2mo ago

did user engagement drop significantly in programming forums?

There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.

Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?

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Communities moving to 'chat' based platforms instead of traditional discussion boards is something I've observed a lot in the last few years. Which certainly feel like a step backwards in my view. It keeps happening though, so I must he in the minority opinion on this.
- The quickest way to have me lose all interest in any new, potentially neat, tech is having to visit their discord for anything from documentation to discussion.
  
  Join our Discord!
  No, don't trouble yourselves, I'll just use something else.
  
  Lol I can't remember if it was sync or Lemmy that tried to get me on their discord server recently. I go to join, and it asked for some kind of ID verification. Like dude, I didn't have to do this for your actual app. As you might guess, I did not join the server.
  
  I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick... I don't want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question
  Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for "suspicious activity"
  At this point I just search the project name when it happens... I'm usually there to evaluate a project, and if that's not enough I just drop it
  
  Idk, I used to get my questions about Mirror for Unity answered on Discord either directly or by doing a search and never had a problem with it. I'd never say never.
  (Tbf, they do use GitHub and such but the Discord is quite active as well.)
  
  How does searching discord work? I was under the impression that entire chat logs weren't permanent and that older exchanges would be routinely deleted.
  
  I've searched chat logs that are ancient as all hell. Not sure what lead you to think they purge history. Maybe it's only on the largest servers?
  
  They do if the chat gets banned. Which eventually some dingas will do something that will get a community banned. Quite a bit of emulation docs got removed a couple of times this year because people cant take the hint not to talk about how they got their roms and emulators.
  
  It actually was half way decent til recently, then they just broke the search function for idk reasons. Discord doesn't purge chat to my knowledge.
  
  there's a thing you can add to a server to mirror everything to a proper indexable website: https://www.answeroverflow.com/
  
  I don't think Discord deletes chat logs. I have no idea how it works but I think restricting chat history based on tiers was more of a Slack thing. But maybe I'm wrong and they have permanent boosters who unlock all those perks?
  
  Discord doesn't delete chat logs AFAIK, however one of the permissions prevents you from reading things from before you joined a server/channel
- Yeah I will never understand why discord has replaced both forums and subreddits, the form factor doesn't fit the discussion style.
- Especially Discord is bad, because it cannot be indexed by web search engines. And the entire structure is not really good for long term, compared to dedicated posts in forums.
  
  It can be (linen.dev is one such solution). But the server owners have to set it up obviously, and often they don't. But it's not an issue if they cared to.
  
  I agree, but I think it's easier for the community owners to get user to join their discord channel with one click, than having users to sign up for a forum, create an account, con firm the email, post in the right subforum and also deal with spam and forum maintenance. It's seen as less hassle for admins and users
  
  it depends. Its not like every user and question requires a new account. There was a time where these companies had a Reddit group instead Discord. Its the same effort to create an account one time, but then it can be reused. Also there is this login with existing accounts (like Google or other methods), as a secondary option.
  If we are speaking about a dedicated forum, that's another thing. But since I gave up Reddit and because Fediverse is small, I started back creating accounts for forums. But only if really want to be part of it. But yes, agreed this is not convenient and Discord has a plus point here. Also Discord is integrated in other services as well (I think on game consoles, not sure).
  I see its pros and cons and why its successful. Also there is no better alternative for what it does. I'm just critical about the negative impact of it. I'm so glad that StackOverflow is not close like Discord.
- I think it's a result of trying to get support right now so you don't get stuck waiting for someone to up vote your question or having other questions push your thread further down.
  I've been a victim of this myself and going to Discord seems to be better getting someone to actually help you, especially for niche questions.
  I'm not saying I like it but I certainly get it.
  
  Also for people its often an embarrassment to ask certain questions, because they think its a stupid question. In a forum, everyone can see it and comeback years later (which is a good thing btw, but for some embarrassing). A chat is forgets much quicker and better.
  I think asking niche questions in a forum is very helpful too, otherwise you will only find common questions. Actually the niche questions answered and maybe corrected over time is very useful in forums. Because in a chat often niche questions requires the right person to be in the right group at the right time.

53 comments