[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.