Comment by riidom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riidom | Hacker News Reader

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Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop.

Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.

Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed).

Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.

I actually prefer IRC over Discord. I'm not sure why. Discord feels a bit excessive in its features. I don't like the bots. It doesn't handle multiple channels well, not as well as Slack, and yet something about it makes people do so many, unlike IRC. There's the mess of roles/self roles.

There's just something about it that encourages overcommunication. You have announcement channels that people just tell you to mute if you don't like announcements but, well, you miss out on all the announcements. The logging means that too much documentation goes on in a server, alongside memes and motivational posts.

I've actually been playing a game where all spoiler related chat goes in channels that get cleared every 3 days. 90% of the conversation is spoiler related. This is a lot more pleasant - things get documented off discord, and yet there's plenty of chatter and banter.

I feel similarly, IRC is better (to me) than the slack-like apps.

At first, the novelty of in-lining sections of the web felt magical, now I feel it raise my anxiety level.

IRC is to Slack-likes as a book is to a television.

The problem with IRC is people can't find active networks. Which ones are you on?

That's not really a problem. Like a phone number, you just want the other person's number, not the server provider.

I still get on DALnet but it's less active now.

In Malaysia, #kampung on KampungChat is popular, often around 1000 people on at any one time. Many of them who used to hang out on IRC during school days.

However, thanks to the magic of internet anonymity, it's full of 40 year olds jacking off now. You have to control the conversation, similar to Omegle. I've had some nice conversations on books and especially chess on there. It appears that the kind of people who join IRC are also nerds in some form.

I can't put my finger on it but every time I have to use Discourse, it feels like something is 'off'. It feels like it's just a mashup of reddit + stack overflow + forums. I much prefer the older style phpBB forums setup. I would take that style just implemented in a newer tech stack over Disourse any day.

Do you mean content-wise, or from UX point of view? I try to understand the arguments against discourse, but to me it's simply not much of a difference when I watch "active topics" on a phpBB or a discourse-one, both feels like "forum" to me. Highly subjective ofc, not trying to preach, just want to understand, as I said :)

I think for me, someone who is actively diving deep into Discourse and hoping it'll work because I love the search and the open-source aspect of it, I still find the UX to be off. I guess I'm used to shorter interactions online, in comments sections or on social media, and Discourse doesn't seem to do those that well.

Now, that being said, they have an alpha version of chat, which is the main reason I've jumped more into it as of late. By being able to take conversations from the chat and port them to topics, making them longer-term group memory and more searchable, gives me some hope.

Still, some of the things just feel clunky. I wish I could put more words to it, I'll try to reflect more.

edit: it also doesn't have a mobile app (it has DiscourseHub, but that's not dedicated to each instance). While the mobile web version is better than most mobile web versions, it's still not an app, which can frustrate me on iOS.

Try the Fig app. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fig-for-discourse/id1485491193

I also recommend learning keyboard shortcuts for Discourse, especially j/k/o navigation and g-u g-n m-t m-r; it runs over most of the friction.

I like the Fig app but from what I know it's no longer being updated, and with the new chat function coming, I'd hope it would get updated for that.

I think there's just a much higher learning curve. I keep learning keyboard shortcuts but I don't know how many of my community members will. Who knows, maybe with a focus on chat will bring a new focus to mobile (and with iOS getting better support for PWAs)

I recall this is the exact purpose of Spectrum.chat, though it can't interoperate with Discord, it's a new chat network. It allows making conversation threads available publicly and indexed on search engines. I've seen it in Google results a couple of times, but it doesn't look like it has caught on much, likely because of the network effect required to make a closed chat software popular.

Oops... looks like it's been shut down.

> Give me some forum instead

That's exactly why Discourse [0] exists. Try it.

[0]: https://discourse.org

The post you are replying to specifically talks about Discourse ~9 words after your quote

Try linking Discord's protocol against IRC with Bitlbee, you can use IRSSI, sic, Hexchat... whatever.

> I just think they are not true

Whichever ones are true, will be worse under discord anyways!

Yes, when I talked about discord in the last paragraph, I actually meant "something like discord, with the same level of popularity" - which doesnt exist though. Discord itself would never implement such a feature, they are all about the lock-in effect.

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