[pmoriarty]

Discord is a black hole where information goes to die. Its search and scrollback is awful. It's awful at being an archive, as finding anything that was asked more than a day or two ago is impractical.

To use Discord in good faith and with open eyes, you have to prioritize communication in the present, and give up hope of archiving anything that was said for people who might need the information in the future.

[joot82]

Discord is just a rich IRC replacement. You can log and search in IRC too but nobody seriously tries to archive information for research later. And big difference is it's all closed and operated by one entity that can change conditions at will. Don't even try to use it for anything else than real time chat.

[pmoriarty]

"Discord is just a rich IRC replacement"

That's only half true. Yes, Discord does allow a "rich" chat experience, with channels and servers, but there the similarities end.

IRC is based on an open protocol, with many open source clients available for it, and a decentralized server infrastructure.

Discord is closed and centralized, with only a single client available for it.

You can easily log IRC channels, but there is no easy way to do that on Discord, if it can be done at all.

I've logged every channel I've ever visited on IRC, and I can use powerful text tools to regex search through all of my conversations on IRC and have the results appear instantly. Nothing remotely like that is possible with Discord.

Paging through IRC logs is virtually instant on a modern terminal, while Discord makes you wait a long time between every other page load, so if you need to look through more than a handful of pages it's incredibly slow and painful.

Some IRC channels have their logs published on the web, making them fully searchable through web search engines, but to my knowledge no Discord channels do that.

What happens in Discord stays in Discord.

[utbabya]

Greping through IRC logs has a 10x better UX

[orangepurple]

Furthermore, you risk getting banned for deleting messages you wrote in the past

[Fnoord]

For gaming communities (where you'd use voice chat), Discord was great. Easy to set up, free as in beer, runs in cloud. The alternatives back in the days did not have these features. They were either expensive (Ventrilo) or bad quality (Ventrilo and Skype latency/quality) or proprietary (only Mumble wasn't, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo etc were) or lacked community features (Ventrilo) or these were very archaic (TeamSpeak, Mumble) or you'd have to self-host (all but Ventrilo). It was also before GDPR existed. So Discord happily used and abused that unique position.

Its a shame its being used for general communities who don't use or need the voice chat feature. Especially when its an official community for a place, given their stance on third party clients and privacy issues.

If you don't need voice chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Revolt, Discourse, and many other would suffice (Linen recently got featered on HN). If you do, I think even Signal would be suffice these days.

For Discord search, recently Answer Overflow was recently featured on HN [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773

[winddude]

agreed.

[Kiro]

I find their search amazing. What's your issue with it?

[aardshark]

Here's just one issue:

They stem words aggressively, so searching for "repeater", which is a less common, specific term, gives you results including "repeat", a commonly used word. And there's no way to do an exact word search.

[geysersam]

The issue is it's not indexed by Google

[wanderingbit]

There was a recent post about an open source tool for indexing Discord content and making it available for Google search:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773

[micromacrofoot]

have you used google lately? might as well not be indexed with all the seo spam you get as top results

[andsoitis]

> have you used google lately? might as well not be indexed with all the seo spam you get as top results

I just googled "how to use openllm" as an example to test your thesis, and the results look very relevant to me.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=how+to+...

[DragonStrength]

You might want to glance again because all of those results are for a different product.

[andsoitis]

Top of the results page says:

"Showing results for how to use openlm

Search instead for how to use openllm"

[micromacrofoot]

when I click this google gives me results for “how to use openlm” a commercial product, they literally change your search term if there’s a product that fits