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Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr have something in common and it's not good
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren't open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
Discord is like the worst source for knowledge anyones has ever used as such.
I regularly find myself searching for stuff where there is only a small community and when they use discord and you want to look something up, you can straight up look into the sourcecode because it helps just as much. It is really devastating to be in this situation and I would really like for people to just get rid of discord and use a real wiki or forum for this kind of stuff.
lol dude this is flat out wrong. Being able to ask active communitites things is useful to a lot of people. Have you ever even heard of IRC?????
What do you think happened before google had everything indexed?
It's useful to chat it out with people sometimes especially when you are all collectively centered around a single topic.
I've learned mass amounts of things through IRC and often times they don't just give you the answer they give you clues to help you figure it out.
Discord will be similar for many people. It's not necessary to archive every last bit of information. It's OK to talk to real people who enjoy talking about said topic and letting them guide you real time.
Oh yeah, it's always cool to ask randos if a mod also runs on Linux only to be told by 3 people that they don't know and then to have someone change the topic.
Wouldn't want that in an indexable thread in some forum where you might find it by it's title and also see answers directly and not wade through 5 weeks of 17 topic only to find out that no one got it to work.
And yes, there was a time before search engines, but you cannot possibly suggest it was better than now. Now we have better tools and should use them.
I'm not saying it's better my point is there is shit loads of that going on since forever. It's not hurt anything and some people prefer to chat it out because searching can also get you a load of nonsense. Guarantee you got your answer. It's mostly super niche communities. If properly run they have searchable forums of a FAQ.
The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It's the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn't need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn't even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it's not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That's just one place, but it's very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.
For me, the problem is not discords real time chat functionality (e.g. like IRC).It's that communities are using it as their only source of information and getting rid of wiki pages and support forums.
There are many open source projects and communities whose documentation lives entirely in Discord. This makes finding information much harder as search engines don't have the information indexed so you resort to asking on chat and hoping someone replies or using Discord's horrible search functionality (it's very basic and has a poor UI)