This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.
Discord is great for what is is. It just shouldn’t be used for anything other than some chat and some voice.
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.
Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it’s a crime
Does Discord now offer the ability to save/fav comments to find them again? When I used it the last time, i was amazed how everything just scrolls by without a possibility to hold on to something.
You can search through the whole history of a channel
Since being forced to use this terrible communication method in my teams and groups, I’ve been copy-and-pasting good Q&A threads into text files that I push to an enterprise GitHub repo for perma-store. At least that way other engineers and myself can either use GitHub’s search or clone the repo locally, grep it, and even contribute back with PRs. Sometimes from there, turn into a wiki, but that’s pretty rare. My approach is horribly inefficient and so much stuff is still lost, but it’s better than Discord’s search or dealing with Confluence.
Hear hear!
I too find my garbage heap notes file checked into GitHub to be better than confluence.
But I hate confluence so much I should probably bring it up at therapy sometime…
Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platformRequests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶
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.
I’m 50 and I have a 23 year old “RTFM” t-shirt.
I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.
What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?
I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.
The instructions on the Web are pretty good, unless you start messing with Tons of mods, but thats your own fault.
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
Why would any sane developer want to use this system to “document” their project? Written docs have worked well for a million years and there’s no need to change them.
Also “I’m so sick of this question” well then put the answer somewhere that’s indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.
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.
Yeah I can’t stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub
There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
Agreed. Trying to find answers for questions probably already asked on Discord is impossible.
The only real alternatives to Discord is Matrix and Revolt. I am on both and there are a good number of people on there but they aren’t too active. Wish they would be more popular and widely used
I think you’re missing the point here. The solution to the “documentation on a chatroom” problem is not putting documentation on another chatroom.
One wouldn’t be too wrong to point at similarities between cancer and Discord in how it quickly takes over different systems (e.g. issue tracking, discussions, Q&A, documentation) and replaces them with a single non-functional thing (chat).
But, to play the devil’s advocate, Discord seems to have some kind of a forum functionality, however I’ve never encountered those Forum Channels myself.
I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.
RTFD, or something like that.
I think you mean RTFM. But in this case it’s WTFM so I can RTFM.
I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers
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.
I don’t think GitHub is social enough or the right tool to address bugs, talk about issues, or completely missing - ask for expertise. It’s not even democratic enough and done in such a way that makes what to work on clear at times.
Some code is still more art than work or science but still there is a notion that maybe if there was a better tool than GitHub there would be no need for a discord.
I see a lot of things that have a discord community.
Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?
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.
