One of the stupidest trends of all time.
There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.
All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they’re all just as bad for it.
Forums are where you’ll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.
Where’s lemmy in regards to this?
Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it’s threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There’s only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don’t have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more “boomer hobbies” and it’s ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There’s car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you’re shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
IRC at least you have text logs, but I agree.
we just need IRCv2 which should add chat history
How do you replicate a conversation like this in a IRC format?
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
I only want the documentation if you have to fax it to me
Whatever, Mr. Stallman.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord
Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once
At least mods help mask all the other missing features
Discord didn’t, and still doesn’t, require a download. Easier for people to pick up and easier to use on locked down computers.
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for “free”, will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It’s been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it’s doing to indexable information and it’s only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight…
Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.
Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.
Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.
Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
