this thread is moot?
Funny thing on that "subjectivity" is when you disagree with other people in this thread, you've plainly said they're just entirely wrong.
When someone disagrees with you, you hide behind "subjectivity".
Yikes this is getting drawn out and silly, eh. I’ll save us some time.
You win.
But one thing that I couldn’t help but chuckle at is your interpretation of the coffee capitol point.
You live in a hockey capitol. That doesn’t make you an expert, but I bet if you wanted to buy a hockey stick you would have a number of stores carrying top gear… If you wanted to see a game you probably have a number of hockey teams from pro to amateur you could go watch live.
I have direct access to three of the top 20 roasters in the country. I’m fortunate to have access to some of the best coffee in the world regardless if I’m an expert or not.
And this is sort of the point overall… You added so much of your own arguments to my position that you aren’t even arguing with me or the points that I’m making.
I’m not hiding behind subjectivity, I was the one who posted the video “negating” my so called “opinions”. You still think I did that as a mistake. Which I think is the second example that shows you are coming to this discussion in bad faith.
It’s no wonder you recommend introspection, given you have been arguing only with your interpretation of my opinion.
Like I said, you didn’t watch the video. Hoffmann clearly stated that decaf coffee can be made well. It is a documented fact that he said that, no subjectivity required.
So how is the other person “stretching” when they claimed he said it?
How do you gather? You think there isn’t many ways to decaffeinate beans or that some of them aren’t gross? Or that most ways used to decaffeinate beans doesn’t make the coffee taste bad?
These are the very points James makes in the first 2/3rds of the video.
The only point that he and I might delaminate on was that all decaf is blasphemous, and that’s a stretch because he never talks about the religious criminality of drinking coffee?
Why do you think I would offer a video to people about decaf that I didn’t watch? Hint: I don’t hate decaf coffee.
Build an entire ecosystem, with multiple frontends, apps, databases, admin portals. It needs to work with my industry. Make it run cheap on the cloud. Also make sure it’s pretty.
The prompts are getting so large we may need to make some sort of… Structured language to pipe into… a device that would… compile it all…
Perfect! We’ll just write out the definition of the product completely in Jira, in a specific way, so the application can understand it - tweak until it’s perfect, write unit tests around our Jira to make sure those all work - maybe we write a structured way to describe each item aaand we’ve reinvented programming.
I see where you’re going, but I’ve worked with AI models for the last year in depth, and there’s some really cool stuff they can do. However, truly learning about them means learning their hard pitfalls, and LLMs as written would not be able to build an entire application. They can help speed up parts of it, but the more context means more VRAM exponentially, and eventually larger models, and that’s just to get code spit out. Not to mention there is nuance in English that’s hard to express, that requirements are never perfect, that LLMs can iterate for very long before they run out of VRAM, that they can’t do devops or hook into running apps - the list goes on.
AI has been overhyped by business because they’re frothing at the mouth to automate everyone away - which is too bad because what it does do well it does great at - with limitations. This is my… 3rd or 4th cycle where business has assumed they can automate away engineers, and each time it just ends up generating new problems that need to be solved. Our jobs will evolve, sure, but we’re not going away.
I mean, I had beta access to ChatGPT and have gotten excellent results from clever use, so I don’t appreciate the appeal to authority.
No, the jobs are going away and you are delusional if you think otherwise. ChatGPT is the DeepBlue of these kinds of models, and a global effort is being made to get to the AlphaGo level of these models. It will happen, probably in weeks to months. A company, like Microsoft for example, could build something like this, never release it to the public, and if successful, can suddenly out-compete every other software company on the planet. 100%.
Your attitude is a carbon copy of the same naysaying attitude that could be see all over hackernews before ChatGPT found its way to the front page. That AI wasn’t ever going to do XY or Z. Then it does. Then the goal posts have to move.
AI will be writing end to end architecture, writing teh requirements documents, filling out the jira tickets. Building the unit tests. If you don’t think that a company would LOVE to depart with its 250k+ per year software engineers, bro…
lol okay dude. Flippantly you ignored all of the limitations I pointed out. Sure it could happen, but not on the timeline you’re discussing. There is no way within a year that they have replaced software engineers, I call absolute BS on that. I doubt it will rise above copilot within a year. I see it being used alongside code for a long time, calling out potential issues, optimizing where it can, and helping in things like building out yaml files. It cannot handle an entire solution, the hardware doesn’t exist for it. It also can’t handle specific contexts for business use-cases. Again maybe, but it’ll be a while - and even then our jobs shift to building out models and structuring AI prompts in a stable way.
