| > 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. |