this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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People cheering on SOs demise don't realize what we're losing.
Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass. Asking the same question over and over, hoping somone is around to help.
It sucks.
I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.
Discord is honestly the most awful way to create a helpful community.
It’s a great way to give the 20 most active members of the community someplace to trample on top of newbies trying to get questions answered.
It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.
Not just that, it forces to create an account just to view!
It's purely because of how easy it is to create and manage a community. Imagine if there were a way to make a Lemmy instance without any fees or knowledge of selfhosting, it would be an instant success.
They don't operate well at scale needed, though.
And search engines are unable to index the questions and answers, so good luck finding the already answered question.
Exactly. I really hate when people use Discord for stuff like this.
Or slack
Pretty soon search engines won't be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won't look that out of place anymore.
If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won't be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?
You're forgetting about the schmuck on the other end of that equation that has to answer the same question a thousand times over.
A server I'm in actually has a bot that, whenever a user types a command, will respond to a question with an answer.
Simple example:
@\Johnny: "Hey, my browser says 404, what does that mean?"
@\Support: !\404 @\Johnny"
@\Bot (using Discord's reply feature to reply to Johnny's post): "'404' is a common error message that can be caused by a variety of issues. Here are steps to resolve the most common issues:..."
I didn't feel like typing out steps to check if the website is down for everyone or to fix it if it's just you, but you get the idea.
The server I'm in doesn't typically handle questions about that, either. They're more specialized to something more specific that that, but, again, you get the idea.
Nah, that person can just ignore/block you.
I didn't say it was a perfect setup. 🙂
And tbf there's lots of people who don't read the FAQ even if you shove their face in it.
It sucks but can you blame them? It's a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.
We're going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.
This doesn't necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it's being applied to is real.
For picking discord I very much can blame them, I figure it won't be long until that goes down the drain too.
they did an ai, but it got shut down.
Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.
We're going to see a lot of changes in online community tools and in the way people use those tools. Lemmy is not exactly revolutionary either, it's modern but it's still a forum at its core.
yeah, as Stack Overflow could. Discord is bound to the stakeholders, and is already getting enshittified.
Not yet. They're still trying to squeeze money out of people with their profile pic frames and stuff. They've yet to introduce ads into app (for now).
Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than "it's been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn't even write into it!" I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you've merged onto the highway.
Once upon a time, they stepped forth from the forests of IRC, but back into those dark woods they then one day marched.
Discord is straight up unwelcome on corporate networks.
I give it a few months before the Community tier servers' data is dumped and sold to an AI model company.
So four months til GPT starts calling everyone "kitten"
I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they'd finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord's forum feature is terrible.
The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there's a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable... OK, I see your point now.
I support the take over. People thinking that they can pick and choose who makes money and how are fooling themselves. The developer who wants all his IP protected so he can make money is upset that a larger entity is also making money is honestly tough fucking shit. Either go back to the origins of the internet napster days or shut the fuck up and live with what we created. There isn't any middle ground. Its only going to get worse unless you make this place hostile to people building walls and stealing all the data for themselves.