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Discord Alternatives, Ranked (taggart-tech.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 70 points 6 months ago (4 children)

We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great

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  • [–] 34 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.

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  • [–] 28 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It's not search indexable or archivable. It's more or less a memory hole.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It's not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.

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  • [–] -2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I hope you're not implying an old forum search was any good

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence "search indexable"

    I'm not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.

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  • [–] -2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    Not denying that it's shit, I don't know anyone who's actually happy with it. But old forums also weren't built nicely.
    You say search indexable as if it's a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:

    • moved somewhere
    • renamed, so now the link is dead
    • was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
    • was edited to remove crucial information
    • was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
    • someone got butthurt so it's now defaced
    • all of the above and more.

    So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can't access it.

    The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    At some point, when you're combing through archives looking for the exact version of a closed forum post that contains exact info you have, you understand that this system also sucks.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago

    I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don't think following them is a good strategy for life.

    Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that's not really accurate anyways.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord "solved". A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago

    If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it's not better.
    The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
    We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it's unique way.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn't exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.

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