My attitude is the same because these are the same issues that it’s faced. I’m not arguing that it’s not a great tool to be used, and I see a lot of places for it. But it’s naiive to say that it can replace an engineer at it’s stage, or in the near future. Anyone who has worked with it would tell you that.
I firmly do think companies want to replace their 250k engineers. That’s why I know that most of it is hype. The same hype that existed 20 years ago when they came out with designers for UIs, the same hype when react and frontend frameworks came out. Python was built to allow anyone to code, and that was another “end of engineers”. Cloud claimed to be able to remove entire IT departments, but those jobs just shifted to DevOps engineers. The goalposts moved each time, but the demand for qualified engineers went up because now they needed to know these new technologies.
Why do you think I worked with AI so much over the last year? I see my job evolving, I’m getting ready for it. This has happened before - those who don’t learn new tech get left behind, those who learn it keep going. I may not be coding in python in 10 years, god knows I wasn’t doing what I was 10 years ago - but it’s laughable to me to think that engineers are done and over with.
You seem mad and strongly opinionated, but I hate arguing when there is nothing on the line. Would you be interested in a gentleman’s bet then?
My thesis is that we’ll have (or some one will, you and I may not have access) to a form of interactive AI that can effectively code from scratch some kind of large-ish application (like a website), make changes to that website, add features, etc, in the next few years, like, very few.
I’d like to come to terms with you and lay down a bet. If need be we can start a sublemmy to post the bet publicly and we can be held accountable for public shaming if we fail to put up.
For the purposes of a bet, I want to suggest that a code base ‘as complicated’ as Lemmy is a good barometer. My getting this prediction right will be to show you an example of that happening in media, or ideally, being able to show it in use. I think in media should be considered acceptable.
In my circles, we usually make these bets beers or bottles of the counterparties favorite drink, and I’m willing to offer you the following terms: 3:1 in the first year, 2:1 in the second year, and 1:1 in the first year. If the above thesis isn’t confirm, I’m wrong and I’ll make it clear that I acknowledge that I’m wrong.
I would like to bet 12 bottles on my thesis based on the above terms, (where a case of 12 bottles of the preferred liquor or beer or whatever does not exceed $200, so like a 12 pack of good beer or mid tier wine).
To anyone who is interested in a better design: Buttons should be labeled with verb+object combinations, for instance “Cancel subscription”. Also it’s better to use less generic words that apply to the task at hand, for instance “Terminate subscription”. Here, ‘cancel’ is the right word, so this hint doesn’t apply as well here.
I think termínate is a better term. I don’t think it would be used because some UX person would worry about associations with robot assassins and people being fired, but terminating the subscription is the best technical term.
Canceling is preventing some future thing from happening. At best, you are cancelling a scheduled auto-renewal. But to end an ongoing thing is to terminate.
You are talking about synonyms here, and its highly subjective. The above poster has some good points with the more clear verbs but this whole end of the flow would work just as well as well with a “yes, I’m sure” and “no” instead of cancel
Well…Forums need to be maintained. Discord is free and easy and fast to use.
Discord should allow the servers to be browsable. But you can only participate by logging in.
Doesnt Disqus handle it like that as well? Same account on every website utilizing disqus?
part of the problem is that discord as a platform for this, is like using NAT to make ipv4 work in the modern era. It’s just annoying.
Discord even if it allowed public scraping would be a nightmare, because it’s search function is practically helpless. Good luck finding a solution as well, that may or may not exist, and that question/answer has probably been brought up numerous times. There is probably specific context around it that we’re missing unless we decide to role play as a historian.
Not to mention, it’s a third layer of abstraction on top of something that should just be accessible.
I mean sure forums need maintenance, So do discords though, Hardware hosting is barely a problem. Basically anything and any internet connection can host a forum, cloudflare will probably sell it to you for pennies on the dollar even. (though i dont like cloudflare myself)
Honestly, you ever tried to look back through a long thread on Discord? It’s impossible. If you want to read the original message that started the thread, good luck, you’ll be scrolling all day and may never get there. How anyone can claim that’s “easy to use” is beyond me.
Discord works for quick discussions happening right now, and that’s it.
If someone at an IT company put down web admin for a moderate forum of ~500 users of which a 100 are weekly active users, serving a small CDN distributed over America and Europe (because side project not because logical), I’d be impressed a hundred fold over a Discord admin.
At best you’d be very good community manager/admin if you maintained and kept the server clean of a >1000 user server of which 500 are participating daily. At worst the interviewers would ask you why you’d maintain a kids voice channel.
Also putting out a forum on a resumee is more impressive (assuming the topics are something you’d want to share).
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