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linuxmemes @lemmy.world lemmesay @discuss.tchncs.de

ditch discord!

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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  • Why so much hate post about discord lately? What's happened?

      1. This is not lately, it's been happening for a long time.

      2. Nothing in particular happened.

      3. I'm gonna explain the meme: Discord started as a gaming communication software, after some time they expanded and discord servers are not used just for gaming. This leads to some software projects being coordinated in discord servers. However, discord is not a tool designed for this purpose, and because of that, OP had the reaction of this meme.

      The disadvantages of discord when used as a community for software projects (as opposed to traditional forums, for example) are as follows (not an exhaustive list):

      • Most importantly, discord doesn't get indexed by search engines. So you can't just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear. Some say that if something is said in a discord server, it hasn't been said, because it's not findable. You have to know in which server to look for, and then use Discord's own searcher (which in my opinion is bad).
      • Conversations are just a flow of messages. Recently they introduced threads, which acts more like traditional forums, with an OP, title and answers. However, most people still just use the chat.
      • If you ask a question in a chat and nobody answers, people will just keep chatting and your question will be faded away, hidden by more recent messages.

      • Most importantly, discord doesn’t get indexed by search engines. So you can’t just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear.

        That's true. But also Google's algorithm has been circling the toilet for years now. So even if you were expecting a Stack Exchange esque reference to a problem in a Discord server, there's a much better chance that you'd get a bunch of SEO garbage inside the first couple of pages purely thanks to degradation in Google's internal optimization.

        If anything, I'd consider Discord's opaqueness a benefit, as it keeps a lot of the spamming and automated manipulations out of these spaces. A good channel will have a Git space associated with it pinned to the main feed. And an active community will often have its own Wiki or equivalent to help organize FAQs for new users.

        Its annoying in so far as its more transient than the older school repositories. But that's the direction the entire internet has been moving for the better part of a decade. Not really the fault of Discord.

296 comments