There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

AlexWIWA ,

Also “I’m so sick of this question” well then put the answer somewhere that’s indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.

b3nsn0w ,
@b3nsn0w@pricefield.org avatar

There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.

RightHandOfIkaros ,

I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.

No, I don’t want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.

AlexWIWA ,

Yeah I can’t stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub

toastal ,

No. Microsoft, the for-profit, publicly-traded, US-based megacorporation, controls that platform, who can use it, what can be put on it, what the ToS are. You can consider open options like Codeberg, et al. as at least you remove all the for-profit & social media trash, but if you want to be in control of your community, you almost have to self host & a self-hosted project should be viewed as more viable.

AlexWIWA ,

Put it somewhere reliable that can easily be copied and indexed

That’s basically what I was getting at.

In the C&C community, all the old fan sites and forums died, and all the knowledge is hidden in discord servers that are terrible to search.

toastal , (edited )

But only one step in the right direction. Releasing it from the clutches of one US corporation but trusting it in another isn’t quite good enough. For instance, say you upload the data as files in a Microsoft GitHub Git repository… well, you can’t use search without being autheniticated on that closed Git forge which will require an account & ToS agreements just to search the reposotiry without downloading it & for similar reasons search indexing won’t be good either.

cerement ,
@cerement@slrpnk.net avatar

You’ve heard of I don’t want your fucking app. Now get ready for I don’t want to join your fucking Discord server just to get basic information that should be on a proper website instead of hidden in the archives of a fucking chatroom.

flambonkscious ,

Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it’s a crime

SamsonSeinfelder ,

Does Discord now offer the ability to save/fav comments to find them again? When I used it the last time, i was amazed how everything just scrolls by without a possibility to hold on to something.

EmbeddedEntropy ,

Since being forced to use this terrible communication method in my teams and groups, I’ve been copy-and-pasting good Q&A threads into text files that I push to an enterprise GitHub repo for perma-store. At least that way other engineers and myself can either use GitHub’s search or clone the repo locally, grep it, and even contribute back with PRs. Sometimes from there, turn into a wiki, but that’s pretty rare. My approach is horribly inefficient and so much stuff is still lost, but it’s better than Discord’s search or dealing with Confluence.

snor10 ,

Thank you for your service 🙏🙏

stalfoss ,

At my job we bought an entire different product (glean) and are paying them a ton of money every month just because they can search our confluence wiki effectively lol

MajorHavoc ,

Hear hear!

I too find my garbage heap notes file checked into GitHub to be better than confluence.

But I hate confluence so much I should probably bring it up at therapy sometime…

Harrison ,

You can search through the whole history of a channel

SamsonSeinfelder ,

How is that the same than a favorite? I can also use a searchengine to find a website, but a bookmark is sometimes better. I can also search through all tweets on twitter, but having some marked as favorites come in handy sometimes. I use favorites and save lists in youtube quite a lot. Even though I could use the yt search bar each time.

Damage ,

Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord’s doors.

hardypart ,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

I fucking hate Discord. It’s a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can’t google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can’t grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.

HKayn ,
@HKayn@dormi.zone avatar

It’s because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.

Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it’s relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.

It makes sense, but it’s sad nonetheless.

squaresinger ,

The problem is discoverability. And that’s where I don’t get why anyone in their right mind would use Discord for stuff like that.

Say, you have Github, a forum or even a subreddit for your project.

Somebody asks a question, you answer it.

Somebody else has the same question. Either they are intelligent enough to find it themselves or they ask and you just link your old answer. Done.

On Discord, it’s basically impossible to find an answer that is more than two screens full of posts ago. So you have to keep answering the very same questions all the time.

hardypart ,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

That’s the exact point. It’s not only that you can’t google shit, even within Discord itself it’s incredibly hard to find the relevant information. BTW, did I already say that I fucking hate Discord?

ChaoticEntropy ,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

I’m starting to get the feeling that you don’t approve of Discord.

Serinus ,

It’s great for real time discussion. It’s terrible for anything else.

It’s IRC, not a forum.

Anticorp ,

Fuck Discord! They’re named after an argument because their very existence is offensive.

AlexWIWA ,

I love discord… For my group of friends and communicating with other developers (internal project communication, not user communication.) It’s ass for literally everything else.

Kecessa ,

It’s also an issue with Reddit/Lemmy though, there’s a good reason why old forums have long, in depth discussions and all alternatives don’t, people have to keep recreating discussions on subjects because they don’t get bumped to the top even if they’re popular.

squaresinger ,

Yeah, discoverability is a huge issue on Lemmy, but it’s much better on Reddit.

When I google some topic, there is a big chance that the first few results will be Reddit. Doesn’t really happen with Lemmy (yet). Hopefully they find the time and budget to work on this in the future.

agnosticians ,

I think part of that is that most forums have terrible search functionality.

Searching reddit via google is a meme for a reason.

Kecessa ,

Sure, that’s an issue with all forums.

