Discord does have an okayish search feature which gave me a desired answer most of the time I joined a server because of a particular program I had. Enormous downside being that you have to guess the previously used wording if you don't have an error message or something.

Yes, but Discord does not get indexed by search engines, because it’s not an open platform.

So while it is in the interest of the open source project that as many people going forward can benefit from past Q&A, it is in the interest of Discord to require you to install their client to search.

Silos are sad.

I don’t want to join a server to search. It’s kind of an expensive action. And it’s sticky. I don’t like joining things and having more clutter.

So in discord it’s like this:

-join server

-search

-figure out how to leave server

On IRC it’s like this:

-join channel

-ask question

-get directed to wiki or forum

-search forum

-never have to leave anything

-or better yet that wiki or forum is indexed so I just google and find my answer that way

I grew up with (and love) irc but currently use discord. I find it odd someone who knows irc would list "figure out how to leave a server".

Try explaining the steps to irc to someone who has never used irc before. That will be way more difficult than figuring out discord.

irc also has the downside of "ask question - get nothing" because the guy (who you dont know which guy is "the guy") wasnt online to even see the message. Or "ask the question and wait and hope I dont get disconnected losing any responses they might have answered with"

Discords can setup tickets or question areas as well, which greatly helps

All that said, I prefer docs, wiki, or a forum/subreddit over either irc or discord, but no way would I want to go back to irc

I’m already on irc, so I just join a channel. There’s no membership or obligation.

Joining a discord server is a whole mental decision. And each server is organized differently. So when you join a server you have to figure out where to comment and search.

Joining a server is about as much 'commitment' as joining a channel in IRC. i.e. technically very easy, and socially it entirely depends on the server/channel. For a support one, it's not at all unusual or hard to join and leave again.

> Try explaining the steps to irc to someone who has never used irc before.

I mean, with modern web clients, it can be as easy as "open chat link, chat, close page".

In my experience it’s way to aggressive at stemming and rewriting and there’s no way to do a literal search.

Reminds me of Slack as knowledge base in some companies. This area needs some LLM disruption.