[byteface]

You're right. For me personally, Discord was killing Stackoverflow about a year earlier. Waiting a week for a reply on Stackoverflow was becoming dull while discord live chat rooms were buzzing with instant feedback. Even as copilot first arrived it wasn't a scratch on asking an room of professionals at realtime. But now chatGPT has become a bit more fledged you can see why it would dent other platforms. I've often thought about this as how would you train future bots if all we do is talk with them now?. Where will they read their answers?

[DaiPlusPlus]

Whenever I go on Discord the chats are so busy my message flies up off the screen in seconds - how does it work for you?

[byteface]

To be fair I haven't used it for about a year. As I recall I joined about 40 rooms though and not all were busy. But I think in general if your question is esoteric you would have to peel of into a room with someone with the domain specific knowledge. Some problems require a wordy description of the problem and that wont fly well in a live chat. I was really just after verification that my solution was optimal. But sometimes there just isn't a better way.

[nottorp]

Holy $DEITY.

Discord is a -ing chat platform. They haven't fixed anything for you. The various communities that run their own discord based chats may or may not have fixed things for you.

[frereubu]

I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? It might work well for one person getting an answer, but the huge value of SO is that the answers stick around and turn up pretty well in searches.

[dspillett]

> I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried?

Yes. This is one of the key reasons behind creating SO and why it worked so well at first.

As well as non-current content in some sources getting buried or otherwise being hard to find, or simply expiring (individual forums going offline), the other issue was the distribution of people willing+able to answer questions around the many disparate forums was inefficient – for all the talk of “the Internet should be as decentralised as possible” no one has found a better answer for this than a bit of centralisation with open licensing (SO wouldn't have attracted as many of the better people answering if their work was going to be locked in rather than covered by something like CC-BY-SA).

The solution that is taking over a bit ATM is Chatty Glorified Predictive Text and its friends, because this gets around the latency issues (you get a much faster answer, even if an incorrect one that means you need to rephrase the question several times) and licensing issues (though IMO the morality of that is rather dubious, the legality of it is still being argued in a number of places, but nether question of legality nor morality is going to stop it happening going forward).