What I’m talking about is on Reddit and similar platforms unless you already replied to a discussion and someone replies to you directly you don’t know that the discussion keeps going.

On forums you see the discussion getting bumped and if you ask a question by creating a new thread and it’s already covered in an existing thread, people will refer you to it and you can continue adding to an ongoing discussion instead of the Reddit solution of being referred to a previous discussion that can’t be expanded because no one will know if you ask for more info in it.

Just look at ADVRider for example, thousands of pages of discussion on motorcycle models that haven’t been in production for over 10 years, that’s a shit load of knowledge all in the same place!

Spzi ,

Which might be seen as a positive by some people (not me).

It encourages social interaction. Every answered question becomes a valid option to ask again just a short time later. And to answer again.

It also takes the burden to search from those who have questions. Just keep the chat flowing.

Maybe it’s a bit like asking people on the street for directions, instead of using your phone. Less efficient and accurate, but you might get a smile in the process.

squaresinger ,

Or you might get a “Just use your phone, you idiot. I’ve been answering the same question all day.”

This is at least what happens a lot on these discord channels…

Cube6392 ,

Live chat is a good choice for friend and making urgent decisions in software. I’ve been watching projects more and more use it for their discussions, issue trackers, and Q&A solutions and it just makes me sad. Live chat isn’t good for anything that will need to be revisited in the future. But still I see more and more communities moving to live chat solutions for their whole community.

And that’s not to get into any of the problems with Discord specifically. I don’t love giving control over community hosting to any individual company. We’ve already seen the results several times. Google groups? Facebook groups? Reddit subreddits? All have demonstrated the problems with hosting your communities on a singular platform. Google groups is straight up gone. Facebook groups require you to sell a small part of your soul to participate. Reddit has been outright abusive towards their user base lately. Discord is vulnerable to all these problems

JackbyDev ,

Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don’t require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.

timbuck2themoon ,

I apparently am not most users.

No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.

tocano ,
@tocano@lemmy.ml avatar

Now that it has threads and features for communities I think it’s pretty decent.

variants ,

The search tool works pretty well that’s usually what I use, or just check the pinned messages that links you to a GitHub or something with a FAQ

ebc ,

Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently “migrated” their Github discussions to Discord… I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!

Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.

Anticorp ,

The fuckers deleted the discussions!

This is a very Facebook-like thing to do. They are openly hostile towards everyone, including their users and advertisers. Shit stain of a company that constantly makes the worst decisions.

Blackmist ,

All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.

I use it, but it’s basically “Free Ventrilo but not as shit.” I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.

ninja ,

I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible…

…but I also agree with everything you say here

ox0r ,
@ox0r@jlai.lu avatar

Also, putting documentation in a format that has way too many features so just reading docs takes up 40% of CPU usage. Yes ,fuck you for using gitbook, i hate it so fucking much

pineapplelover ,

The only real alternatives to Discord is Matrix and Revolt. I am on both and there are a good number of people on there but they aren’t too active. Wish they would be more popular and widely used

SpaceCadet2000 ,
@SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social avatar

I think you're missing the point here. The solution to the "documentation on a chatroom" problem is not putting documentation on another chatroom.

joao ,

The lack of indexable pages is a killer, what a waste of human time to be answering the same basic questions because every previous answer gets sucked into the black hole of a walled chat room with bad search.

muhyb ,

Fuck Discord.

porthos ,

Seriously fuck discord

FinalRemix ,

I just tried asking a question yesterday, and realized there’s basically no way to save / bookmark / whatever a specific thing… it’s seriously just a fucking chat room.

EddoWagt ,

Yeah it’s literally just that. I still have no idea why it’s used as some kind of database by so many

iegod ,

It’s great for what it’s intended for, a gaming voice/text chat server.

Abnorc ,

Yeah I don’t get the hate for Discord here. If you use it for customer service or as a substitute for documentation, I can imagine it being annoying. It’s like using Excel for absolutely everything. Excel isn’t that bad, it’s just the people that use it badly make it so.

lord_ryvan ,

No don’t, it’s a good chatting service, much better than Messenger for one. Fuck users who misuse a chat app as customer “service” rather than writing documentation!

QuazarOmega ,

So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it’s just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I’m really interested in and I can’t say it doesn’t work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??

condenser ,

Us the 90s kids grew up with the idea of ‘internet as a library’, which means websites are treated as books or magazines inside the shelves, that serve as repositories. We still have to read, but we were also used to it.

Perhaps it’s a generational shift, but nowadays ‘internet as an assistant’ approach is gaining over, which means the search bar (whichever it happens to be from) is treated as a search engine, and user directly inputs a semantic question expecting it to be answered. Users don’t expect to read, and aren’t expected to. Advertisement space is far more important.

When you think of that way, the idea of having a chatroom instead of proper support forum start making sense, even if I dread this idea and prefer proper text.

