Hacker News Reader

Comment by maldev | Hacker News Reader

I'm a boomer, how do I find Discords of people coding?

I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting.

e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.

Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and hope someone bothers to help me before my question drifts off into oblivion.

For real, though, who though this is a good idea to do project documentation and issue tracking? It's stupid.

Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs".

It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow.

I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.

Yeah, I can understand that it's quite okay from a maintainer point of view. But still, you have to moderate the Discord server, which in itself can be quite the hassle.

Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.

I find they are linked frequently on GitHub pages for projects. If not as part of the README, then somewhere on the right-hand side.

There are also dedicated Discord search engines like disbord.org.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com