[jliptzin]

I love discord. It is the only social media I regularly use. There seems to be a sentiment that pops up every now and again that it’s a shame that content in discord communities is getting “walled off” and inaccessible by google and others from the rest of the internet. That is a strange sentiment to me. Discord communities are private by design. If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that. Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant? In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.

[spencerflem]

I think most people complaining about that are talking about support discords for software projects - where the default used to be that you contributions were permanent and searchable. Walling it off makes it less useful.

I use discord mostly for keeping up with friends and am very glad those chats aren't on the open internet

[StevePerkins]

I don't think anyone wants to read you and your buddies' discussion of Cities: Skylines II and Super Mario Wonder.

They're irritated by all the open-source projects replacing their mailing list, forum, or wiki with "Just ask on the Slack or Discord". It's the most god-awful mode of community support imaginable.

[asynchronous]

I don’t understand how we got here either. Like who pushed for this result? It’s objectively worse in every way.

[0xfae]

Not every way.

I love the old bulletin boards and IRC channels where you get to know people, talk about projects, asking for help, etc.

Discord fills that role in a much more accessible way than posting on a forum or googling a stack overflow answer.

Both hae value. Apparently you much prefer a less real-time interactive approach to solving those problems.

[margalabargala]

Discord optimizes for you getting help with your problem at the expense of you being able to help yourself with your problem by searching for other people having the same problem.

[Arrath]

Just look to the Discord channels for popular games or 3rd party modpacks to see this constantly in action. Lacking a forum with a pinned thread for FAQs or basic support, the mods/admins/regulars must rely on chatbot auto-answers keyed off of keywords to pull out rote responses to common tech support questions.

[avitous]

I get that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, would prefer such a socially high touch "bulletin board" model, but... some of us run away screaming from such things. I find Discord impossible to navigate in terms of finding discussions of issues that have already occurred, and having to perform my own "archeological excavation" to discover the tidbits that are actually relevant to me is orders of magnitude harder and more irritating than, say, perusing/searching a discussion forum or similar online venue.

For those of us who came of age during the "RTFM before bothering anybody, dammit!" attitude toward supporting engineers, looking for already posted answers to a problem that likely someone else has already solved is vastly superior to bothering someone about a problem they might well be tired of talking about for the 100th time.

I've never been good at "conversation" in real life or online; some of us simply aren't and have/find our strengths elsewhere, and increasingly it seems all online discussions about, say, issues around a game published by a small indie vendor are being pushed to Discord and in some cases even shutting down other online communication channels in favor of that. A vendor who keeps its online discussion forums available and supported is always going to get a lot more interest from me than what I see younger companies doing.

Maybe it's just a big cultural shift, and I am no longer relevant. Not ready to "go away" just yet...

[jliptzin]

I don’t see how that’s discord’s fault though, blame the project leaders. They must have their reasons. Maybe for projects in active development, content from years ago just isn’t relevant anymore anyway.

[jowea]

> Discord communities are private by design.

Are they? I'm sure there are people who use Discord like that, but I am on dozens of servers and all of them are public, i.e. anyone can join anytime. That's not private that's just hiding from Google.

> If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that.

Chat/video/audio as good and popular as Discord? Where? IRC? Matrix?

> Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant?

Fair enough but nobody is asking direct messages or the servers for people who actually know each other and want privacy to be on the open web. Just the ones that are closer to being public squares for discussing specific topics.

> In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.

Eh, I get what you're saying but don't you think the Internet as a whole loses a lot of its value if this happens? Wasn't Google and good indexing one of the crucial things that led to the Internet revolution?

[jliptzin]

I’m sure the vast majority of sites would still opt-in to the indexing, considering the lengths people go to with SEO crap to get to the front page of google.

[userinanother]

The good ones are actually private and you need to pay to play

[jowea]

You're talking about the ones behind someone's patreon? Or something else?

[userinanother]

There are groups that hang out behind a subscription. They use payment management services that handle renewals and subscription. Not patrons. They can be really well organized like work slack level of organization. The fees often pay for people to manage the content and staff to moderate. Though moderation staff is generally younger or in poorer countries.

[strken]

It's not strange to me at all. People use Discord for things that should be publicly searchable, like FAQs or issue tracking. This is usually what drives complaints.

If an open source project chose to track issues using a series of private conversations in restaurants, most of us would recognise how ephemeral and fleeting that is.

[asynchronous]

Discord sucks because it’s taking communities that SHOULD be public and walling them off. It has replaced forums for several open source communities.