I’m glad they’re leaving the old site, but Discord serves different purposes and isn’t a replacement. I’d recommend they start a Lemmy community.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.
The new generation of Internet users simply does not search. Watch this exasperating behaviour grow exponentially with all the AI bots, GPT whatnots and LLM shenanigans.
Zoomers overall can’t use computers, they grew up with phones and apps. Everything has to be handed to them in a closed off environment.
Revanced did this and it's infuriating. I just hop in once in a while and ask the same dumb question because I can't be arsed to scroll up 200 posts to find the answer; just to underscore this point.
Thought the same when I was reading this, weird they wouldn't migrate here, unless they are unaware of the Fediverse
I must admit I’m quite surprised more subs that are closing shop these days aren’t at least attempting to move to Lemmy. It’s as if most of the mods are completely unaware of - or, for some unknown reason, are avoiding - the fediverse.
I had no idea this place existed until about 2 weeks ago. It's really not common. Non of my friends have any idea what lemmy is when I tell them I quit reddit
Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn't anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?
Yeah def not a good replacement for micro blogging. It’s almost impossible to catch up Discord even with slow mode on.
I find Lemmy cool. Hope more people leave Reddit for it and we can rebuild a decentralized place no one company can control.
Plus, I've seen communities try this during the blackout. I didn't see the outcome for other communities, but on/r/Dota2 at least, people despised the suggestion because the discord already had an establish culture and that culture was basically shit.
So you were told to go take your activity and do it in a place of a different format, with different levels of topic focus, on a more personal level, in a place where you're basically an outsider butting in and the people there don't even really share an interest in discussing what you want (which was at the time a big tournament).
That's an astronomically terrible idea. And the worst part, not just did we have THIS website, we also had other forums (even the steam forum). I dunno what reddit mods have to be smoking to willfully ignore those in favor of a chatroom.
Discord is VERY different from link/thread aggregators/forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. I just don't understand subreddits that move to Discord.
/r/buildapcsales/ has an official Discord server now, and it just sucks compared to Reddit's format.
Also, Discord doesn't show up in search results for if people are trying to find an answer for something. And the search in the Discord servers sucks for this kind of thing as well.
Elaborating on /r/buildapcsales specifically with earlier comment:
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord actually has "Forum" channels that work like Reddit. You can create posts and search for them. So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
Not a fan of them moving to Discord instead of Lemmy, but anyway, fuck Reddit.
I didn't know about Forum channels, thanks for the heads-up. Are they crawled by search engines, though? I feel like with people deleting their reddit posts and moving to discord, it's already becoming a lot harder to find information online.
They cannot be crawled by search engines, unfortunately. Information online is going scarse.
Considering you don't find Discord server logs on Google I'd say: No.
Discord is its own thing.
Google results have been down the drain for years, the only reasonable results I found were by appending reddit or site:reddit.com. Now even that is gone :-/
So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
I am part of some Discord servers that utilizes this. Downside is that it doesn't have comment threads which might be one of the things that made Reddit popular. Also, because Discord is more meant to use for chatting, people type a lot of non-productive stuff that you have to go through instead of filtering from top/best comments. Servers that have slow mode turned on (can only send a message every # of mins) to help still has this issue as well.
They probably already know how to use Discord, so they think that it's easier to migrate their community to a service that they already understand vs. researching an alternative, learning how it works, and then trying to migrate their community.
Also, a lot of their members are probably on Discord already, so you don't have to try to convince them to sign up for a new service on top of everything else I mentioned earlier.
Discord prevented 3rd party clients before it was cool.
If the objective is to avoid being forced to accept changes to software you use.. why choose another person with the same power over you rather than free software?
Same story with Twitter users going to Meta's Threads instead of Mastodon. Most people don't see privacy online as an important matter because it's non-tangible for them. They go with the "safe/popular" option only for the story to repeat itself later...
Because nobody really cares about free as in freedom. Speaking in hyperbole, of course, but you step outside of our tech savvy bubble for just a moment and it feels that way very quickly. As far as they're concerned, Facebook is free. Threads is free. Switching from twitter to threads is just switching from one shitty free thing to another free thing that they think will be less shitty. Of course it's less shitty now, they want users. Mastodon? Pleroma? Seems kinda confusing, what's a server? Is FB a big server? Yeah... Free software alternatives have some PR problems to overcome at the moment. Now if there could be a new thing, a killer app, that was free? That would be insane.
I personally just don't get Discord and find it very annoying when it's the only means to communicate about something. And it certainly doesn't feel like a good replacement for Reddit due to the many reasons mentioned in this thread.
Because everyone knows that live chat rooms are exactly like message forums with content that can be voted up and down.
Hot take but this is worse than them just staying on Reddit.
Is this really a hot take? Discord is awful for anything but active discussions in the moment. Trying to retrieve any information from the past on a Discord server is infinitely worse than even Reddit's (commonly mocked) search function.
Discord is just a very different platform compared to Reddit. Personally I feel like Discord is amazing to stay connected with friends and other small communities. But it's simply not made for large communities the way Reddit is. Or was.
I would disagree on the grounds that this will functionally just break up the community, which is the best outcome. People will get bored and move on to the next thing, and both reddit and discord will lose.
Discord is not an appropriate replacement for Reddit.People are only saying it is because it's popular.
Discord is terrible for being able to go back and see shared knowledge.
I don't understand why some are migrating to discord, it is not a reddit alternative in any way shape or form
Protesting a walled garden blocking third party apps, by moving to a walled garden that never allowed third party apps, is one of the stupidest things I've seen on reddit.
Not only is Discord a bad replacement for Reddit, it is another monolithic platform struggling to find a business model. The enshitification of Discord is real, and is going to get worse.
Haha. Why though? What's the point?
Out of the frying pan into the fire I guess.
We need a way to mirror Discord to the web so it can be searched.
Seriously. A firmware I use only really uses discord to communicate. It's near impossible to find fixes for anything on there.
Huh, literally never seen that sub in the 5 years I was on Reddit that I can recall
Moving from one company that monetizes you to another. Not the brightest idea.
from bad to worse
May as well leave Reddit for IRC. Completely different purposes. Shame.
Ugh, I don't know why but I find Discord incredibly confusing to use. I've joined plenty of different communities for game mods and android development and I can never find anything that I'm looking for. The UI is so busy and anything useful that gets posted is quicky pushed out of the way for comments. I really don't understand how a reddit community would be able to move there in the first place.
Yeh discord is an absolute mess imo. As soon as there are any decent number of people it just becomes like a bloody twitch stream chat.
It’s a chat app, not a forum or Reddit replacement. I wish people would stop suggesting it as one.
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