this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I don't think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I'd love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for "long form" topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.
Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like "how do I do x?".
I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a "simple" question which wouldn't be a problem on a forum.
The problem with the concept of "Quick one off questions go to discord" concept is when the second through infinite people have the same question or issue. Discord isn't crawled by search engines, and it ties up support staff/developers with answering repeat questions. Nevermind the time zone issue.
Like, I get that conversation isn't as dynamic, but you can always schedule a time to chat dynamically.
I hang out in the Python discord quite a lot and it seems to work well for this purpose. I will say that Python's core library and many of the most popular packages are well documented, so it's definitely not a case where discord is the main source of knowledge and that's a good thing. However, a lot of people on there are new to development and don't know where to start, so we answer their beginner questions while teaching them how to search the docs for answers.
The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.
To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.
Right, there is nothing wrong with discord type services other then the fact that I hate them and find them annoying and impossible to engage with, but that is a personal opinion I can just sit there and deal with if communities also have other places I can interact with them online but again for the overwhelming majority of them…. they don’t.
My whole life I have been very much a “social butterfly” engaging in lots of different hobby communities and enjoying learning and reading expert conversations on niche things I never knew about. In the last 6 years or so, more than anything else Discord has been destroying my capacity to do enjoy doing that. I join a Discord server about something I am passionate about and I just can’t find the interesting conversations anywhere (even though the topics are extremely interesting to me) and I end up zoning out and disengaging with the community. I also need an account to search old conversations which feels VERY VERY wrong to me.
My point isn’t “woe is me” but to stand up and sound the alarm that we are rapidly losing agency, searchability and general knowledge curation capacity systematically across digital communities as the Discord tidal wave envelopes all. It has and will do massive longterm damage to the health of internet communities.
I mean, for goodness sake my damn workplace was trying to unionize (hell yeah) and we had a great signal chat that was very focused going on (not perfect by any means) and then a couple of people who like Discord got EVERYTHING to move to Discord and….. guess how effective we were at organizing our ≈110 person company?
Spoilers, we weren’t, at all.
It just crushed me to see people trying to agitate and encourage people to think outside the narrative of what the boss says is possible or how people’s relationship to work has to look like according to the boss, but there was zero creative or imaginative power to conceive of the politics and consequences of the tools we were using to organize or thought into how a communication tool fundamentally impacts the kind of conversations that happen in favor of others. I get that it wasn’t the primary question, but it seems to me like a far more relevant question than people gave it credit for, especially since our solution was “use the popular social media service being massively subsidized by investors in an attempt to develop an unassailable monopoly on the industry” which seems like not a great place to build the future of worker power, especially since Discord is a U.S. based company.