[silisili]

Maybe I'm old. Well, no, I am relatively old.

Either way, when I see a person or business advertise a Discord link, I immediately think of either as immature.

I miss the days of forums, and wish something like them could thrive again instead of rather private, but importantly ephemeral chats.

[michaelt]

> I miss the days of forums, and wish something like them could thrive again instead of rather private, but importantly ephemeral chats.

Open source projects have long had ephemeral chats, private to the people in the chat at that moment - it just used to be called IRC.

[foresto]

And they have also long had places for collecting persistent, searchable information alongside their IRC presence; usually public bug trackers and/or forums.

It has become all too common for a project to offer only Discord, which not only makes all community-collected information more or less ephemeral, but also locks it away behind some corporation's ever-changing terms and conditions, some of which are onerous.

GP's complaint is not that ephemeral chats exist, but rather that there is often nothing else.

[macintux]

Except there were open, archival solutions for IRC for projects to take advantage of. Are there any for Discord?

[voxic11]

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Discord

[macintux]

Sounds like you have to join the server to see the logs, something that was not required for IRC archives.

[soulofmischief]

I've been hired and have hired people through the Discord community. It's no different than Hacker News in this respect, where I've done the same. Professionalism is orthogonal, though I will agree that ephemeral chats have serious drawbacks for project-oriented communities.

[hofrogs]

You can read HN without an account, and making an account doesn't require providing a phone number. (Discord in some cases locks you out of an account entirely if it thinks that you are "suspicious" until you provide a one-time sms code from a phone # that satisfies them)

[soulofmischief]

Yeah, Hacker News is an ideal community. Part of it is how sequestered our little community is, despite being popular within our own circles. I'm sure if they scaled up their userbase they'd start running into issues with spam and then we would see account verification.

[ekianjo]

its seems even more self defeating when its a FOSS project whose only way to connect with the community is a Discord space.