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Comment by vkoskiv | Hacker News Reader

> discord servers are usually social spaces; I’m more interested in the people in them than the particular topics they’re talking about.

I'm more interested in the topics. That's why I went to that discord server and that channel. To go read about that topic.

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I have a lot of negative vibes about discord, it feels like this generation sucked up all the grandiose web ideas and tried to retrofit them onto html5 IRC. So many servers are so strict about no talking something somewhere, so serious, so ban happy.. as if their life is an encyclopedia to create convo by convo, all making their little wikipedia page.

Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.

Do you remember how popular AIM was? This is their proboards and AIM wrapped in one. Plus it's easy to use, customizable, and incredibly interoperable.

proboards ?

I don't really mind about customization and ease (i mean it's just a chat). Again I feel like they're overdoing and overbelieving in the current paradigm. All this to have nitro emojis and short lived things.

Is it interoperable when you don't have an account with the Discord company?

Power-tripping mods aren't anything new.

My main beef with Discord servers turning into this decade's forums is a lot of useful info is locked up and not discoverable by search engines.

> My main beef with Discord servers turning into this decade's forums is a lot of useful info is locked up and not discoverable by search engines.

This to me is by far the worst part of Discord. I'm in a few game mod specific Discord's and there is tons of info in them, but it's so hard to find and get to it might as well not even exist.

I reluctantly accepted a Discord server for my project as my users demanded it. Now the people who help out on the project do so in Discord and I hate it. I have to constantly copy the info into a Github issue or discussion otherwise it's pretty much impossible to find again as it scrolls up. There's also a ton of noise in between the contributing comments. I think I'm going to push back and leave the Discord server and tell people to please use Github instead for contributions.

> Now the people who help out on the project do so in Discord and I hate it. I have to constantly copy the info into a Github issue or discussion otherwise it's pretty much impossible to find again as it scrolls up. There's also a ton of noise in between the contributing comments.

This is one of the reasons I prefer Zulip to Discord. You get more organization by default, with all conversations happening in threads with subjects, and a tendency to create new threads for new topics. I can actually find information in conversations long afterwards, and cross-link to useful Zulip threads from GitHub or elsewhere.

just copy a link to the discussion and add a pr template that grants a blanket read only invite

You probably have more people contributing on Discord than you'd have just on Github. Maybe 2, 3 or more times as many.

Discord tends to be social in a way Github is not, with lower friction to contribute. And perhaps even a better asynchronous model.

I don't discount your frustrations. Maybe a bot that can create GH issues from Discord would help. With rights to use it spread liberally around the community.

Tell people you need help getting data into Github, give them a bot so they don't have to context switch, and they'll probably surprise you.

You're probably right on the increased contributions. It's definitely a case of pros and cons. I'll look into bots, that's a good idea.

To me, Github is a code repository and Discord is synchronous chat. I personally find both Github and Discord to be much harder platforms to extract information and ask questions than wikis, fourms and subreddits.

I'm a 100% sure you can find at least 42 Discord bots that can create and update relevant GitHub issues directly.

We host the full version of Zulip for free for open-source projects. :) https://zulip.com/for/open-source/

People keep saying this but even on my worst IRC days I've never encountered that much petty-kingdom feeling. Maybe freenode was its own bubble I don't know. On IRC there's this vibe that you don't own anything. You just joined a room first, or someone gave you mod capabilities but it was very freeform in nature.

Can you use a bot to extract conversations into external website?

Not sure about tech, but for pop culture like games, I blame that partially on Wikia/Fandom. I would not wish the horror of scrolling through Wikia websites on a phone upon my worst enemies. It's a lot easier to write and view useful information in Discord.

You’re describing my experience with IRC in maybe 2001 and what discouraged me from returning.

Well well, interesting. My theory is sinking :)

Maybe find different servers? I have never been banned from anything on discord.

IRC had networks and channels like that as well. A good rule of thumb is: the bigger the social group, the stricter the rules.

My worry about Discord is the same worry as Android (though I am early adopter of both): its free as in beer, but we pay with our privacy. Sure, Ventrilo sucked as well given it was very strict and you could not run it on your own server plus high latency but low memory footprint. But we also had things like TeamSpeak and Mumble. These were alright, except it wasn't standardized, so you might need a different client per community. Its the standardization which abstracts the user experience, akin to people going to a site via Google or where the internet is Facebook.

I invite you to read this article: https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otte.... I suspect that the ban-happy communities you're seeing is the result of the otters being dominant on those particular servers, and trying to keep the server focused.

Seconding that. There is no lack of servers and channels dedicated to general discussion. Stop trying to turn my topic channel into your Facebook page.

That's kind of a solved issue. Every message board had a bunch of subforums for offtopic discussions. Besides a few popular or tangentially-relevant threads it usually was a boring slow-burn or just chaos.

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