this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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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.
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.
It's also an issue with Reddit/Lemmy though, there's a good reason why old forums have long, in depth discussions and all alternatives don't, people have to keep recreating discussions on subjects because they don't get bumped to the top even if they're popular.
I think part of that is that most forums have terrible search functionality.
Searching reddit via google is a meme for a reason.
Sure, that's an issue with all forums.
What I'm talking about is on Reddit and similar platforms unless you already replied to a discussion and someone replies to you directly you don't know that the discussion keeps going.
On forums you see the discussion getting bumped and if you ask a question by creating a new thread and it's already covered in an existing thread, people will refer you to it and you can continue adding to an ongoing discussion instead of the Reddit solution of being referred to a previous discussion that can't be expanded because no one will know if you ask for more info in it.
Just look at ADVRider for example, thousands of pages of discussion on motorcycle models that haven't been in production for over 10 years, that's a shit load of knowledge all in the same place!
Because lots of people fucked spez