[cowsup]

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing.

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.

[keerthiko]

Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the community even if I do not become a regular member.

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.

[rcxdude]

Communities rarely want to maximize growth: at most, they want a slow and steady growth, and at least they may wish to shrink. You'll find most long-lived communities that actually still have a sense of identity and norms have some form of barrier to entry: whether that be obscurity, extremely aggressive moderation, a strong set of norms which are actively policed by members, or a culture sufficiently toxic (at least superficially) to keep most people away. Often a combination of all of the above. I think for most moderately sized communities too much growth is more of a problem than too little.

[dsir]

> 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

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:

https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

[stevenicr]

Interesting. Planning to keep the code private or offering to others as well? I've been wanting to try something like this.

[antifa]

I couldn't identify the wiki aspect (implied by reddit), however looks awesome so far.

[bee_rider]

At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.

[bradgranath]

"Longevity"

LOL

[TeMPOraL]

That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers. Many of them remain lurkers. Surely someone run a study on this, but at least in my personal experience on HN and some more discussion-oriented subreddits, the most interesting/valuable submissions are often one-offs done by users who otherwise don't submit or even comment much.

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.

[SkyPuncher]

> That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers.

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.

[TeMPOraL]

I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to name or even describe it.

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.

[JCharante]

You're assuming people who find reddit results in google only use it as a knowledge base and are only lurkers.

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.

[michaelmior]

Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.

[Kye]

Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.

[TeMPOraL]

There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on, say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute, is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community personally by existing community member, who themselves were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind of "word of mouth".

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.

[Kye]

Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way to find these things before The Great Consolidation. They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and hop on.

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

[7speter]

Ironically enough, subreddit sidebars were almost always a great place to find highly relevant and useful discords, forums and blogs.

[TeMPOraL]

Exactly. The current trends make a lot of places suddenly out of reach for passer-bys.

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.

[michaelmior]

The network effect is amplified significantly however by the popularity of those companies. You're much less likely to hear about an individual Reddit community by word of mouth. However, once you're aware of Reddit, it's much easier to discover subreddits that suit your interest. The same isn't true of Discord.

[michaelmior]

Finding Reddit and Twitter by word of mouth is very different from finding a specific subreddit or Twitter account by word of mouth. AFAIK, Discord as a platform doesn't support internal discoverability in the same way as Reddit and Twitter.

[wyclif]

Absolutely the same experience for me with Google search, Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord etc. Word of mouth or getting invites from friends.

[dkga]

Mostly by direct interest. For example, all Discord communities I participate are related to open source projects I follow.

[toomuchtodo]

Is there any tooling that can plug into Discord to make the corpus within Discord more publicly accessible, perhaps on a per server basis? Let folks come together where it is easier for maintainers and participates, and offload the heavy lifting of exposing the knowledge to middleware.

[yonixw]

"Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 ( 19 hours ago )

Should've asked for a million dollar...

[seoulmetro]

Discord is a shockingly terrible place for information to exist and be helpful to others. The search for messages is very useless, the history management is slow, painful and prone to scrubbing.

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.

[Talanes]

>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.

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.