One wouldn’t be too wrong to point at similarities between cancer and Discord in how it quickly takes over different systems (e.g. issue tracking, discussions, Q&A, documentation) and replaces them with a single non-functional thing (chat).
But, to play the devil’s advocate, Discord seems to have some kind of a forum functionality, however I’ve never encountered those Forum Channels myself.
StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice… Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there’s still someone who hasn’t gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.
Yeah, StackExchange solved this problem. Concrete example, moving from ubuntuforums.org to AskUbuntu.com was a life changer. The time to find correct solutions dropped through the floor.
Sounds like my situation. Running a program, it has an error and crashes. Support page says ask in discord. I do. Crickets. I ask again a day later. I get told off bc I asked once already and the devs know. I ask how I’m supposed to know that since literally no one replied to me. I was further chastised that I should know that they know. I gave up.
And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it’s not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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