this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Most importantly, they're searchable on the internet.
Discord isn't even really searchable on discord. It was never meant for this kind of stuff and it shows.
What? Discord search is great. You can search by users, channels, text string, attachment file type, date, etc.
Ok, so say something is up with my car and i want to look into fixing it. I'm not in any car discord servers, so how do i find what is up with my car with? I can search all the dates and users i want, but i wont find anything useful. 10 years ago i could have just googled my make and model with with problem and the first link would have been a Saturn owners forum i never heard of with a thread detailing the problem thoroughly as well as estimates of how much i can expect to pay to fix it. Discord is just a modern IRC; it's great for talking with your buddies in real time and having that all be logged, but it's a terrible way to find information.
Lol yeah, now when you search google for stuff like that the experience is:
You find a website with a link to an owner’s enthusiast discord for your car’s model.
But then once you join you have access to one channel called #rules
Then you figure out you have to react to that one message in that channel with a tire burning out emoji and you get access to another channel called #introductions where you have to describe yourself and your car.
Then if a mod thinks it’s genuine, they’ll let you in to the other channels.
You finally get in and search for your issue. Your issue is really specific, but you don’t know the technical terms to search for, so your keyword of “brake squeaking” pulls up all a massive unorganized list of results purely sorted by post date of anything including those keywords, no way to sort by relevancy or popularity, so you scroll, and you scroll.
You find one message that is close, but you need more info. But before you can post in the #help channel you have to make 3 posts in #general (to fight spam of course).
Finally, after succeeding in the requirements, you copy a link to the message you found in search and post in #help.
A mod tells you to use the search, that question has been answered. You explain that you already did but you’re not sure exactly what to search for. You are now banned
Discord’s walled garden and conversational approach is awful for gestalt knowledge storage and access.
I hate Discord for the reason you mentioned but I remember having to jump through hoops on forums too. Shit sucked, but at least it was searchable and readable without having to do anything
Yeah forums were never great for organizing knowledge, but discord, being a chat platform, is the worst parts of forums without the good parts when it comes to trying to find answers. Honestly the best thing was Reddit, but Reddit now self destructing means that I can only hope lemmy instances allow themselves to be indexed so they begin to fill search results of real, organized questions and answers, with the benefit of comments being upvoted and downvoted and sortable, so the valuable information is more readily available
You just have to laugh…
Otherwise you’d cry! Thanks for this :-)
Okay yeah you're right here. Discord search is great for searching a server that you expect to have an answer. There is no solution if you aren't already part of a community.
All the others have good examples, but I mean something different.
If you search in a forum, you most likely get a thread dedicated to only your problem or something very similar with lots of matching answers (best case)
In Discord you find a question by someone with your exact problem and then 40 messages about other problems, cause there is only a single "problems" channel. This is a god awful experience.
It works until you wanna search for something that's somewhat similar to a common word. The other day I wanted to look for a discussion I've had about OpenAL, went to search for it and it showed everything with the word "open" in it. There's no further control so you're just at the mercy of what the search thinks you want, and this happens way too often.
This is anecdotal, but... I feel like it has gotten really slow. It's like it doesn't index anymore. It's so slow as to be unusable, even if I'm just searching within one DM history.
https://xkcd.com/979/