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Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app
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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don't want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
Yeah, it really bugs me that it's basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don't reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it's about 50-100 ish people interested in it. But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
And there is so much idle chatter to scroll through. I shouldn't have to scan through months of jokes and memes to get updated.
Heck, even with a handful of people anything longer form feels like a chore. I've been the admin of a tiny friends only server for a good few years and even in there it feels hard to keep track sometimes when there's more than a single laser focused topic.
That's a moderation issue. The servers I have in have channels per topic and quite aggressively redirect any offtopic convo's into the General Chat.
I mean stuff like parallel conversations on the same topic, a lot of it is probably on my ability to parse it all
And every gamer and his dog have their own, so communities are adhoc and lackluster. It does the opposite of what forums used to do.
for real, my local rhythm games community is split among 3 different servers (that I know of) organising meet ups is a challenge nowadays
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and found it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I'm happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I'll give it another go from time to time
Edit: grammar
Imo it's decent at what it set out to be: user friendly, painless realtime chatting, with some voice/video calling to top it up. That said, they keep adding questionable bloat to try and upsell Nitro subs so honestly I can only see it worsening as time goes on.
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Jup, it's terrible. Where information goes to die. I wish devs would not use it as much as they do.
You nailed it.
Ya this is true and that sucks and I don't see a way to change it. Would be nice to go back to get all this info back on forms
Back on forums so its indexable, so you can find the solution if you have the same problem.
Don't even get me started on people actively chatting in public discord servers
It takes seconds to ask a question and receive an answer in discord. It's entirely likely that my problem was never discussed on a forum post from 10 years ago with 15 pages to sift through.
It takes seconds to ask a question and receieve an answer on a webforum to.
for the same reasons. The person was sitting there and can reply immediately.
and you dont get an instant reply for the same reason.
the person wasnt sitting there.
I'm always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can't imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they're trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
It's an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers, voice chats, kitchen sink ....
I just can't force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it's so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
Happened with doujin style, it used to be a great site to search for indie albums but then they moved to discord and now it's a nightmare to browse unless you already know what you are looking for.
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
EDIT: don’t get why the downvotes. It’s a question, not a statement.
We call them websites.
Oh, you don’t know what SaaS stands by?
I do, it's exactly what a website hosting is. We got hundreds of frameworks to do all those things that don't include signing your soul with blood to a cartoonishly evil corp or billionaire. Paying with privacy is not mandatory.
Good! Now that you know, can you answer my question and tell me an alternative?
Good point, and I think there isn't a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.
They have forums within discord. Searching takes moments.
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It's not an improvement IMHO.
Discord does not allow you to search well. Discord's search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).