[rob74]

The Zig Discord is a great resource for anyone learning Zig. At any given time, the zig-help forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes.

Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? Discord is basically just a chat platform, and while it's nice that there are always people there who are willing to answer the same questions over and over again, you can't rely on that staying the same in the future. Whereas SO crowdsourced a "canonical" answer to a question, and if someone came up with the same question later (and didn't find the existing answer via the search function or Google), they could be pointed to that answer.

[bmacho]

> Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow?

I have a long-held belief that the single best community information database format is Stack Overflow. (As opposed to wiki, chats, user groups/mailing lists, flat/threaded forums.) An editable top-level question, answered by several editable top level answers with different weighting on different things. (And then chat or small comments, there should be a place for some busywork that should carry no relevant information ideally.) Not necessary the website, but the format.

The second is blogosphere, allow users to write articles and engage in comments. For some reason basically no communities have these. They tend to have discord, and maybe a wiki.

[zamalek]

I previously worked at a fintech and they, understandably so given the domain, blocked Discord. Think for a second what wonders that does for participating in open source (which the same employer had no problem with).

Discord is not a suitable platform for developers. I think Matrix is pretty good but, fuck it, I'll take IRC over Discord - it's still perfectly functional.

[sebtron]

I agree, Discord is a terrible user experience for me. The UI is confusing and any piece of information older than a few hours disappears forever into the void.

[tobyhinloopen]

SO is a very beginner-unfriendly platform. Every time I used it, I either did not get any replies or had my question altered, deleted, removed, closed etc. I have no clue why anyone still uses it.

[Buttons840]

My 10 year old question was closed as a duplicate of a 7 year old question. I'm still both bitter and amused by this. (This was a few years ago, but it's still closed.)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10181706/working-with-a-...

[rkangel]

Yes, this is an unfortunate direction that SO took in the last 5 or so years. In the first 5-10 years of its life it was much more welcoming and a great resource. Now it feels like a static database of (potentially slightly out of date) FAQs.

[vfclists]

SO has always been this way, which is why I prefer to ask on reddit, and resort to SO when the question is unanswered or quite technical.

[robertlagrant]

The two options are: 1) no one has had their questions answered on stack overflow, or 2) your questions were duplicates or needed a lot of rewording to make them useful to people in the future.

[QuadmasterXLII]

Asking a question on stackoverflow that is long term useful to the community isn’t a beginner-difficulty task.

[rob74]

Yeah, I guess if you have a very specific problem that you need help with, it's better to ask about it on Discord. But for the general questions that many noobs are likely to face that the blog post mentions ("How do you make for loop in reverse?" or "What allocator to use in WASM?"), I still think SO would be the better platform, if only to avoid trying the patience of the helpful people on Discord too much...

[troupo]

And even for specific questions like the one he mentions after that you really want to have them somewhere in public, because someone will eventually run into a similar problem

[firesteelrain]

It’s beginner adverse site today. It’s got a lot of great existing questions and answers though

[tobyhinloopen]

It is.

[Night_Thastus]

It's very hostile. Sometimes I just want to ask a broader, conceptual question. I don't need someone to produce working code. Just discuss.

Sometimes I can't make a working minimal example because I work with info that can't be placed online and writing something ground up that is similar enough and decoupled from the hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of lines would take me a week or two and may not end up even working out.

[mixmastamyk]

They decided to not support those kinds of questions—their prerogative I suppose. They do have meta and software design, architecture sites.

[emrah]

Not that it matters as much any more since SO is slowly dying, they should replace human moderates with AI and involve humans only when AI says it needs help with something

[karel-3d]

You can still ask your Zig question on Stack Overflow, or they have a semi-official Discourse forum Ziggit (which I find preferable to Discord) where I got answers quickly...

Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip...

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

[koakuma-chan]

> Zig Discord is also just semi-official

Is the Zig creator not there? I'm pretty sure he is.

