Technology

I'm working bro, just read the first bit and saw how you completely misinterpreted my points

Edit: Have some time now, here's my response.

*the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad

i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”*

Completely wrong, I literally said the exact opposite in fact, what we need is a better discord wherein there is no lock in where you have to have a discord account to be able to search for things with an engine.

The search functionality literally in forums is and was bad, your point about how bad discord search is, is exactly the same thing I experienced on forums with their built in search functions, Google worked great by comparison of often getting me to the most relevant portion of a thread. Sure I still had to sometimes look forward and backwards a bit but it worked well enough.

I also never said anything about devs being able to answer peoples questions directly, I did however say it being a real-time chat made it much easier. Obviously the devs would hopefully be active whether it was async or not, but that's not a platform feature lmao.

I do not see how you so wildly misinterpreted what I said to be the exact opposite.

except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.

This is the same experience I mentioned before with built in forum search being bad, also discord users/servers do not use functionality like the forum feature or threading hardly ever, many don't even know those features exist, I'd like those to be an option in any discord-like replacement as they help alleviate those issues a good bit on their own.

Specifically, you can group things by topics or threads, it still has some poor ux tho that could be much better, but overall I think search engines are simply better then basically any search tooling these platforms build for themselves.

with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.

Again, there is functionality in discord with similar features, people just don't use them out of laziness or not being aware they exist.

I work at a major corporation as a senior tech specialist working with lower representatives actually speaking to clients, real time communication is leaps and bounds preferable to async communication in my 7 years in this role. {Edit2: We had to train the representatives to keep their discussion of their kssue in one thread, it was not inherent knowledge, used slack initially and now have to use teams which was definitely a step down but at least it has threading at all. Same with teaching them to search the channel, so often the answers are there if you search for them.}

I'll clarify since you seem to think I'm a discord lover, I literally canceled my nitro a year ago when rumblings of IPO was coming because I knew what followed, I looked into replacements like Revolt (now stoat) and Matrix and tried to convince all my friends to move off discord.

I'm not a fan of discords direction, however I am intimately familiar with it, and can speak to its strengths and weaknesses as I have seen them, and prior to that, a lot of experience with forums, from being a user to hosting my own, my goal is to hopefully share that with others to maybe be able to steer a future FOSS/federated version that is more open and usable.