[spywaregorilla]

Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.

Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.

The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

LLMs also excel in this area.

[jachee]

Also: any discord mod worth their salt will have set up a #faqs channel with the most-frequent questions and their answers.

We went a step further on the iRacing community discord and wrote a bot that will search that channel and spit out answers.

…because users will nearly always just ask a FAQ instead of reading one.

[TeMPOraL]

> Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet.

Counterpoint: selection bias. Most of the people who have a question are the ones who failed to find the answer on the Internet. Chat is good for them, but if chat is the only thing that's left, then much more people will have no choice but to either join the chat and ask questions that could've been trivially answered with a search, or just ignore whatever it is your community is doing/promoting/supporting.

> They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.

Counterpoint: that's only if you're lucky and happen to ask the question when right people are present, willing, and not busy with an ongoing conversation. Otherwise, you'll be spending unpredictable amount of time trying to ensure your question gets seen or answered. And that happens for any question, regardless of how many times it was asked and answered before. Tiring and inefficient.

> Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.

Exactly. If. That's a big if for smaller communities - and for larger ones, the question becomes if anyone notices your question in the flood of ongoing conversations.

> The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

It's kind of the polar opposite of Discord, or even Reddit - the experience is bad for participants, but great for passer-bys looking for already-written answers to already-asked questions.

[carlosjobim]

The democratization of the internet with smart phones have had the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the internet with questions that are easily answered by looking just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer, when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?"

Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted? 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close the tab and get on with their life.

Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very soon.

[spywaregorilla]

cynical and incorrect take imo. also, people are very appreciative on discords generally

[firesteelrain]

> The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its Experts Exchange killer website consortium.

[wyclif]

SO is pretty much dead to me except for search. A lot time ago I stopped trying to even use it or participate in it in the intended way after getting my answers or questions killed for what seemed like no reason.

[7speter]

People still tell you to use the search function on discords, and there aren’t even searchable topic names or the option to use google’s algorithm to power the searches.

Also, the great fun of llms is going on youtube and watching content creators accuse other content creators of cheating and using llms to write their scripts, even if they may just be using it as a research tool to round up preliminary information.