[kristoff_it]

No, Andrew deleted his Discord account a while ago. Regardless, having the creator present does not make a space official, it's a matter of who owns the space and what the general policy is.

The general policy of the Zig Software Foundation is to not have blessed community spaces outside of spaces used strictly for coordinating the development of Zig (those currently are the Ziglang GitHub Organization and the ZSF Zulip), so all communities are equally non-official.

The main Zig Discord server is owned by community members and is actually not even the only Zig server on Discord.

[wmedrano]

I thought the Zig creator abandoned Discord due to invasive ads sometime last year.

[atiedebee]

That wouldn't necessarily make it official though

[charlie-83]

I always found SO really slow. Often I would get stuck on something, ask a question and then have to wait an hour for a response (which would often become a back and forth of comments with large periods of time between them). Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes.

I think this is likely due to the incentives SO creates. I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. I will often contribute to a discord question even if I don't full know the answer just because I think I can add something useful.

[lelanthran]

> Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes.

On SO, at its peak, you got an answer even faster because it was public (i.e. the answer was already there, you just searched for your question).

So you're comparing minutes to instant.

[tester756]

But zig's discord is also public ;o

[feelamee]

Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no. So you need to manually search in discord chat instead of using google to search the whole internet.

[tester756]

>Google can index discord messages? AFAIK - no.

Why they cant? it's up to them to add support for it

[Lyngbakr]

    > I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. 

IME, this is heavily dependent on the language and, therefore, the subcommunity. For example, for Clojure and R I've found the SO communities to typically be kind and positive, whereas I've found the JS folks there to be dismissive and aggressive, but YMMV.

[dragonelite]

I agree i rather see all this discussion etc take place on dedicated forums or other text based options so search engines can index the stuff..

[bsder]

Ziggit is a Zig Discourse that is pretty good: https://ziggit.dev/

It's almost as fast as the Discord and much friendlier to searching and context.

I make a point of avoiding the Discord simply because I want my questions and answers to be searchable by people who come afterward.

[cassepipe]

Except discourse is just a forum and thus less useful than the SO format where good answers bubble up

[kristoff_it]

Discourse has the feature where the comment marked as answer will be placed up top right after the question.

[bsder]

I'll be honest, for me, SO feels sclerotic.

Any question that is more than a couple of years old and applies to something under active development risks having the "bubbled up" answer being actively incorrect.

Maybe this is just because I'm not developing in Javascript.

[kristoff_it]

Ziggit is indeed another active community and it's perfectly legitimate to want to stick to a platform vs another for personal preference, the people who downvoted this comment should really re-evaluate the way the approach this subject.

[gyomu]

Agreed - humans like participating in chats better (when you have a problem, you want live humans ready to answer you now), but the SO style archive is better for long term archiving & retrievability.

A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.

[Klonoar]

There are already several projects that have tried the “expose Discord data for indexing” model. Problem is no chat servers ever actually use them, perhaps because they’re at odds with expectations of people in the servers themselves.

[Zambyte]

In the context of Zig, Ziggit has been pretty nice also. I use that instead.

[kristoff_it]

Discord is just one of many places where you can get help from other Zig community members.

Over time I've seen plenty of comments like this one about platform A vs platform B and I find them all absolutely uninteresting. Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere.

Some people prefer Discord and they made a comfortable home for themselves. If you prefer a different platform (which could be a matter of personal preference or an objective advantage, it really doesn't matter which it is), then go make yourself a comfortable home there and start offering help to others on it.

If you're a newcomer and can't really offer much help, then you're asking for people who do have that knowledge to help you on a platform of your choice. That's certainly something you can wish for, but you can't demand it, regardless of how much objectively better your platform might be.

[thunky]

> Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere.

It actually does when users are pointed to discord to ask the same questions over and over.

Look at the two example questions in OP's quote. Sending users to discord for those means nearly nobody else will benefit from the answers.

And I think it's fair to point this out.

