[mooreds]

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google.

Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

[Hermitian909]

> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.

Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality.

The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope.

What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die.

On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread:

> I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.

[Hermitian909]

> What you described is a culture of fear

No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.

It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).

[AstralStorm]

Technically there always have been platforms that let you run a hosted forum maintained by others on someone else's host. These were typically paid.

But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.

It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.

The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.

[johnnyanmac]

>Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.

I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.

[hnick]

At this point I think the only thing that will stop SEO-spam articles is an AI good enough to read with a human-like critical mind that can detect bullshit (or, at least skim the 100 similar articles to get the one useful fact they all repeat).

It makes me wonder about the future of the content producers though since that AI is not looking at ads.

[bsder]

You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin.

Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them.

A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.