4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.
For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:
Just join a server, find your answer, and leave. Why is that so scary? You don’t even have to interact with anyone.
That lazy culture is exactly why discord is bad for the job. I search for solutions first, instead of barging in with a question that may have been asked and resolved a thousand times before.
Discord has a search feature 🤦you still don’t have to interact with anyone…
I can’t understand how the people advocating for Discord in place of support forums can be so tone deaf about the core complaints others have about Discord.
Discord’s search feature is worthless to me and a huge section of others. The search results don’t show up on web searches. Web search indices are important because they aggregate information from many sources. Forums like Discourse don’t have that problem. With Discord, you instead have to install a shitty electron app and register an account just to do the above mentioned search. Sometimes, they even force you to give them your phone number. No - I don’t want to do that for every software problem I need to resolve. Even plain mailing list archives are miles ahead in that aspect.
Meanwhile, the community discussions are stuck inside a proprietary silo that appears convenient until the company decides to profit from it through eventual and inevitable enshittification. At that point, the rest of the world will be left looking for a way to free those discussions.
It’s been 8 years and they’ve done nothing and still haven’t. The criticism that you have to make an account to use a search feature which many forums already do makes no sense. My uploads from the day discord released are still there.
There were many times I couldn’t find a Reddit thread using a web search whereas I could immediately find it using reddits built-in search. Most of the search engines aren’t actually that good because there is too much noise in most web browser results these days.
If you know the exact website or app where the discourse for your topic is happening then 99% of the time you have far better results just using that websites built in search instead of the trash results modern browsers give you.
May I remind you that situation you’re describing already happened countless times since the days of free forum boards and irc channels going down. Yet we’ve always managed to keep things going. Things shutting down and information needing to be found again is not a big deal.
If anything I’ve seen more information lost by people hosting things themselves than the 8 years discord has kept things running smooth. So many niche communities on public forums, irc channels, etc, all self hosted and gone. Yes I and most of the world are willing to not cry about making an account for that guaranteed stability.
Is there any guarantee that they won’t? The same statement has been repeated for many such platforms and has proven to be completely myopic. Reddit has a 20 year history and they still managed to screw its entire user base. This argument is very weak is because it relies entirely on the benevolence of a for-profit company, to whom their profits outweigh the interests of their user base. All the alternatives mentioned here have a way to replicate and archive the data for future searches - they don’t depend on anyone’s benevolence.
I don’t know the exotic logic you rely on. But I can search forum posts from Google or DuckDuckGo without ever registering. Let’s see you search Discord messages without installing a crappy client (their web interface is lobotomized), registering and possibly giving up your phone number in the process.
You are attacking a strawman. The target you choose to prove your point is Reddit? The company that screwed its entire userbase in order to cut off their competitors from data access - which is the reason why they don’t work well with searches? People don’t like Discord for the same reasons as Reddit. Both are silos meant to lock users in.
This is laughably inaccurate. So, you’re just making up facts now? I do web searches on technical problems and search engines perform very well. Your claim doesn’t stand up in an actual test.
There is a reason why Discord is not searchable online - it’s a silo by design. And they intend to monetize it someday. Doing that today will affect the growth of their platform. But some day when their growth slows down and once they’ve achieved lock-in, they will start restricting it. Even if you have reasons to believe that the current management has no reasons to do so, they will get acquired by someone else lacking the same sensibilities. You should be completely blind to not see this play out again and again and again. Reddit is the most recent example. If you think that it isn’t going to happen with Discord, then you’re just deluding yourself about the value you represent to a for-profit company.
On the other hand, those forums and IRC servers that you claim to have gone down, have backups and searchable archive because they are designed with them in mind. Longevity of information is not an accident - it’s by design.
You’re making up nonsense again. May be it’s not important to you. But they are important to FOSS projects and their users. They don’t just want to be able to pull up solutions to previously encountered problems - they depend on the traceability of the said information. You wouldn’t have made such nonsensical claim if you were seriously involved in a project.
The statistics of this entire discussion doesn’t agree with your statement. But let’s forget that for now. You’re not crying about making an account or stability of the platform because you’re foolish enough to believe in those. You don’t have the insight required to observe what’s happening all around you. I can’t wait for the day to come back and say ‘I told you so’. Because it will happen. Nowhere in history has it happened in any other way.
Ridiculous argument. There are no guarantees in this world besides death. Your favorite website can and will eventually go down yet that doesn’t mean I won’t use something even though I know it’s temporary.
There are forums that hide their built-in search feature for registered users only because it causes too much to run those queries for unregistered users.
I used Reddit as an example to show how bad google searches are yes. Your attempt at whataboutism is not appreciated. Good try.
I mean we’re both using personal anecdotes. I’m giving you a perspective where it is not the case. Hard to digest, I know. And yes I stand by using Stack Overflow’s search instead of relying on Google for example. You don’t get terrible bloated results plagued by ads and clickbait. You’re quite literally wasting your time using search engines.
I don’t think you understand how expensive it is to keep websites available to be indexed by search engines. The sheer amount of bot traffic making large volumes of requests makes running things much more expensive than they need to be especially if your product is free and without ads. Sure it’s a silo by design but that lack of public availability is what makes it cheap to run with the extra features I get to enjoy.
Yes and I literally don’t care. It’s the best platform for the role it fills currently and I’ll simply move on to the next thing just like everything else in life. I’ll keep enjoying it like I have for the past 8 years and not cry about it.
All you have to do is ask around in the community everyone migrates to and that’s it. It’s a tiny annoyance and that’s genuinely my perspective. You get bothered by it sure, but I legitimately don’t care if Discord sped up development for most of the projects lifespan.
By the way I already know it will happen but you are projecting some caricature in your mind onto me. Do yourself a favor and don’t respond.
At the end of the day all of the reasons you stated maybe <1% of people care about and most of the points have nothing to do with the chatting features itself. If I’m honest it’s basically paranoia and fear for the insanely low chance something goes slightly wrong. It’s like refusing to leave your house because you can spontaneously get struck by lightning. 🤷
Whatever solution you’re using I would bet most people would find incredibly annoying to use from a usability perspective. As it would lack the 8 years worth of features and QoL discord introduced.
So we have a philosophical difference and that’s that.