QuazarOmega ,

That’s a very interesting observation, I have to admit that even I sometimes am too lazy to read documentation from top to bottom and prefer asking a question to someone that already knows. Though I think it can also be attributed to how good a certain text is structured, quality of documentation should account not only for completeness, but also for laying out the information to be easy to parse and highlight the most important parts, which is maybe why I feel “documentation fatigue” in some cases

RoundSparrow ,

For open source, I almost always found IRC was a black hole of information. All kinds of developers discussing things that never made it to search engines. It’s a long tradition.

flashgnash ,

As a dev, far easier to answer questions about my code than write up documentation, so makes total sense to me

With discord at least you can usually search chat history for your question and find someone else asking it in the past

I wonder… Might be able to write a language model based crawler that goes through a discord server and pulls out all the useful information to generate documentation or at least a FAQ

vile ,

Hate this so much, very much into 3d printing (voron right now) and huge parts of the community are on discord it’s just an absolute pain to use

Damage ,

Annex engineering requires phone number verification to enter their discord. Fuck that.

Overzeetop ,

The phone number gatekeeping is annoying. I think ChatGPT requires it. I can’t use it because it won’t accept my phone number as I only use VoIP numbers. Never mind they used to be land and cell numbers I posted there. Same with some banking sites. No sms 2FA allowed because the gateway they use can’t jump to voip - the codes just never arrive.

cuacamole ,

Imo the discord works quite well. For mods the github repo us great and for most questions a diacord is enough. I like the fact that i can quickly share stuff and get answers. Forums always felt very clunky to me. I can use them, but the culture us often a bit shit, and then there are those that need registration to view posts or pictures. While those problems also apply to discord, i dont need a ton of accounts, i can somply join a server.

RoundSparrow ,

Matrix chat as the core developer hangout I find is similar

spez ,

true

Squirrel ,
@Squirrel@thelemmy.club avatar

RTFD, or something like that.

BiNonBi ,
@BiNonBi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I think you mean RTFM. But in this case it’s WTFM so I can RTFM.

original_ish_name ,

No, i think op is saying RTFD as in "read the fucking discord"

BiNonBi ,
@BiNonBi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Ah, in that case we need something like MTFDS, make the fucking discord searchable.

JoMiran ,

I’m 50 and I have a 23 year old “RTFM” t-shirt.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

This context needs to be on the shirt.

forgotmylastusername ,

I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.

RoundSparrow ,

This year has been dramatic. I’ve seen a big increase of users with quality content doing deletes in protest of Reddit. And the shift to sites like Lemmy that are not as favored by search engines.

Reddit should have gone the other direction, become a non-profit, eliminate advertising, go back to open sourcing the code like they used to, and run on donations. Cut their staff of people that had anything to do with advertising and trying to market the platform.

TwistyLex ,

I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

It wastes everyone’s time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don’t have instant access to answers

Anticorp ,

Why would any sane developer want to use this system to “document” their project? Written docs have worked well for a million years and there’s no need to change them.

freeman ,

You can even include them in your version control system and allow others to suggest changes

Anticorp ,

And you can include separate ones right there in the root folder where the script lives. README.md renders out beautifully on GitHub.

skullone ,

What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?

max ,

I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.

cuacamole ,

The instructions on the Web are pretty good, unless you start messing with Tons of mods, but thats your own fault.

max ,

True, but they have access to so many better ways of documenting stuff…

Ajen ,

You’re probably right, but I can think of a couple other 3d printing projects that have the same issue.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Poor bastard. I feel you. 💐

snowbell ,
@snowbell@beehaw.org avatar

What printer is this so I can avoid it?

sherlockandghibli ,

man up, dude (obviously /s)

^ man as in the man thingy to understand a code, like manual

worfamerryman ,

I see a lot of things that have a discord community.

Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?

Eccitaze ,
@Eccitaze@yiffit.net avatar

It’s free*, insanely easy to set up, you don’t have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there’s a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.

master5o1 ,

Basically the same reasons subreddits supplanted forums.

TWeaK ,

Lots of users gush over Discord for some reason. My impression is that more technically minded people don’t really like it, but your average user uses it for almost everything and encourages more services they like to use it. Hence why many reddit subs moved to Discord - the mods didn’t necessarily prefer it, but they were sent an overwhelming number of requests from their users.

worfamerryman ,

Thanks for the heads up, i guess I just a bit too old to have been part of the discord group.

In the country where I live, it’s all Facebook messenger. It’s a shame as o think a number of people don’t really care for it, but everyone and every business uses it so we are kind stuck.

TWeaK ,

Yeah I mean I don’t understand it either. Telegram is bad enough for me, can’t be assed with Discord.

narnach ,

Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.

worfamerryman ,

I don’t care for the real-time communication aspect of it. In fact i find it unusable.

Am I supposed to just sit there and read random conversation and wait for a point to jump in?

Seems like it takes too much effort.

Damage ,

Especially when there’s multiple subjects being discussed on the same channel

P1r4nha ,

I mean, that is what IRC chat rooms were back in the day. Or any public chatroom from the 90s.

Realtime communication has its part. We use Slack at work all the time. But searching Slack is a horrible way of replacing missing documentation.

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