[TimPC]

It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is bad if you want to create content for universal consumption but no one I know is truly using discord for that.

[toastal]

Pithy retort: that must be a parallel dimension to suggest Discord is good for privacy.

Letting ideas float around a chatroom is good but communities hopefully have motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity because we will lose them over time. Some places do a better job, but a lot of content is straight up locked out from the wider internet where users are required to give away credentials to a private American company just to get access to it; at least private American Reddit I could read without an account with answers to folks web searching for a quick solution. But we’re tech-savvy folk and know better, but it seems from even the Stack Overflow survey results yesterday that our industry is also trending in the wrong direction.

[Barrin92]

There's different notions of privacy. Discord isn't going to protect you from someone deliberately stalking your posting history, but it is more private in the sense that it is, first and foremost, comprised of communities who want to manage who participates. A Discord server is the equivalent of a local pub with a specific audience.

And in that context not being crawlable is very much a good thing because communities require spaces that are to some extent fenced off, nobody holds a meeting in a train station. In an age were publicly scrapable information becomes subject to automated surveillance or vacuumed up by AI systems it's not surprising and justifiable that people move to walled gardens.

Not to mention that a lot of discord chats are conversational. And the default for casual conversations is that they're ephemeral, for good reasons. When you have a chat in the analog world, you don't expect that to be scanned by everyone for posterity.

[TeMPOraL]

Sure. It's not a problem that people who want a casual chat with friends or interest groups use a platform for casual chatting. I say that even though I prefer the earlier world where everything was indexed and people liked to overshare on Facebook.

The problem is when you use Discord (or Slack, or IRC - yes, IRC is just as bad in this context) to run a community that's outward-facing. For example, when a large OSS project, or a foundation, decides to use Discord as its main support/hanging out channel. Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. Again, this is not about causal chats - your "offtopic" forum thread probably is better off being a Discord channel. The problem is when contributing to, or receiving support from, such community requires being active on a chat group.

Remember "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[0]? That seminal article from 1970s that, for some reason, just doesn't want to die? It was posted here just three days ago[1]. It actually talks about this. What it calls "elites" that naturally grow as an informal hierarchy in a group without a strong formal hierarchy - Discord, et al. are pretty much designed to create those. The people who are able and willing to keep up with the chat flow, following it all day every day, are the ones that become those "elite", and end up running the community.

--

[0] - https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097

[johnnyanmac]

>Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities.

depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project more of a strain than a collaborative effort.

----

I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. Its much more annoying to log on and read the day's messages, but the number of relevant messages may be in the dozens that take 10 minutes to skim, not thousands that takes a part time job to parse. But even then it makes sense; for those super large OS repos, there are in fact people doing it as part or full time jobs

[dmonitor]

Take a look at Zephyr RTOS, for instance. It's all behind a fucking discord. It's a pain in the ass compared to something like Nordic Semiconductor's Devzone. The fact that I have to join a tech support channel for my job with the same profile I use to join 18+ furry roleplay servers (discord requires a phone number that can receive texts and I don't have a work phone) is a sign that something here is a problem.

[johnnyanmac]

well yes, that's always an issue with popular social media. That's why I make sure my 18+ furry roleplay account is different from the professional one.

[TeMPOraL]

> I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush.

For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people".

Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least occasionally active on IRC (later Telegram), and 5 people generating 1000+ messages between 09:00 and 17:00 on every regular working day. By volume, 50% could be casual shitposting, 30% interesting technical conversations, and 20% something relevant to the community - but 100% of it was a bonding experience.

No surprise that the people generating most of the chat backlog volume were also seen as the "core" / most involved participants.

[johnnyanmac]

1000 messages in a work day sounds like a lot even for a decently popular game discord. That sounds like it goes beyond "active participants" and more like "eternally online" people.

You already made your choice, but there is something worth considering on if you even want to be a part of a group (even if you had all that free time). I find it interesting that this post came up later after I came back to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323888

[acomjean]

>motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity

I think there were some sensitive documents dumped from Discord (where noone noticed them for a good while) to the public internet. So I'd say there is some truth to it being semi-private. The "Discord Leaks".

https://wapo.st/3NvrkFk

Discord has its place, but its not generally great as a information sharing place.

[sweeter]

There are a few open-source projects that mirror the Discord help channels to a external website so that it is easily searchable. More people should do this in my opinion. Discord is extremely convenient and it is always very active, so naturally people will be drawn to it, but we should push for more alternatives like using matrix with a bridge to discord and indexers that mirror content to be more open and transparent. The problem is that its expensive and not everyone is capable of doing it easily, or they dont necessarily care or know why that's a good thing.

[monero-xmr]

Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.

[jazzyjackson]

I mean this was basically clubhouse which people loved until it grew large enough that they had to build out moderation tooling besides "kick this motherfucker out of the bar" (like automatically enforcing "if anyone talking in this bar personally blocked you, you're not allowed to enter the bar. Fine for a local dive, disastrous for larger rooms, imagine being banned from a conference because one person blocked you - they didn't even have to want to ban you from the conference, you're just auto-kicked from any room they enter !)

[toastal]

Except it’s often used in a way that goes beyond chitchat and bouncing ideas. I was pretty active in a programming community a few years ago, and then they decided to move official chat exclusively Discord which I disagree with on principle & was not going to create an account. Some (not all) decisions I would have previously expected to see on the forum got discussed and decided within Discord’s proprietary walls which cut some users out that previously were a part of the discussion.

[TeMPOraL]

It often happens unintentionally, and it poisons communities. Back when I was actively participating, and for a time even running our local Hackerspace, I insisted on a hard rule: our IRC channel is non-binding, anything of any relevance must be also discussed on the mailing group, and only decisions made on the mailing group are binding. This rule was keeping the community from going nova - shedding outer layers of occasional participants, and collapsing into a core group of friends that's in constant contact.

Even with that rule in place, when I graduated and had to focus more on my work, I realized I'm slowly becoming an outsider to my own community, simply because I'm not able to keep up with the torrent of random conversations on IRC. Back then, there were no LLMs available to summarize the 1000+ messages people sent between 09:00 and 17:00. And even if they were, it wouldn't have helped, because the problem was, people who wrote those messages were bonding together, becoming closer-knit every day, while I was becoming more distant just by missing out on this.

It's what eventually made me stop participating - and from what I talked to other people in and around our Hackerspace at the time, I'm not the only one. Which is why I say, chat groups are, by very nature, poisonous to communities - including off-line ones. They need careful managing.

[Sophira]

It already is indexed, though. Any member of a server can run a search over the messages. Granted, it's not a particularly great search, but it's there.

[johnnyanmac]

Indexed to the public, I imagine they meant. And you can't enter a server (and therefore search a server) without creating an account first.

[berniedurfee]

Content created for universal consumption was the dream of the early internet. It powered several generations intellectually forward at light speed (or backward in some circles).

Segmentation, paywalls clickbait and SEO are, unfortunately, the Monday morning reality we’re waking up to.