One of the stupidest trends of all time.
There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.
All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they’re all just as bad for it.
Forums are where you’ll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.
Where’s lemmy in regards to this?
Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it’s threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There’s only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don’t have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more “boomer hobbies” and it’s ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There’s car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you’re shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
In regards to the advrider comment, I don’t find those ridiculously long-running threads all that convenient even though they are very useful. In your example the WR250R thread could have multiple subtopics being discussed at once in the same thread which I find frustrating.
For example, one guy might ask about tires and while that’s being discussed another guy shows up asking about a big bore kit to make more power. Now there are two discussions happening at the same time and all I can do is view the thread chronologically. Then someone else shows up asking what oil everyone uses. Then someone new joins and says “Hey it’s not possible to go back and read through all 2300 pages in this thread, what GPS are you all using?”
Like sure it’s great that all the information is in that one thread but navigating through it only in chronological order can be super frustrating.
IRC at least you have text logs, but I agree.
we just need IRCv2 which should add chat history
How do you replicate a conversation like this in a IRC format?
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
I only want the documentation if you have to fax it to me
Whatever, Mr. Stallman.
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
Documentation is bad enough. But it’s worse when that’s the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.
If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn’t count.
What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.
If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it’s open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord
Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once
At least mods help mask all the other missing features
I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.
Discord is easily the better options among those choices.
I also can’t think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you’re just looking for a different thing. And that’s okay.
Discord didn’t, and still doesn’t, require a download. Easier for people to pick up and easier to use on locked down computers.
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for “free”, will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It’s been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it’s doing to indexable information and it’s only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight…
At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.
Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was “calls” and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.
I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it’s over complicated and feature creeped electron shite
You don’t see its incredible simplicity as an advantage? That’s crazy
Counterpoint
Counter-counterpoint: He did eat something off his foot in front of an audience.
Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.
Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.
Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.
Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
using discord for documentation is like using excel for a database
It’s way worse. At least Excel lets you do database-like stuff. Discord is unusable for long-form posts or any info you want to keep long term.
still worse They own everything you write on discord
Why censor the word “discord”?
How to install:
Step 1: git clone website
Step 2: run dependency install script
Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don’t have it? Well, I’m sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!
Step 3: Run " program name" and … “insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens”
Step 3 again: When you run it, get error “k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can’t fix this”
Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it’s 12 dependency hadn’t been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.
This is why I like Docker. It’s basically “works on my machine” as a service.
Similarly, I’m starting to really like dev containers. They’re Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.
I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.
There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it’s really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.
Maybe it’s a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.
I personally don’t like LaTeX for documentation because it doesn’t benefit much from advanced features of LaTeX, while being more difficult to read/write than Markdown.
Discord is great for building a community because it’s the defacto chat service for communities. It replaced IRC and does that quite well. Having a place to casually chat with people more invested in the project has its advantages.
Now I really dislike it if they think discord can replace a wiki. Iirc discord added a wiki-like feature a while ago and it’s terrible because it’s not indexable by search engines.
LaTeX produces PDFs, which are hard to read on small devices. Just write a website.
LaTeX can produce .html with links. It can litterally generate an entire documentation website.
best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what’s that? you’re looking for a fix to an issue you’re having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we’ve already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
I think we fixed that for someone a few months ago, maybe you can scroll back and find it. I think the guys handle was user-something, might have been around May…
Reading this made me feel a bit of anxiety
