I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.
I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines.
If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information online again.
The general problem with forums is that once they get good SEO placement they then become targets of the army of spammers, real and human, trying to use the highly ranking forum for their unscrupulous SEO spam, and now the maintaining team has to do heavy loads of spam management.
Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.
As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.
I believe they meant "not searchable from an external search engine", which is a serious issue in many people's view (including mine). I would also suggest that it's a problem that chats are not browsable, because if you're new to a particular problem, you may not know what keywords you need to search for. With a forum, there are categories you can browse and usually discover the keywords you need much easier.
The assumption is that forum is viewable by guests (including Google) and Slack is not, so to search the Slack history you need to log in to Slack and use the Slack search (which might be broken / paid in the future, etc)
Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI.
Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.
I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.
Careful, you’re digging at the great HN conflict. Everyone making these pointless and disruptive UX changes logs off at the end of the day, jumps on HN, and complains about other products’ pointless and disruptive UX changes.
The list of things I hate about it is longer than the list of things I like about it. Certainly the workspace selector is miles better. Almost everything else is worse.
It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.
Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that.
Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix).
It’s also not searchable on Google either (yes you can run a bot but you could do that on discord/matrix or any other service too).
> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online
As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there.
Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that goes away as soon as you open the tab. No need to scroll up to where you got mentioned if you don't want to.
The ephemeral nature of IRC makes it a surprisingly relaxed experience.
IRC simply a different use case than a forum. I think both are useful and I don’t see a reason why a company couldn’t have IRC and a forum, there’s no contradiction and the overlap is small.
Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more people find the thread the higher the likeliness to find a solution.
IRC is nice for quick back-and-forth type conversation for topics which are more “common”, where the requirements to participate in teh conversation are lower. For example, a discussion on a potential feature request.
Oh no IRC and a forum are near perfect complements. Discord and friends try to integrate the two functionalities, but I've yet to see that work even remotely well.
Except that newer products like Slack and email providers with their conversation view are conflating the two use cases.
Slack tries to implement features of a forum by allowing threaded conversations. Conversation view email removes the nested threads and makes the email thread look more like a chat as opposed to a forum discussion with multiple threads.
It's not that bad either. You can use Ergo as an IRC server, and The Lounge as a client to provide a pleasant experience for small teams without the setup hassle.
> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.
You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].
Forum threads inherently have better searchability, because conversations are split into separate pages, with a clear subject/title, and usually a description of what the thread is about at the beginning of the page.
In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.
With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.
Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.
I do not want desktop app nor Yubikey either. I do not want to risk loosing account when I loose the stupid key or whatever secret. My use case, which would be participating in low key low risk projects, discussions, bug reports, feature requests or searching through source code does not need any of that.
As would be most people case. So, having discussions in place that requires it is just wrong choice. I do suspect github did that intentionally so that they dont act like free storage place for unpaid projects, so going elsewhere is not even hurting them.
Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.
I signed up for discord once, was horrified by what I saw, gave up, and never looked back. Everything about identity and “servers” seemed to be the opposite of what I would want.
On the plus side when it inevitably shuts down I will be unaffected.
My favorite "wtf" moment is how Discord reveals to users when I have blocked them, because they can no longer apply emoji reactions to my messages. Good times.
Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.
This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.
The difference between an account and an identity was so unclear when I signed up for Discord that I actually just closed the app and gave up on whatever led me there.
The identity and “server” concepts are complete non-starters for me.
Discord is in complete control of what information is shared with other users. There’s no mechanical prevention on them changing this behavior by accident or on purpose.
You're making this sound a little more dramatic than it is. Discord only makes your membership in a server public to users who are also members of that server (and who could thus see you in its member list).
"Only". I'm not into Discord in a big way, but this is propping up my reasoning as to why I don't like it. Being forced to join a server to browse it and having that shared with others is as bad as being forced to login to Twitter/X. Not to mention that conversations on Discord don't get indexed on Google, so finding solutions for some problems is an exercise in frustration.
reminds me of that site 'experts-exchange.com' which was a pre-StackOverflow login-only forum that nonetheless used to top Google search results. HN would have hated it. I'm surprised Discord gets a pass here.
The client also now sort of supports multiple accounts, but one issue is that the whole point of the discord client is to spy on your activity. If anyone thinks they're just collecting data about game application use, I have a bridge to sell you.
There's also a Chinese firm that owns a decent stake - tencent, I think.
In a professional context I would avoid both. I don’t want to join chat servers for various SaaS I pay for where I just want a simple support question answered. At least with a forum, the questions and answers are indexed so I might find exactly what I want without having to reach out to support.
I’m not a community member, I’m a paying customer.
Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model.
I would never use it for something professional/business related.
Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it.
But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen.
Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since.
The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly.
Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on.
Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case.
I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free?
I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.
Voice chat is fairly easy, it's not actually a huge use of bandwidth (in principle it can be basically none and peer-to-peer but that has privacy implications and discord now routes it all through a proxy). The CDN is probably the largest cost, and they have made moves towards cracking down on using it as an image host. But they do have a good income from selling Nitro features, much as many people don't see any value in them. They aren't quite profitable yet, but they're far from burning cash either.
You're right that Discord as a platform provides a thousand ways to make the server more pleasant. But it's not happening by default. The spam/bot control could be extremely improved on their side so that people don't have to use third party solutions by default.
We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack.
Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.
You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them.
Not in my experience.
We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course.
That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.
