I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.
>Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Discord started as a way for gamers to chat with one another. Initially the developers even wanted to sell games directly from the platform [1].
I think it would be incorrect to position Discord as a privacy-oriented platform when the desktop client needs to be run in a sandbox because there's no real way to disable data collection.
Discord came about because all the instant messaging services (eg: AIM, MSN) had recently died, Skype was hot flaming gasoline garbage, Teamspeak and Ventrilo were tedious and expensive (for gamers), and otherwise there were no other means of reliable, easy, free, convenient means of voice communications.
Mumble was the best free voice communications app and briefly took over after Teamspeak fell out of popularity.
Discord was really the best place to hang out with your friends outside of games. Social media was too distant and Steam friends didnt do enough. The old IRC chatroom / Discord format with voice comms and screen sharing is THE way to relate to friends online now.
Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.
Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.
Every big, lasting company has a product portfolio: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft... A single product will leave you vulnerable to disruption, and the aforementioned problem.
I'm not sure Discord knew what it wanted to be. Private for your friends, but not end-to-end encrypted. Chat for streamers with rooms, but not a streaming platform. (They tried. Twitch also tried to make a Discord-like desktop app.)
Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)
My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.
It wasn't meant to be "private" in the e2e sense. It was just meant to be a modern reimagining of Ventrilo/TeamSpeak, which were group chat programs for gamers. The video call stuff came after (since it was strange to not have video if you were already voice chatting in the year 201X). They want to branch outside of servicing online gaming communities but that was their origin, and you can still see how that culture affects their product design today. A good way of understanding the product is to just ask "would online gaming communities use this?".
Not everything should be preserved forever. It's actually really nice to be able to talk online and not have it form a permanent record that can be instantly referenced by anyone.
Correct. However, some things should be preserved forever and accessible. It's really nice to be able to put a piece of scientific jargon, or a text of an error message, into a search box, and get back links and references to material you can peruse at your own pace and discretion - as opposed to having to join a closed community and keep asking people, hoping someone who knows the answer and is willing to help spots the message before it disappears in the flood of ongoing conversations, and monitoring said flood so that you catch the answer in time to ask follow-up questions, etc.
Point being: different needs require different tools. Current trend is doing everything in closed, ephemeral groups.
Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.
> Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has [always] existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.
Forums don't suck it's accessibility the biggest strength of discord is probably that they let you discover the communities and even take part in the conversation without signing up. It's just like IRC back in the day choose a username and of you go and if you like it converting the temp account to a normal one is just 2 clicks.
It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
I would argue it makes no sense to index the vast majority of content without good search. If your search is good enough, you can index everything and then surface only the good stuff at query time.
Interesting comment. I would think Reddit is similar in terms of content, yet “site:reddit.com <query>” is common as a general search pattern (pre-blackout)
Discord is made for realtime chat and instant messaging. People don't put a lot of thought process in the vast majority of what they write. The format of ressit encourages a bit of a slower conversation and therefore more thought through comments. You barely even have time to edit a message before it's already irrelevant in discord.
That depends a lot on the channel. Some channels are exclusively monthly public announcements, of new version of software, or bugs, or announcements of conferences for example. Or job opportunities with instructions on how to apply.
Some channels contain a high level of knowledge in the same way as a forum, knowledge you won't find posted again, perhaps because the person who posted it no longer works at the company. Some channels are used for work purposes, similar to Slack and MS Teams, and contain async information across timezones about product development, or bug-investigations updates, or design discussions, which are more real-time but valuable to be able to find again. Some channels contain the information needed to enter and participate in multi-month long competitions. The information is not posted anywhere else, even though that would be useful and well suited to a blog or issue tracker.
Some places are using Discord not because it's their favourite thing, but because many other companies and projects in the same field are now using Discord, so it's become expected by users (like Twitter). After all nobody wants to install yet another application, but if everyone in a field already uses Discord for work, then that's what you have to use as well.
My first year of Discord was entirely because it was required by my job, as it was the way everyone communicated at that company.
The point is it was the only way everyone communicated at that company aside from a negligible number of emails (maybe 10 emails in a year), and some Telegram channels with outside parties. So nearly every formal announcement and work-related message, as well as real-time chat went through the company's internal Discord server. When I occasionally searched the company dev channels I found a treasure trove of relevant technical knowledge I couldn't find anywhere else. Knowledge I couldn't get in a reasonable time by asking current people. But being Discord search rather than a web page, it was really hard to keep track of things found, and that knowledge was effectively lost.
At my current job we use Teams the same way the last company used Discord. Teams is worse.
Apparently because it is very easy to setup and offer a place where people can join.
More and more open source projects are using it and I don't really like it, but what easy alternatives can you recommend to them?
Genuine question, as it is an open issue for me. I want to focus on my project, not setting up and maintain a forum, mailing lists, etc. on top of that.
I would much rather engage with a community on Discord than on Github discussions/Reddit/a forum. The inability to easily browse historical posts is a feature to me that makes it much less risky to ask questions and join a community. I don't have to spend a lot of time searching and effort to phrase my questions just right to avoid getting yelled at by someone that I should have used the search instead of posting.
But then instead of putting X amount of effort up-front to do search, you have to put in 10X amount of effort to join a community and ask someone about the thing. It's not a good trade, IMHO.
In my experience, most people on GitHub discussions seem to be more than happy to help out, and over time it also builds up a reservoir of information that anyone else can tap into. GitHub discussions search is relatively good.
Whereas on discord, you might get a great answer which helps you and anyone who is immediately following that conversation but that's it.
Those are the biggest aspects, but the private aspect is actually an important part of why many open source projects are using it. They don't really want to be having those sort of conversations in github issues or the discussions page or anywhere indexable.
Like getting on a call with a coworker or a collaborator on the project. You can technically record it or leave it open to the public, but most people do not because they just see it as not "informing the public" worthy.
Discord does have search, but I really hope they do not improve it.
The lack of good search really prevents the hostility towards new users that you often see on Reddit/forums where every question is instantly answered by a one liner "use the search" reply.
Discord communities are some of the most friendly and welcoming communities I have ever encountered on the internet. I think a large part of it is the chat nature and inability to easily pull up old comments.
I always use discord search to find answers, but a lot of people don't bother. I'm not sure answering the same noob questions over and over is fun for anyone
No one are automatically entitled to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline, although a community may chose to make it available.
Perhaps you should consider getting your answers from ChatGPT in the cases where a community has decided to be for themselves instead of the greater internet.
> No one are automatically entitled to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline, although a community may chose to make it available.
That's the difference between the "cozy web" and the web 10-15 years ago. The communities used to grant everyone the right "to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline" by default; in fact it was weird to gatekeep things that could be useful to others - the only thing that was gatekept was "write access", and it was done based on attitude, not on someone's ability to do networking and invest large amount of time on an ongoing basis.
Of all groups, it's both ironic and sad to see this happening to open source projects in particular. Those projects owe their very existence - and people participating in them owe their skills - to that open, indexed, no-strings-attached knowledge-sharing culture.
The alternative here is that people are more of a burden on the community, not less. It's more disruptive to have noobs asking the same questions and having to be answered by community members every time. At least from where I sit.
I don't think asking noob questions makes you part of the community in the way it matters here - actually contributing.
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.