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ditch discord! (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

348 comments fedilink hide all child comments

person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:

person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let's check out the community"
screenshot with the text

Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat.
hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
person looking behind with the text "nevermind".

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This is not lately, it's been happening for a long time.
Nothing in particular happened.
I'm gonna explain the meme: Discord started as a gaming communication software, after some time they expanded and discord servers are not used just for gaming. This leads to some software projects being coordinated in discord servers. However, discord is not a tool designed for this purpose, and because of that, OP had the reaction of this meme.

The disadvantages of discord when used as a community for software projects (as opposed to traditional forums, for example) are as follows (not an exhaustive list):

Most importantly, discord doesn't get indexed by search engines. So you can't just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear. Some say that if something is said in a discord server, it hasn't been said, because it's not findable. You have to know in which server to look for, and then use Discord's own searcher (which in my opinion is bad).
Conversations are just a flow of messages. Recently they introduced threads, which acts more like traditional forums, with an OP, title and answers. However, most people still just use the chat.
If you ask a question in a chat and nobody answers, people will just keep chatting and your question will be faded away, hidden by more recent messages.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most importantly, discord doesn’t get indexed by search engines. So you can’t just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear.

That's true. But also Google's algorithm has been circling the toilet for years now. So even if you were expecting a Stack Exchange esque reference to a problem in a Discord server, there's a much better chance that you'd get a bunch of SEO garbage inside the first couple of pages purely thanks to degradation in Google's internal optimization.

If anything, I'd consider Discord's opaqueness a benefit, as it keeps a lot of the spamming and automated manipulations out of these spaces. A good channel will have a Git space associated with it pinned to the main feed. And an active community will often have its own Wiki or equivalent to help organize FAQs for new users.

Its annoying in so far as its more transient than the older school repositories. But that's the direction the entire internet has been moving for the better part of a decade. Not really the fault of Discord.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, if all the good answers are behind non-indexable discord servers, of course search engines will be filled with SEO crap. If I Google "how to parse HTML with regex" stack overflow comes as the first entry.

Wikis and FAQs are not at all unique to discord.

If the only benefit is that "it's not reachable, therefore spammers won't spam", then it is shit. If an information source is not reachable, might as well not exist. If you don't want spammers, you make things read-only, or whitelist/blacklist system or any other system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Wikis and FAQs are not at all unique to discord.

No. And I'll happily concede that the above is annoying af when the Wiki/Web FAQ should be the primary source for info. But Google should be able to search/cache/serve that kind of info and clearly seems incapable of doing so anymore.

If the only benefit is that “it’s not reachable, therefore spammers won’t spam”, then it is shit.

I don't think that's the only benefit of Discord, by a long shot. I just consider it a fringe benefit, relative to the older "Here's a link to a Slashdot post from 2001 that's got 5000 comments, 90% of which are now gibberish that's piled in thanks to the high Google index."