this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:

  1. person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let's check out the community"
  2. screenshot with the text

    Community
    The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat.

  3. hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
  4. person looking behind with the text "nevermind".
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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 246 points 7 months ago (16 children)

Discord makes for a bad forum because it's not a forum! Stop using it as one! It's good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you're using it as a public forum you're using the wrong tool!

[–] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 81 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This, exactly.

Discord sucks at what it wasn't designed to do... Shocker. That doesn't make it bad.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 33 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I've seen, and buggy af. It's barely gotten any better too.

[–] thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago (10 children)

i mean, it's far from perfect, but as someone that's been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven't found it.

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[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They're entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.

Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its... fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.

The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds....

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[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 49 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me "this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it".

I left that server right away.

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[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 20 points 7 months ago (10 children)

They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won't use it regardless, due to privacy issues.

[–] lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can't show up in a search engine

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[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I'll never have a discord for a project because I don't want to answer the same questions over and over.

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[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 86 points 7 months ago (17 children)

I don't get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can't find anything, I can't tell what conversations are over, I can't figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it's completely devoid of anything of value, if it's too big everything of value gets buried.

I've tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.

[–] LilDumpy@lemmy.world 36 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.

Made me never want to step into discord again.

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[–] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It's great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I've always found it painful

But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so...

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 7 months ago

Yeah. My D&D group uses it for audio and video feeds and a little bit of between session chat. I appreciate how good the audio settings are.

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[–] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.

The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.

It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 64 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I don't care if people use Discord to talk, it's only when that's where the documentation, faq, etc. is.

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 24 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.

I would take a busy forum any day.

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[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 61 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (12 children)

I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.

The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.

I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.

The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.

I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).

This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don't understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to "discord channel organizer brain" kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when "everything" can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.

It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?

Did I mention I hate discord?

[–] Soggy@lemmy.world 29 points 7 months ago (4 children)

I think discord works for up to perhaps a dozen people. Big servers are pointless to engage with, they flow too quickly to be useful.

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[–] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 57 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Discord seems okay for chat, but not good for information that is going to be retained and indexed. Isn't this already known? Why is this news?

[–] TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world 27 points 7 months ago

I guess because people still use it. It might be obvious, but it isn't common knowledge. All people are ignorant about most things. There's just too much to know and not enough time to learn it unless you're forced.

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[–] femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 43 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You ditch discord because it's bad for organizing projects

I ditched discord because it's proprietary

We are not the same

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[–] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 42 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Discord is only convenient for those already using it everyday. For everyone else this is a high barrier to entry, especially when you actually care what software you use.

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[–] bleistift2@feddit.de 37 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I can’t ditch discord. They won’t even let me in via browser because I “failed the captcha”.

(Not that they’d tell me this somewhere in their UI, this is the server response.)

[–] lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 7 months ago (5 children)

my failed attempts at registering on discord:

  • use temporary email: locked out
  • use real email with VPN: locked out
  • use real email without VPN and Firefox: locked out
  • use real email, no VPN, le lion(brave): registered. join a community. community requires phone verification. deny it. locked out.

every damn time they require a phone number.

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[–] Smacks@lemmy.world 31 points 7 months ago

The transition to Discord for communities really sucks. It's impossible to find information now that everything is gated to unsearchable servers.

[–] fastandcurious@lemmy.world 28 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I am OOL, why so much discord hate lately? I have never used it…

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 37 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (11 children)

Discord is a real-time communication system that also has a built-in history feature. This type of communication promotes conversational interactions, which are really hard to search for complete ideas about problems and their solutions, and those solutions are not indexed by internet search engines, which makes it extremely difficult for people to discover useful information on the platform even with the available history.

The asynchronous nature of web based forums promotes communication in more complete ideas (though this is clearly not always how communication happens) and they are indexable by search engines.

Just look at how people discover solutions in Reddit posts so frequently when searching Google, but nobody finds solutions in chat logs, even IRC which has been around for decades and is often archived in a search indexable site where chat logs are posted.

Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.

That's the beauty of it. Tomorrow, it will be.

(When an AI copy/pastes your answer to someone asking about choosing the correct iphone power brick, or something.)

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[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 26 points 7 months ago (4 children)

It would be nice if more people used Matrix. From my experience though it seems like not a lot of people check in on it regularly because the niche communities they follow are on Discord and even though bridges between Matrix and Discord do exist they are often neglected and fall of out sync.

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[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Worst example I've ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.

[–] supercritical@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago

Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you're redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 23 points 7 months ago (5 children)

My biggest issue with discord is that I'll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.

Even if I get to the notification, often I don't get it right away, and often I don't open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I'm left with no earthly idea why I'm in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.

When I'm actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I'm almost never actively in discord.

I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens.... Then I don't mind it so much. However, if I don't use discord all the time, then it's less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there's no chance I'll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.

DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.

To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are: Pros:

  • convenient (when in active use)
  • good voice chat
  • a lot of people use it Cons:
  • slow notifications
  • bad notification handling

I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don't have problems with it, since they're pretty much always on it. For someone who isn't always plugged into discord, it's a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don't really have any issues with it.

Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn't do voice, so there's some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you're taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.

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[–] FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago

I get frustrated with these platforms trying to turn into these 'do it all' applications. discord was fine before they started adding all the bullshit in everywhere. it was a great chat place with 'rooms' for different groups of people or friends. kinda like how spotify seems to be trying to morph into some social music sharing crap. i don't use spotify to be social, i use it to listen to fucking music.

[–] unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 19 points 7 months ago

Given that most of these projects are on GitHub, why not use the new GitHub discussions feature. MonoGame are ditching their forum in favour of it, because it's cheaper (free) and easier to maintain. Though they still have a discord for chatting about game development and progress on their games.

Discord has recently introduced a forum-like thing but it's not indexable by search engines and the built in search only works if you get the exact title. Basically rubbish.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago

Discord has done for reproducible support what panty hose has done for finger fucking.

[–] abraxas@sh.itjust.works 18 points 7 months ago (3 children)

There's a growingly popular javascript schema validation library I avoid like the plague because its author was a whiny child on reddit who would get into flamewars with a bunch of people and then suddenly delete all his comments.

There's a lot of reasons not to trust a library with an unstable Code Owner.

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[–] Octopus1348@lemy.lol 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)
[–] tron@midwest.social 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we've always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.

  1. USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
  2. Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
  3. Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
  4. Tencent Ownership
  5. General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.

So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I'd say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won't play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you're welcome on my server.

Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.

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[–] gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com 15 points 7 months ago

"Teams for Gamers"

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