this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Stop using Discord if you care for the internet. Seriously, Discord is the internet but privatized. It’s the precursor of the future of the internet that capitalists want. Access only available if you login. Search is useless for anything older than a week. Data not accessible to search engines, even on public servers. Need to use their bloated (web)app. Charges for basic functions. Stop 👏 using👏 Discord👏 What is wrong with good old forums.
And Twitter is going the same direction as Discord.
But now many projects put their community on a server discord. The information isn't indexed since it is private, so if you search for the same issue that was solved on the discord channel, you won't find any answer.
That is not really a Discord problem, but a project problem.
I simply refuse to use any project that uses discord as their knowledge base.
Especially stop using Discord as a support forum for your software project. That's the most daft thing ever conceived.
GitHub is a great place for this. They have an Issues and Discussions tab for repos. Zero reason to use Discord if you use GitHub already for your project.
does Codeberg have these features? if the jump to free internet is going to be made, do it all in one trip.
Personally I'm ok with discord for private social communication, imo not everything needs to be archived or searchable. But there's people/devs who use discord as a knowledge repository and that's the recipe for disaster imo.
The recipe: Old problem questions, solutions, how to guides, ... All hidden behind a login wall and if you do get in, then you still have to contend with the crappy search engine, so you might just as well ask the probably already answered question yet again. And one day it's probably all going poof or behind some kind of paywall. Basically also what quora has been trying to do for years, but I don't think any people with more than a few braincells complain about quora being hard to access, since most of their content stinks anyhow.
yeah this is mostly my gripe with discord. Many groups, especially game dev groups, use it to share knowledge with the public, yet that knowledge quickly becomes buried and virtually inaccessible.
I don't like discord, but it is a MASSIVE improvement over all the meta-garbage. Stop using Facebook, instagram, whatsapp and really also twitter first. Discord is the smaller evil compared to those.
Yes forums have their application and are better than discord for a lot of things, but discord is really more a competitor to IRC-chats with a focus on life discussion, rather than long-living content. And it isn’t discords fault if some people completely misuse it as something that it really isn’t trying to be.
Which means that it works in a regular browser, which is so much better than a lot of other infrastructure that is increasingly mobile-app only.
Does it though? It charges for certain emojis and the like, but that is honestly a MUCH more healthy business model than what a lot of other places on the internet are doing. And if you just want to use it as intended, you really aren’t missing out on anything.
I’m really not saying that it is great, but I wonder whether some of the people ranting about this may get signal boosted by meta to distract from their even worse cesspool…
eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse...
they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum...of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible "last message first" sorting, and terrible UI that doesn't do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at...
so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it's not an exception...
I use a "jump to top" plugin specifically to make discord threads more usable. I'd still rather use an actual forum or even reddit over these poorly implemented features.
People deciding to use threads as forums is not Discord's fault.
I get that it's stealing your data, what I don't get is why it has to be accessible by search engines. First of all, most servers are private because they would rather be that way, they don't want anyone joining or viewing the content. Second of all, the big search engines would have had the ability to gather all the available data and train AIs, give it to advertisers etc. I don't want that. I don't know what the Chinese are doing with the data, but I know what Google and Bing would be doing with it. Not everything on the internet has to be available to everyone, a lot of people want privacy. I get that ideally there shouldn't be accounts with personal information required, but the rest I don't agree with. Reddit and twitter are meant to be public, everyone on such social media is aware that anyone can see their comments and posts. But discord serves another purpose, it's for private, closed communities.
I also don't see what basic feature is charged. Everything charged has to do with functions that require a lot of storage/server space or stupid stickers and emojis. None of that is a basic feature and for the former I get why someone would charge.
I am not defending discord, I'd rather not use it, I know it aggressively steals our data and they probably plan on enshittifying it a lot more once they've taken out the competition completely, but that criticism I mentioned is not valid imo.
you shouldn't use it because it's a black hole for information.
anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.
when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.
communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.
think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.
so many communities have already just... disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.
that's why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.
it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.
it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can't show you the contents, so you don't even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they've already been answered, and on and on the list goes.
discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!
there's a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!
so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don't talk to each other, or don't even realize they exist at all!
and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque "search" and "discover" algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.
it's top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.
discord is the bane of online social groups!
and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there's no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!
I would dump discord the second I can get somewhere I can do voice coms and stream my screen with my friends. That is the only thing I use it for anyway.
I agree with everything you said except search. I've found search to be pretty good. Yesterday I found my comment from 3 years ago on a server.
"Why are you still using it?" Buddy I don't want either but it's the old story of "most people are using it", plus it's one of my ways to cope with loneless.
I suspect Discord will die within months, till then I'll keep using it..
Yes I understand the irony of that statement.
I mean, search isn't a fantastic feature, but it does work. So this sounds like a you problem, not a Discord problem.