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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

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As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.

I believe they meant "not searchable from an external search engine", which is a serious issue in many people's view (including mine). I would also suggest that it's a problem that chats are not browsable, because if you're new to a particular problem, you may not know what keywords you need to search for. With a forum, there are categories you can browse and usually discover the keywords you need much easier.

It can be searchable from a search engine.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

That ain't google

It's indexed by Google...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aansweroverflow.com+c%...

I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Not entirely. 3rd-party search engines still can't reach these, thus reducing discoverability.

As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.

It's the real time chat all the things people want to search are moving to.

Minecraft mod? "Find us on Discord!"

Hot new indie game? "Find us on Discord!"

Interesting little open source project? "Find us on Discord!"

30 year old forum shutting down? "Find us on Discord!"

Discord is, or at least can be indexed and searchable. Same as IRC chats become indexed and searchable.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

How is it less searchable than slack?

The assumption is that forum is viewable by guests (including Google) and Slack is not, so to search the Slack history you need to log in to Slack and use the Slack search (which might be broken / paid in the future, etc)

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