Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it’s a crime
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m starting to get the feeling that you don’t approve of Discord.
Fuck Discord! They’re named after an argument because their very existence is offensive.
It’s great for real time discussion. It’s terrible for anything else.
It’s IRC, not a forum.
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.
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.
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.
Now that it has threads and features for communities I think it’s pretty decent.
Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platformAlso “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.
There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
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.
I’m 50 and I have a 23 year old “RTFM” t-shirt.
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.
Requests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶
I mean, it’s not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.
It’s still a shit ruling. Back in the day they just blocked all .io sites so you couldn’t play agar.io and so on. But all the IT sites we used were also blocked by that. So we had to go and ask the guy for every single one until he grew sick of it and opened it again
That’s true, but we had a work server there for voice chat
Wow. I’d be self hosting mumble for that. Or using Teams.
Not wrong lol, it’s a gamer chat. It tried to rebrand as a regular chat app, but the entire gamer aesthetic says otherwise.
This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.
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
Kids these days:
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.
Always has been. Old forums were full of this.
Agreed. Trying to find answers for questions probably already asked on Discord is impossible.
I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers
And the people asking basic questions probably don’t want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.
And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it’s going. Further people who aren’t deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.
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.
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
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.
You can even include them in your version control system and allow others to suggest changes
And you can include separate ones right there in the root folder where the script lives. README.md renders out beautifully on GitHub.
What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?
I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.
The instructions on the Web are pretty good, unless you start messing with Tons of mods, but thats your own fault.
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
I think you’re missing the point here. The solution to the “documentation on a chatroom” problem is not putting documentation on another chatroom.
