1418
ditch discord!
(discuss.tchncs.de)
person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let's check out the community"
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text "nevermind".
I don't get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can't find anything, I can't tell what conversations are over, I can't figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it's completely devoid of anything of value, if it's too big everything of value gets buried.
I've tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.
That's was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.
Made me never want to step into discord again.
Same thing with EVERY SINGLE GORILLA TAG SERVER. Way too many mentions. Not straight forward enough. I can not express this enough. It’s insane!
It's great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I've always found it painful
But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so...
Yeah. My D&D group uses it for audio and video feeds and a little bit of between session chat. I appreciate how good the audio settings are.
It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.
I tried posting an image using the app on my phone but it kept ignoring it. Somehow I magically hit the right button and it included it in my reply. I had no idea.
The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.
It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.
I think it is only used more than IRC because you can post images.
What do you mean find anything?
Discord is used like this:
Text message: you wanna play today? Yeah.
Discord: here's the server address. Thanks
Discord voice chat: I made us a bunch of supplies. Cool I dug up a diamond.
And if we were talking about hooking up with our friends to play Minecraft, that'd be a great point.
Everyone is like "discord is a bad project discussion and documentation space! "
Which could be read as "it's very hard to cut this steak with a plunger!"
People are complaining about using a tool incorrectly.
We're complaining about having to use it incorrectly. We can't help if the software project (that's part of a software project, that's part of a software project we need) only offers support via discord.
To belabor your metaphor, you're saying that we shouldn't complain if we want a steak and the only place to get steak only offers plungers as utensils.
Does that really happen? I only used discord for limited socialization, discussing e.g. math in specific channels.
You don't have to. Fork it, make it better. Crush the existing developers, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their Patreon donators.
It's open source software. Forking and improving is a core feature.
If people have a decent idea but a shit implementation, supercede them.
Sure. If you need software support, build a support system and get everyone else to use it. Makes perfect sense. I hope you live exclusively by this principal.
What? This is about documentation and maintenance of an open source project, this isn't a SaaS situation.
If your documentation sucks, you're no better than the discord hell the original project came from.
And yes, I only work with open source projects that are run well, or I fork them and maintain them for personal use.
I'm interested, what's your process for 'personal' forks? Any extra steps?
The one discord thing I do is mention I am making the fork, then spend the first while doing the documentation I wish existed. I set up the repo to accept issues and allow discussion.
Conan the Developer has spoken!
Well the specific context here is software projects using it as the platform for their community... So it's kind of like going to a steakhouse and being given a fork and plunger to eat with. It makes sense to both complain about the steakhouse, and remark on the shortcomings of using a plunger for the purpose it was imposed on you for.
Now of course, it's wrong to say that Discord or a plunger are bad tools per se-- They are both occasionally useful for when I need to deal with some problematic shit. They are unpleasant, but I just hold my nose and thoroughly wash my hands after.
Actually the plunger analogy tracks better than I expected.
To which I'm saying anyone who engages with discord in a project space that is silly. Creators and users. Software dev happens elsewhere. Fork it and make it better.
Fork... what? The software project that you're trying to get help with? The problem isn't that you need to change the code, the problem is that you want to be able to leverage the community.
Oh sorry are you not familiar with GitHub or other branching code managers?
Haha that's not the issue, but it's pretty clear that you're deliberately misunderstanding at this point.
I understand it fine. People are intrigued by a useful project, only to find the junk devs run a discord for community engagement, issue tracking, devlog, and so on.
People feel helpless they they have to engage with discord in this way, because it is shit for that stuff.
People have no ability to self correct their experience, even though the system has built in features to allow them to improve the project by forking it and raising the standards.
Great, I knew you could understand if you wanted to (hence the "deliberate" part).
So... Yes. Exactly. The complaint is about poor choices in the implementation of the project's community. Not everybody who would want to use the software (e.g. Typst, in this meme) knows how to code at all. Those people are reliant on the community for support, and may choose to avoid a project if the community isn't good for them. That's the premise of the meme, and orthogonal to any properties of the version control system.
Among those who can code, it's still reasonable that someone might consider the community when evaluating the cost of integrating the project... Especially if they plan to be an end-user of the application.
It's great if you grok the source of every project you use and accept the burden of maintaining them yourself in lieu of a good community. That's really neat. But I don't think it's practical for everybody to do that for everything they might want to use... Yes, even though the Fork button is right there.
So generally people would prefer to complain that improve? Very cool. Just flail and meme
Lol yes, people would often rather avoid getting involved with a piece of software at all (and perhaps complain about it), instead of taking over the burden of developing and supporting it themselves. Kids these days, right?
Sucks to suck I guess
I've always found that Discord's search works pretty well!
Yeah that's what I use most to see if people have asked the same question I have then I jump to the discussion they had and that leads me where I want to go, but I do get it would be really annoying for someone who isn't logged into discord or uses it to chat with friends
Forums do it better, can be indexed by a search engine, can be bookmarked, and can be archived using the wayback machine or a similar service. Important information shouldn't be buried in chat logs. And discord's forum feature was an idea they tacked on and is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Those are definitely some excellent points
The barrier to entry for IRC is very high for non technical users. It's also archaic, has little to no customisation and can be difficult to moderate at high volumes.
I'm not defending discord here, but the IRC comparisons are silly.
I am guessing they advertised the right time in the right place. I agree, it's absolute trash
Are you old?
28yo here - Discord feels as if ADHD was a piece of software
As someone diagnosed - you couldn't have said it better 10/10
I’m 25 and share all these woes, what is old to you?
I’m 21 and completely agree.
Old is when you don't try to understand the interface anymore.
Discord enables so much that's never been so convenient before. Can't say I like the company, but it's pretty much the best at what it does.
I joined reddit at 23 like 3 yrs ago from Tumblr/4chan(tttt)/VK/irc and already used discord before. It's just shit and you're coping
K? Coping with what exactly?