Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it’s a crime
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.
Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently “migrated” their Github discussions to Discord… I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!
Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.
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.
I apparently am not most users.
No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.
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.
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.
Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don’t require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.
They still require accounts with US-based megacorporation (with obligations to say, ban access to Syrians civilians due to sanctions). If your project can do better, it should.
This comment is ancient wtf
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.
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I see a lot of things that have a discord community.
Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?
This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.
Discord is great for what is is. It just shouldn’t be used for anything other than some chat and some voice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.
No, I don’t want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.
Yeah I can’t stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub
