Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
I may be getting old, but I think D*scord (I’m all for cencoring it like a slur) isn’t any more simple than a phpBB or something similar was. Quite the opposite actually, at least for any user trying to navigate the the darn thing.
Maybe navigating is the wrong term. It’s just impossible to find stuff relevant to me on discord. On any given larger server, there may be a few channels I could be interested in - but they are just a single chat log, often with lots of off-topic spam, and many different people having almost separate discussions at the same time. On any given larger phpBB, stuff is mostly separated into different threads with all the off-topic posts being delegated to a single thread. It’s better searchable and better organized.
What even is “relevancy”? Their search is just a search by matching keywords. There isn’t a magic algorithm discord uses. Every time I had an issue with some sort of bug or function I just search for specific keywords and 9/10 times I find something. On the odd-chance I don’t then I’ll behave like a human being and ask. I just don’t get what’s wrong with that? You can already limit those keyword searches with specific constraints so you don’t get much noise.
Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don’t want all their stuff centralized to Discord’s servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.
I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they’re going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they’ll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that’s where everyone is.
That’s absolutely not to say that it’s a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.
tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn’t be used for documentation in place of forums though.
Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I’m not so sure about documentation though.
Of course an IRC chat won’t be used for documentation, I meant for general chatting and support. Also I didn’t know that, hopefully I’ll be able to replace the absolutely proprietary discord with it.
Discord is better than IRC in any way except available clients, while also doing voice/video chat rooms so it replaced Teamspeak/Mumble. With the additional (at first) paid streamers and being free it took off especially with younger audiences. I remember how terrible Skype was and Discord just worked.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I’m unfamiliar with Directional Chat outside of things like VRchat, how that work if you’re not manipulating your position in space relative to other users?
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for “free”, will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It’s been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it’s doing to indexable information and it’s only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight…
you can’t honestly be saying that there are no issues with hosting documentation/support for a project exclusively on discord as opposed to a classic forum or wiki.
even ignoring the issues that you are dismissing (and would not exist on a better suited platform), the people using the discord server do not own it. discord servers have no backup functionality. what happens when an admin goes rogue or gets hacked etc? what happens when people get tired of discord for the next chat app?
you shouldn’t have to use a burner email to download a videogame mod or view documentation for an open source project.
There are issues of course. I’m just of the view that answering questions and giving support to a project is perfectly fine on discord because of incredibly fast response times.
As a developer you really only have bandwidth for maybe one or two methods of communication until you get stretched far too thin. Discord combines threads and irc chats into one. That is incredibly productive from a support standpoint.
To me this is nothing different than asking someone to join an irc server for technical help. Most of the irc servers I followed no longer exist but the projects are still fine and they’ve managed. If anything it’s better because you actually have a search feature.
i can understand your point of technical support, but what the op is calling out is when the only source of docs/support are discord.
i’ve had multiple experiences firsthand where I needed basic information about a piece of software that really should have just been on a readme or a wiki or something. instead my only option was to repeatedly ask a discord tech support channel and wait for someone who cares/knows about my question to actually answer me.
unless the options are limited, i’d rather simply pick a different solution than be forced to ask a busy discord channel for tech support.
Assuming you used the search feature on discord and no results came up, then you would be the first person to have ever asked that specific question to the developer. What makes you think that would actually be on a readme?
that’s a good point - i might be letting my dislike for discord-as-a-wiki color my argument. i will say that i’ve had mixed results using the search - sometimes there are no results and sometimes there are plenty of irrelevant results. that’s just what you get when basically hitting ctrl+f on who-knows-how-long worth of conversations instead of a purpose-made knowledge base.
i still think that a dedicated wiki/forum/repo available on the web for anyone with the url is far better suited to this purpose than discord is. discord is (arguably) good at being a chat app and its features aren’t well tailored to being an easily navigable knowledge base. it feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops to have to join a server on the app i use to share memes with my college roommates to get help troubleshooting some software, or worse, to get access to the only official release of the software.
I was recently trying to talk a person online out of marrying someone once the two of them are both 18. It’s partly because they’re head-over-heels in love with their partner and partly to move out of the US to Canada to escape their trans hostile state. They are trans and their partner helped them through some rough patches. The couple is only now meeting in person for the first time after three years. It was a little frustrating talking to them because I’m a naturally cautious person. My husband and I took about five years from first date to cohabiting to wedding. They honestly sounded like your stereotypical love sick teenager.
I would agree with the general judgement of this cartoon. There’s going to be some survivor bias for marriages that worked young. I know a woman who married a man who was in his 50’s when she was 18, right out of high school. When he died, she never remarried. But you never hear much about the marriages where an 18-year-old deemed themselves “more mature than those other girls/boys” and it turned into a disaster. They typically don’t last that long and no one wants to talk about them much.
Wife an I met and got married when I was 25 and she was 19. We had some life experience and knew what we wanted. 15 years later, it’s still amazing, we’re still best friends and inseparable. When I met her I got this weird feeling, like I met someone I had somehow known all my life. It felt like I met my wife in a past life, and was immediately like “oh there you are!” When I met her in this one.
I maintain that I was married to her in a past life. From our first date we clicked immediately. It felt like I was back into a groove with someone I’ve known forever. She came over to stay at my place for the weekend after like our 4th date, she never left. We’ve been living together since like 3 weeks after meeting, and we have never regretted it. We have kids and love each other and our life immensely.
I do that to my dead drives, but I’ve only had one fail that wasn’t an SSD. Moreso because the washers that separate the platters have a very satisfying ring to them that makes me keep them as a fidget toy.
I use the magnets to hold screws, it works great for that.
Unfortunately, SSDs have less interesting parts, so I just take them apart to destroy the chips after failure
Yeah like everyone wonders a little bit whether there is an intrinsic grammar to human biology but saying there are feature/s that every language shares is a strange and reductionist claim.
I just love how he and Skinner had it out. Skinner wrote “Verbal Behavior”, Chomsky responded, and Skinner’s takeaway was “well, he didn’t read this at all.” And declared himself the winner. Meanwhile Chomsky was expecting a rebuttal, never got one, and declared himself the winner.
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