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by jackofalltrades 920 days ago
Honest question, why does everyone uses discord for community space nowadays? What happened to product forums that could be easily found in a web search?
7 comments

I used Discord for Wave because it is real-time, free, and has a lot of community and auto-moderation facilities built in. It also seems to scale well to large communities. Because you asked, I think it is fair game to share our discord link here: https://discord.gg/XfvZ334gwU
It's unnerving, especially for open source projects. The idea of open source extends beyond the license. It is as much about the community as it is the software. Discord is the worst possible place from an open-ness standpoint. I don't use software that uses it.
You can set up a Discord server for free in under 3 minutes. 10 if you want to install all the fancy moderation bots and change the icons and add custom emojis.

There's nothing comparable for forums. FB tried but it's a cesspool of "user engagement", managing groups is a full time job and still doesn't work properly.

Oh, and Discord _has_ a forum-like feature inside it :D

You can setup a room on any Matrix server of your choice in the same 3 minutes.
The UX in Matrix is really crappy. I say this as someone who has been on IRC since the late 90's. I can deal with jank. I was in the IRC wars. I've seen server splits used to take over channels by Polish IRC warriors.

Matrix is its own brand of confusing because it's trying SO hard not to be a Discord clone. If you properly want to own your Matrix channels, you need to run your own server and that's not a 3 minute thing to do.

> Discord _has_ a forum-like feature inside it

Pretty sure the last bit in the GP was the important one:

> What happened to product forums _that could be easily found in a web search_?

Without web searching capability, whatever "forum-like feature" exists is still subpar.

Yea, searchability on the internet went to crap ages ago.

Content is either in silos like FB or Discord or in videos on Youtube. None of which is properly searchable from an external search engine by content.

Moderation in Discord is much easier than on self hosted platforms. It’s also free, which helps.
As an open-source maintainer, the simple answer is because that's what the majority of users want. The barrier to join a discord server and ask a question is very low, compared to signing up for a forum, posting, and hoping that somebody looks at it.

The only negative feedback I've gotten is from users in China, where Discord is blocked.

If I see discord, I move on. You chose how to run your community, and I'm not going to complain -- I'm not that entitled. I'm just not going to participate.
Or something actually open like matrix! It's really bad that you have to sell your privacy just to get support on a FOSS project.
I hate this trend, whenever you see something interesting and/or wants to engage with someone conversation, you get redirected to discord.. I don’t like it, why not mattermost or similar services if you don’t want to put some effort making a forum?