[kristoff_it]

1. Questions and answers on Discord are searchable, there's a channel format that makes every conversation a thread and the UI even automatically searches for matches as you type the title of a new thread, which is what the Zig Discord server uses. It's correct to say that Discord answers will not be searchable outside of Discord, but it's factually wrong to say that you won't be able to very easily find out if your question has been asked already.

2. OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience. Zig has multiple communities and you can get help also elsewhere. A blog post that recounts one's experience doesn't need to list all other ways of getting help and it's wrong for you to assume otherwise.

[thunky]

> it's factually wrong to say that you won't be able to very easily find out if your question has been asked already

IME discord's search is terrible. When I try to find previous questions it seems like it uses a naive exact word search, so if I change my keywords slightly it finds different results. I haven't tried Zig's channel so maybe they do it better. But in general, I stand by my comment.

> OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience

The quote was clearly recommending the Zig Discord channel as a place for anyone learning Zig to go and ask questions. This is "sending people there".

[tauoverpi]

Discord will arbitrarily ban users for using a VPN making it next impossible to access prior conversations on given topics where support takes anywhere from a week to two months to review tickets related to it (they then go "whoops" and lift the ban only to apply it again days later).

Not being searchable outside of Discord is the problem (matrix / telegram also suffer from this) as it places useful Q&A and discussion behind a wall.

[vfclists]

> 1. Questions and answers on Discord are searchable, there's a channel format that makes every conversation a thread and the UI even automatically searches for matches as you type the title of a new thread, which is what the Zig Discord server uses. It's correct to say that Discord answers will not be searchable outside of Discord, but it's factually wrong to say that you won't be able to very easily find out if your question has been asked already.

The built-in search software for a lot of forums is for lack of a better term, abysmal.

Consider this search on SO - user:172406 javascript userscript

consider the same search on google - vfclists javascript userscript.

It is the first answer on the list and note that I didn't add "stackoverflow" to the query.

[rembicilious]

I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication.

IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go.

Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat.

Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.

[troupo]

> forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes.

You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.

[maccard]

Yes you would.

[troupo]

1. Not as much because people can actually find the answers to their questions before locking to the chat

2. On top of that you can make info on and solutions to other issues/problems actually available and accessible. Like the one the author describes later in the same text

Instead all this info is locked behind a proprietary chat platform

[interpol_p]

Totally agree

But once we opened a Discord for our product we had so many more questions and users coming in. I do not like that it is locked up on a proprietary platform organised as a chat interface, but damn is it popular and often-used. Having users communicate with us more regularly is very motivating, and we've had so much more quality feedback by having it available

It is, unfortunately, where a lot of the people are and it makes your user base feel very "alive"

[jjani]

Why not use AnswerOverflow to make the chats indexed and searchable? It's definitely a lot better than nothing, multiple times it has already helped me find answers to questions I had.

[interpol_p]

Thanks for the suggestion! I had no idea this existed

[TUSF]

I don't think SO's "canonical answer" concept really jives with a pre-1.0 language like Zig that is still in constant flux, regularly making breaking changes. One of the questions the blog brings up as an example, "What allocator to use in WASM?" would have a different answer last year than it would this year, and may well have a different answer next year.

[rkangel]

I agree, but I think that you could get a useful middle ground by continuously publishing the contents of your Q&A Discord channel to the internet (in a way where it gets indexed by search engines).

Yes, Stack Overflow collated these questions and answers better but then at least you could google for something and get the answer, rather than asking again.

[Buttons840]

Discord is really bad if you want more than 1-on-1 real-time communication with other humans. This is also its primary advantage.

[krapp]

In a world where every surface of the web is infested with bots, trolls, spammers and AI slop, persistent static and public information is a hazard. Moving knowledge to ephemeral communities is an immune response to what the web has become. I'm usually not a fan of gatekeeping but doing so to filter for human beings seems like a necessary evil.

[drob518]

Discord sucks. Slack is so much better, IMO.