Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it's a crime

Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord's doors.

It's because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.

Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it's relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.

It makes sense, but it's sad nonetheless.

Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently "migrated" their Github discussions to Discord... I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!

Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.

All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.

I use it, but it's basically "Free Ventrilo but not as shit." I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.

It wastes everyone's time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don't have instant access to answers

What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?

What printer is this so I can avoid it?

There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.

I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.

No, I don't want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.

I mean, it's not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.

And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it's not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.

Looking at you, Our Summer Car -_-

Us the 90s kids grew up with the idea of 'internet as a library', which means websites are treated as books or magazines inside the shelves, that serve as repositories. We still have to read, but we were also used to it.

Perhaps it's a generational shift, but nowadays 'internet as an assistant' approach is gaining over, which means the search bar (whichever it happens to be from) is treated as a search engine, and user directly inputs a semantic question expecting it to be answered. Users don't expect to read, and aren't expected to. Advertisement space is far more important.

When you think of that way, the idea of having a chatroom instead of proper support forum start making sense, even if I dread this idea and prefer proper text.

And the people asking basic questions probably don't want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.

And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it's going. Further people who aren't deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.

Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.

It's free*, insanely easy to set up, you don't have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there's a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.