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Discord != Documentation (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 301 points 1 year ago
[-] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 115 points 1 year ago

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

[-] SamsonSeinfelder@feddit.de 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] EmbeddedEntropy@lemmy.ml 30 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Damage@feddit.it 18 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] hardypart@feddit.de 206 points 1 year ago

I fucking hate Discord. It's a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can't google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can't grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.

[-] ebc@lemmy.ca 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

The fuckers deleted the discussions!

This is a very Facebook-like thing to do. They are openly hostile towards everyone, including their users and advertisers. Shit stain of a company that constantly makes the worst decisions.

[-] HKayn@dormi.zone 36 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] squaresinger@feddit.de 71 points 1 year ago

The problem is discoverability. And that's where I don't get why anyone in their right mind would use Discord for stuff like that.

Say, you have Github, a forum or even a subreddit for your project.

Somebody asks a question, you answer it.

Somebody else has the same question. Either they are intelligent enough to find it themselves or they ask and you just link your old answer. Done.

On Discord, it's basically impossible to find an answer that is more than two screens full of posts ago. So you have to keep answering the very same questions all the time.

[-] hardypart@feddit.de 41 points 1 year ago

That's the exact point. It's not only that you can't google shit, even within Discord itself it's incredibly hard to find the relevant information. BTW, did I already say that I fucking hate Discord?

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[-] Cube6392@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

Live chat is a good choice for friend and making urgent decisions in software. I've been watching projects more and more use it for their discussions, issue trackers, and Q&A solutions and it just makes me sad. Live chat isn't good for anything that will need to be revisited in the future. But still I see more and more communities moving to live chat solutions for their whole community.

And that's not to get into any of the problems with Discord specifically. I don't love giving control over community hosting to any individual company. We've already seen the results several times. Google groups? Facebook groups? Reddit subreddits? All have demonstrated the problems with hosting your communities on a singular platform. Google groups is straight up gone. Facebook groups require you to sell a small part of your soul to participate. Reddit has been outright abusive towards their user base lately. Discord is vulnerable to all these problems

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[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 31 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] TwistyLex@discuss.tchncs.de 97 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 60 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] freeman@lemmy.pub 16 points 1 year ago

You can even include them in your version control system and allow others to suggest changes

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[-] skullone@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] snowbell@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

What printer is this so I can avoid it?

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[-] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 81 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] b3nsn0w@pricefield.org 28 points 1 year ago

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

[-] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 55 points 1 year ago

Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platform

[-] TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com 47 points 1 year ago

Requests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶

[-] dan@upvote.au 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] nx2@feddit.de 31 points 1 year ago

It's still a shit ruling. Back in the day they just blocked all .io sites so you couldn't play agar.io and so on. But all the IT sites we used were also blocked by that. So we had to go and ask the guy for every single one until he grew sick of it and opened it again

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[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 year ago

I'm 50 and I have a 23 year old "RTFM" t-shirt.

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[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Kids these days:

StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice.. Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there's still someone who hasn't gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.

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[-] salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 35 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it's just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I'm really interested in and I can't say it doesn't work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??

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[-] peter@feddit.uk 27 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Cube6392@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago

Very complex questions should be discussed on traditional forums.

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[-] philluminati@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.

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[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] narnach@feddit.nl 40 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago

I don’t care for the real-time communication aspect of it. In fact i find it unusable.

Am I supposed to just sit there and read random conversation and wait for a point to jump in?

Seems like it takes too much effort.

[-] P1r4nha@feddit.de 20 points 1 year ago

I mean, that is what IRC chat rooms were back in the day. Or any public chatroom from the 90s.

Realtime communication has its part. We use Slack at work all the time. But searching Slack is a horrible way of replacing missing documentation.

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[-] Eccitaze@yiffit.net 15 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Mandy@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This applys to so much more than just programming now, sadly

[-] vile@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 year ago

Hate this so much, very much into 3d printing (voron right now) and huge parts of the community are on discord it's just an absolute pain to use

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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
1089 points (99.0% liked)

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