by lnalx on 6/19/23, 1:09 PM with 137 comments
But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine.
Why not use a forum-like solution like Discourse?
by marginalia_nu on 6/19/23, 3:40 PM
This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock.
Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.
by cowsup on 6/19/23, 2:58 PM
Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others later on, so they can re-read prior information.
Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.
Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.
by ksec on 6/19/23, 3:13 PM
No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling.
Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up.
Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.
by samtho on 6/19/23, 3:52 PM
Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.
I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.
A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.
by tikkun on 6/19/23, 3:26 PM
Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use.
If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).
With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.
I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that).
This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.
The two things needed to break that network effect are:
1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content
2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)
by hombre_fatal on 6/19/23, 2:37 PM
It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum.
It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.
by whalesalad on 6/19/23, 3:48 PM
by Klonoar on 6/19/23, 1:12 PM
I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a real loss for the web.
However.
Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right patterns/etc to hook people.
Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.
by egypturnash on 6/19/23, 9:10 PM
Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.
Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.
Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?
by barbariangrunge on 6/19/23, 4:31 PM
There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit/discord accounts though
by spywaregorilla on 6/19/23, 3:25 PM
Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.
The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.
LLMs also excel in this area.
by Daegalus on 6/19/23, 3:49 PM
1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won't bother.
by LordKeren on 6/19/23, 2:36 PM
> But discord is far from a real knowledge base
I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.
by bitshiftfaced on 6/19/23, 5:29 PM
The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.
by gsmo on 6/19/23, 3:47 PM
by zelifcam on 6/20/23, 7:05 PM
I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.
by re-thc on 6/19/23, 1:28 PM
Slack was popular before Discord.
I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve.
More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.
by dusted on 6/20/23, 7:42 AM
There's a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don't need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to "catch up" via a side-channel.
It's just too convenient.
Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.
by altairprime on 6/19/23, 10:42 PM
by Solvency on 6/19/23, 3:01 PM
by bradgranath on 6/20/23, 4:39 AM
We're talking about a BBS. We solved the tech problem forty years ago.
Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit?
If Reddit didn't need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn't pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.
by razodactyl on 6/19/23, 3:06 PM
This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.
They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.
by braza on 6/19/23, 4:08 PM
At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.
by jerjerjer on 6/19/23, 3:59 PM
by ImAnAmateur on 6/20/23, 5:42 AM
by superkuh on 6/19/23, 3:23 PM
by taubek on 6/19/23, 4:16 PM
by stavros on 6/19/23, 3:30 PM
Presumably they can also be indexed, but I'm not sure at all.
by shortrounddev2 on 6/19/23, 5:01 PM
by MINIMAN10000 on 6/20/23, 10:00 AM
by frou_dh on 6/19/23, 2:32 PM
That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a proper KB.
by nicbou on 6/19/23, 10:44 PM
Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk there.
by meotimdihia on 6/20/23, 1:05 AM
And they missed so many features like a mobile app and notifications. And a lot of things that Discord offered.
by acedTrex on 6/19/23, 3:53 PM
by bhu1st on 6/20/23, 1:01 AM
by jrflowers on 6/19/23, 5:56 PM
by seydor on 6/20/23, 12:30 PM
by cft on 6/19/23, 11:09 PM
by SirMaster on 6/19/23, 7:20 PM
Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new messages etc.
And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users.
I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.
by nektro on 6/22/23, 12:05 AM
by nozzlegear on 6/19/23, 2:31 PM
by Marsymars on 6/19/23, 8:14 PM
To me, a move from reddit/forums to Discord is akin to a move from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.
by beardog on 6/19/23, 8:28 PM
by justsomehnguy on 6/19/23, 3:07 PM
Because it's serverless *badum tss*
by Buttons840 on 6/19/23, 6:39 PM
> i need help lol
That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.