For the main project I’m a maintainer on we do have forums too but they’re pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that’s what everyone else seems to be using.
Discord is absolute trash if you’re a user searching for solutions. It simply doesn’t turn up in web searches. Why would you want your users to ask the same questions again and again?
It just so happens to be where all our users end up anyway so for us it’s been okay for the most part. Having moderator commands for frequently asked questions, and automating frequently asked questions tends to help even more. Discord also seems to work well for projects far larger than ours, ones like RPCS3 etc.
After reading the comments on several communities including Lemmy, reddit, YouTube and several others, I don’t get the feeling that FOSS users are as enthusiastic about discord as you portray. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it’s a restriction that you impose on your users?
Besides, all the bells and whistles of Discord don’t solve the biggest gripe that I have with it - the searchability and discoverability of questions and answers. Despite the history recording in Discord, it acts essentially as an information black hole. People’s efforts in solving problems are just lost because they can’t be found again.
And finally, there’s one thing that corporate social media has proven time and again. Eventually all of them pivot for some reason or another. Perhaps they want to monetize the platform on unacceptable terms (like reddit recently). That will happen to discord too some day. They are holding the community content hostage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they won’t ever try to make money off it, cutting the community from it.
I mean, I don’t disagree with you, but our forums are dead. Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
All I can really say is my experiences, and what I have seen in other cases too.
I wish Discord weren’t the giant that it was, and I wish it were open-source, but unfortunately that’s just how these things go sometimes I guess.
Again, I think another good example of this is RPCS3. They have forums that are pretty dead, and they have a Discord that has a ton of users in there.
Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don’t mind using it.
But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It’s only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) very young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That’s a very small part of humanity.
If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.
I’m a member of a Discord that is the primary source of discussion and information about a piece of hardware, including technical & usage tips, firmware announcements, etc. It’s a terrible way to track this stuff.
That said, the only other forums that have decent communities around it are Reddit, Facebook, and Elektronauts - none of which are even close to as active, but in which many of us will post important info & tips to get the news out. Over 3 years into the project (which is not open source) it would be ridiculous to try shifting the whole community to a new platform. We’re kinda stuck.
Luckily the community as a whole seems to realise this, so we happily answer noob questions over and over and provide links to the appropriate resources, discussions, and pinned posts without snark or judgement. We’ve all been there. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s not efficient, and it’s not the end of the world.
Finally, with the state of search engines in decline due to monetisation, encroachment of AI bloat, and general enshittification, it’s a matter of time before very little real information will be easily searchable. Insular communities who decide to withdraw and do everything their own, better way will likely become the norm. The internet needs a reset anyway.
We have been using the forums. It’s been announced in Discord, we have a webhook that posts in our main Discord channel every time there’s a post in our main forum section. Every announcement goes to both the forums and the Discord, and the Discord announcements link to the forum posts.
We are using the forums. Our forums are still dead.
You’re the maintainer and presumably you control the discord server. You can decide to move things to a more available platform by removing Discord as an option.
There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:
Those who want quick answers. They don’t want to do the research - to see if the problem has been addressed before. They don’t care about if the question has been asked before.
Those who prefer searching for solutions. They don’t like joining any community just to search for those solutions.
Group 2 is going to be very invisible to you (maintainers), because they ask questions only if they can’t solve the problem themselves and nobody has asked it before. (I know this because that’s me). This group isn’t a minority.
Group 1 is the vocal type that you are more likely to interact with, since their first instinct is to ask. If you provide them a choice between forums and chat rooms, they always choose chats because that’s where they can get away with providing minimal background information on their questions and doing minimal to no research.
This doesn’t mean that the majority of your users are happy with chatrooms. It’s just that your observations are going to show this survivorship bias.
I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.
Recommending the use of a software for a purpose it wasn’t meant or designed for, is the real bad argument. There are a lot of projects that use forums for support questions just fine. Instead when you offer a chat room, people will try to get away with quick answers. But it rarely ends up like that and all the conversation that ensues also becomes buried.
Short lesson - use software for what it’s meant for. Don’t shoehorn a support forum’s job to a chat application simply because people already use it.
Everything beats a proper forum because most proper forums are basically dead since small projects won’t have many users and only a small number will sign up for a specific forum.
Forums used to be great since there was not much else, they still are good for large communities, but other than that, nope.
only a small number will sign up for a specific forum
Most people don’t have to sign-up, 90% of cases should resolve on just searching the problem. Good chances it was already asked and answered.
Most of the time, forums with few users aren’t dead, they’re just really slow, whenever you post a question - expect at least 12-hour delay. I’ve never seen a message on Discord answered 12 hours later - you either get somewhat instant response or it’s ghosted forever. Also good luck asking questions if there’s heated/rapid discussion in the room, or you have a little time and other responsibilities other than checking discord every couple minutes.
My company doesn’t appreciate my taste in programming flavors. I hoped to whet their appetite with a lunch and learn but when I tried to demo the functionality on my bosses computer I ended up being escorted from the building.
For a open source project like the above which has so many constant moving parts, a discord is probably a good idea to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
Because I can absolutely see a breaking change involving something outside of the open-source project itself.
I say that as a person who hates discord. But I’m also part of the older generation so waiting 3-9 months for a reply is kinda normal. And the projects I support, it’s pretty common to make a merge request that finally gets approved a two years later.
to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
if you actually visit that Discord (like I reluctantly do, from time to time), you’ll find that all issues are being discussed in a handful of general channels with multiple people discussing multiple issues at the same time in one never-eding stream of messages. if you miraculously find a proper keyword that brings up someone else having the same issue as you do, the only way to find if someone else replied to it is by scrolling through all that noise.
It’s saying that instead of spending all the resources needed to gather all of the training data for the LLM, just give a junior dev some coffee as the input instead.
The direct comparison is input and output. Coffee/training data is the input and the code is the output.
Yeah I don’t really get this, you can come to deterministic mathematic conclusions with ML, it just requires different structuring of the problem. While area of a rectangle may not need optimization, there are many such places that do, like file compression, which requires perfectly accurate results.
it’s for programmers, which you’re obviously not if you think this makes no sense…
and guess what, troll, that’s why you have a public comment history…
it’s a primary function… which i used, as intended, to see how much of a troll you are…
LLM costs $20 a month and needed only 60 hours of training, junior dev has been at it for years, costs as much for a half hour, and still needed me to repeatedly explain what a rectangle is
It was an interview with Jonathan Swan about COVID-19 where Trump had a bunch of papers with graphs trying to show that the US was doing well with cases. The paper he handed over showed the rates of deaths per case (though Trump didn’t seem to understand the graph), and Swan was asking him about the high rate of deaths in the US when looking at the total population of the country.
Man, if the media was worth a damn it could absolutely bury Trump in negative campaign ads. It’s one thing to run a single valid negative campaign ad. With Trump you could collect them like fucking pokemon.
That’s the problem though. His core supporters define themselves by who they oppose, so anything negative said about him is seen as an attack and becomes fuel for the hate machine
Holy shit! That Swan guy is a fucking legend. I’ve never seen Trump get that hounded by a journalist before!! He needs to et this more often. Why the fuck aren’t more people pressuring him with questions like this?
Remember how he abolished press briefings at the White house because Sarah Sanders couldn’t and didn’t want to answer questions from those pesky journalists?
Yeah, I found it on my laptop and was too lazy to send it over to my phone where I was on lemmy. So I typed it up, and then I actually sent the link to my phone when it was pointed out that it was broken.
Well, maybe lazy isn’t the right word. But I was too something.
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