Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum? With the Reddit blackout, I see plenty of communities redirecting their members to their Discord. But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine. Why not use a forum-like solution like Discourse? |
But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.
There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.
Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.
The functionality of the www also changed quite a bit over the years. If we could do the same with the other clients and protocols it would be quite the something.
edit: How is it that all desktop apps had to morph into web based apps while with phone apps it is the other way around? It cant both be right.
Usenet was created before the web was created so you can use a newsgroups app to access it if you don't want to use Google Groups.
Presumably they can also be indexed, but I'm not sure at all.
That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a proper KB.
Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk there.
And they missed so many features like a mobile app and notifications. And a lot of things that Discord offered.
Perhaps the difference is that I don't typically start technical discussions - instead, I search for prior ones, which 99% of times solves my problem faster than any chat would.
My biggest complaint with forums is the lack of reply indentation.
Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new messages etc.
And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users.
I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.
That wasn’t what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time chat where there’s no easy way to search through history.
To me, a move from reddit/forums to Discord is akin to a move from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.
Because it's serverless *badum tss*
> i need help lol
That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.
This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock.
Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.
It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.
Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451
Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.
Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them.
A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.
Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.
The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.
Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)
Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.
The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything.
This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too.
I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.
Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others later on, so they can re-read prior information.
Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.
Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.
No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling.
Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up.
Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.
Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.
I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.
A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.
Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use.
If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).
With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.
I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that).
This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.
The two things needed to break that network effect are:
1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content
2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)
It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum.
It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.
OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow. Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only widely-accepted providers.
Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism for independent forums and reduced signup fatigue.
That said, IRC was an information black hole in just the same way Discord is, for the same reasons. In my personal experience, running an official channel alongside the official community mailing list was a huge PITA, as the very existence of that IRC channel required constant oversight and regular reminders of its subservient/non-binding role, as otherwise it would quickly end up with the whole community being taken over by a small group of people who had too much free time, and therefore could coordinate everything amongst themselves on IRC, in near real-time.
You could call it "OODA loop mismatch" - IRC and Discord run through their OODA loops an order of magnitude faster than mailing lists and discussion boards, and as a result, unless actively prevented, they take over the community and cut out people who can't keep pace.
I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a real loss for the web.
However.
Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right patterns/etc to hook people.
Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.
Arguably, it works less than more traditional forums though (a la Reddit). The fact that web search isn't supported means that users will keep asking the same questions. Searching for topics is harder too (as it's a long line of intertwined topics).
I moderate a room and see this a lot, so...
Like, tell me the last time a user who came in for support actually used the search bar. I'll wait, lol...
Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.
Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.
Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?
There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit/discord accounts though
Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.
The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.
LLMs also excel in this area.
1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won't bother.
> But discord is far from a real knowledge base
I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.
However, specific niches of PC gaming are a different thing. There's a myriad of subreddits focused on narrow things like assembling gaming PCs, evaluating GPUs, playing a particular game, modding a particular game, etc. Many of those have a knowledge-generating nature, and among them plenty are maintaining Wiki pages, so that valuable knowledge is not lost (and so that the same questions aren't being asked a hundred times a day).
In general, this is the case with many (most?) subreddits focused on topics that have a knowledge component - be it a hobby like woodworking, a specific diet, a support group for specific mental issue, etc. Where tools for it are present, people maintain knowledge bases, for their own reference as well as to let newbies get up to speed without flooding the group with questions.
Maybe to subreddit moderators but to reddit admins and executives and stakeholders, they see it as a major plus that reddit is an ever growing and indexed knowledge base.
The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.
I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.
Slack was popular before Discord.
I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve.
More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.
Technical systems that we need help with are always complete garbage, users are clueless/eternal September, spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and providing high-quality answers for free.
Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over, previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible.
Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site' posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-driven oversight, etc..
The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell.
But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.
There's a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don't need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to "catch up" via a side-channel.
It's just too convenient.
Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.
I think Discourse is fine for what it is, but it's less OK to be a siloed forum in 2023 than it was in 2013. Yes, I'm aware federated forums are just reinventing Usenet, but there was a good idea there we lost sight of in the web era.
We're talking about a BBS. We solved the tech problem forty years ago.
Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit?
If Reddit didn't need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn't pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.
This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.
They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.
At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.
Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.
I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Here's an example community:
LOL
Also: moving the community from an open discussion board to a closed chat strongly favors the most active participants - i.e. those who are dedicated enough or otherwise have nothing better to do with their days than to actively participate. It's not a problem if the "community" is just a bunch of friends and regulars shitposting. It starts to be a problem when large open source projects move from open boards to closed chats, as they effectively shut off anyone who has a day job, kids, or... well anything else to do, tech or otherwise.
Also: lack of (or bad) indexing and search affects not just outsiders, but community members themselves: it's not just that some rando can't find the fruits of your discussion via Google search - it's also you who can't find it one month later.
I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're interesting) (2) forget about them forever.
Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals from other sites or happy accidents. I rarely join a community simply to lurk on it.
I'd say it's the opposite. Every new message is not new, valuable information. 99% of users are saying useless stuff and people interacting daily are only saying useless stuff that doesn't matter. People using reddit as a knowledge base do still contribute and someone engaged in that subject matter by googling it is more likely to be interested in that subject matter and participate in the community that they've found. Communities are killing their discoverability and turning into a closed-off echo chamber and keeping only their useless users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 ( 19 hours ago )
Should've asked for a million dollar...
Anyone who knows the values of past forums and thinks Discord is in any way an equivalent hasn't used both properly before.
Discord is easier to moderate the same way a chatroom is easier to moderate than a bulletin board at any scale.
Depends on the community. In a gaming community, for instance, having low barrier information means you're not stuck explaining things yourself to people who aren't in the same discords as you.
We went a step further on the iRacing community discord and wrote a bot that will search that channel and spit out answers.
…because users will nearly always just ask a FAQ instead of reading one.
Counterpoint: selection bias. Most of the people who have a question are the ones who failed to find the answer on the Internet. Chat is good for them, but if chat is the only thing that's left, then much more people will have no choice but to either join the chat and ask questions that could've been trivially answered with a search, or just ignore whatever it is your community is doing/promoting/supporting.
> They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.
Counterpoint: that's only if you're lucky and happen to ask the question when right people are present, willing, and not busy with an ongoing conversation. Otherwise, you'll be spending unpredictable amount of time trying to ensure your question gets seen or answered. And that happens for any question, regardless of how many times it was asked and answered before. Tiring and inefficient.
> Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.
Exactly. If. That's a big if for smaller communities - and for larger ones, the question becomes if anyone notices your question in the flood of ongoing conversations.
> The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.
It's kind of the polar opposite of Discord, or even Reddit - the experience is bad for participants, but great for passer-bys looking for already-written answers to already-asked questions.
Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted? 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close the tab and get on with their life.
Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very soon.
Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its Experts Exchange killer website consortium.
Also, the great fun of llms is going on youtube and watching content creators accuse other content creators of cheating and using llms to write their scripts, even if they may just be using it as a research tool to round up preliminary information.
If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)
That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.
The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope.
What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die.
On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread:
> I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.
That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.
No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.
> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.
It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).
But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.
It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.
The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.
Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.
I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.
It makes me wonder about the future of the content producers though since that AI is not looking at ads.
Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage with any chat-based communities, because from experience I know that
- I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a time,
- If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing or caring about, and
- It stopped being sustainable around the time I started working full-time in the earnest.
I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield no insight, and the problem still remains something I need to solve - only then I'll bother with Slack/Discord, as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the question several times until I do it in the right timezone so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just from thinking about it.
And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people. Also, when in the process I read something interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that same place a week or month later, and still find that thing I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing or broken search.
Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to be an outsider looking to learn something or start to participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby groups moving to Discord - or worse, Whatsapp groups - there's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the thing it's worth it.
This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.
That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star Trek subs: https://startrek.website/c/daystrominstitute
Thanks for posting the link. I am aware of the current location of /r/DaystromInstitute, and registered on that Lemmy instance already - but to reinforce my point, I actually learned about it thanks to someone posting that link on HN a few days ago, randomly, in the middle of the Reddit blackout discussion thread. Much like you posting it here, which will hopefully help some other interested people find it.