1y ago

Discord != Documentation

Bumba's Shitpost Palace @boomer.casino

1 0

143 comments

- Yes! Discord is such a black holes for good knowledge, it's a crime
  
  Does Discord now offer the ability to save/fav comments to find them again? When I used it the last time, i was amazed how everything just scrolls by without a possibility to hold on to something.
- Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord's doors.

I fucking hate Discord. It's a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can't google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can't grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.
- Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently "migrated" their Github discussions to Discord... I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!
  Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.
  
  The fuckers deleted the discussions!
  This is a very Facebook-like thing to do. They are openly hostile towards everyone, including their users and advertisers. Shit stain of a company that constantly makes the worst decisions.
- It's because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.
  Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it's relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.
  It makes sense, but it's sad nonetheless.
  
  The problem is discoverability. And that's where I don't get why anyone in their right mind would use Discord for stuff like that.
  Say, you have Github, a forum or even a subreddit for your project.
  Somebody asks a question, you answer it.
  Somebody else has the same question. Either they are intelligent enough to find it themselves or they ask and you just link your old answer. Done.
  On Discord, it's basically impossible to find an answer that is more than two screens full of posts ago. So you have to keep answering the very same questions all the time.
  
  Subreddits and GitHub discussions exist and don't require accounts to view nor do they require hosting anything.
  
  I apparently am not most users.
  No desire to use discord in the slightest honestly.
- All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.
  I use it, but it's basically "Free Ventrilo but not as shit." I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.
- I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible...
  ...but I also agree with everything you say here
- Now that it has threads and features for communities I think it's pretty decent.
  
  The search tool works pretty well that's usually what I use, or just check the pinned messages that links you to a GitHub or something with a FAQ

Also "I'm so sick of this question" well then put the answer somewhere that's indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.
- There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.
- I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.
  No, I don't want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.
  
  Yeah I can't stand that shit. Just put it on GitHub

I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.
- It wastes everyone's time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don't have instant access to answers
  
  Why would any sane developer want to use this system to "document" their project? Written docs have worked well for a million years and there's no need to change them.
- What 3d printer is this so I can avoid it?
  
  I’m afraid they’re talking about the Voron printers, which are really great printers.
- What printer is this so I can avoid it?
- Poor bastard. I feel you. 💐

Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platform

Requests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶
- I mean, it's not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.
  
  It's still a shit ruling. Back in the day they just blocked all .io sites so you couldn't play agar.io and so on. But all the IT sites we used were also blocked by that. So we had to go and ask the guy for every single one until he grew sick of it and opened it again
  
  That’s true, but we had a work server there for voice chat
- Not wrong lol, it's a gamer chat. It tried to rebrand as a regular chat app, but the entire gamer aesthetic says otherwise.
- Better than being blocked as tasteless. Encountered that one the other day.

Kids these days:
StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice.. Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there's still someone who hasn't gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.
- Always has been. Old forums were full of this.
  
  Yeah, StackExchange solved this problem. Concrete example, moving from ubuntuforums.org to AskUbuntu.com was a life changer. The time to find correct solutions dropped through the floor.

I'm 50 and I have a 23 year old "RTFM" t-shirt.
- This context needs to be on the shirt.

I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don't approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That's when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.
- This year has been dramatic. I've seen a big increase of users with quality content doing deletes in protest of Reddit. And the shift to sites like Lemmy that are not as favored by search engines.
  Reddit should have gone the other direction, become a non-profit, eliminate advertising, go back to open sourcing the code like they used to, and run on donations. Cut their staff of people that had anything to do with advertising and trying to market the platform.

One wouldn't be too wrong to point at similarities between cancer and Discord in how it quickly takes over different systems (e.g. issue tracking, discussions, Q&A, documentation) and replaces them with a single non-functional thing (chat).
But, to play the devil's advocate, Discord seems to have some kind of a forum functionality, however I've never encountered those Forum Channels myself.
- I’ve only seen it so far in the discord group for the city building game Cities: Skylines. And it’s still a mess.

Agreed. Trying to find answers for questions probably already asked on Discord is impossible.
- And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it's not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.
  Looking at you, Our Summer Car -_-

So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it's just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I'm really interested in and I can't say it doesn't work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??
- For open source, I almost always found IRC was a black hole of information. All kinds of developers discussing things that never made it to search engines. It's a long tradition.
  
  As a dev, far easier to answer questions about my code than write up documentation, so makes total sense to me
  With discord at least you can usually search chat history for your question and find someone else asking it in the past
  I wonder... Might be able to write a language model based crawler that goes through a discord server and pulls out all the useful information to generate documentation or at least a FAQ

I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers
- And the people asking basic questions probably don't want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.
  And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it's going. Further people who aren't deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.
- Very complex questions should be discussed on traditional forums.
  
  True, that would make it better to find the answer. My experience with traditional forums though is that I have to sign up to a brand new website and make a post only to not get a response, and because it's a brand new site I have to keep checking it for a response every day.

This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.
- It's admittedly quite good at what it was originally supposed to be: a voice chat service for playing games that's easy to join, use, and share. The troubles began when they started trying to pivot to be a general-purpose public internet space provider, because the platform was never supposed to be that and they've done absolutely nothing to support it.
- Discord is great for what is is. It just shouldn't be used for anything other than some chat and some voice.

I see a lot of things that have a discord community.
Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?
- Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.
  
  I don’t care for the real-time communication aspect of it. In fact i find it unusable.
  Am I supposed to just sit there and read random conversation and wait for a point to jump in?
  Seems like it takes too much effort.
  
  easy to use
  Doubt
- It's free*, insanely easy to set up, you don't have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there's a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.
  
  Basically the same reasons subreddits supplanted forums.
- Lots of users gush over Discord for some reason. My impression is that more technically minded people don't really like it, but your average user uses it for almost everything and encourages more services they like to use it. Hence why many reddit subs moved to Discord - the mods didn't necessarily prefer it, but they were sent an overwhelming number of requests from their users.
  
  Thanks for the heads up, i guess I just a bit too old to have been part of the discord group.
  In the country where I live, it’s all Facebook messenger. It’s a shame as o think a number of people don’t really care for it, but everyone and every business uses it so we are kind stuck.

This applys to so much more than just programming now, sadly

Hate this so much, very much into 3d printing (voron right now) and huge parts of the community are on discord it's just an absolute pain to use
- Annex engineering requires phone number verification to enter their discord. Fuck that.
  
  The phone number gatekeeping is annoying. I think ChatGPT requires it. I can’t use it because it won’t accept my phone number as I only use VoIP numbers. Never mind they used to be land and cell numbers I posted there. Same with some banking sites. No sms 2FA allowed because the gateway they use can’t jump to voip - the codes just never arrive.
- Do you have invite links?
- Imo the discord works quite well. For mods the github repo us great and for most questions a diacord is enough. I like the fact that i can quickly share stuff and get answers. Forums always felt very clunky to me. I can use them, but the culture us often a bit shit, and then there are those that need registration to view posts or pictures. While those problems also apply to discord, i dont need a ton of accounts, i can somply join a server.

Totally agree, please let the doc be doc, not a chat.
PS: what were the original subtitles of the screenshot? :)

Fuck Discord.
- I just tried asking a question yesterday, and realized there's basically no way to save / bookmark / whatever a specific thing... it's seriously just a fucking chat room.
  
  Yeah it's literally just that. I still have no idea why it's used as some kind of database by so many
- It's great for what it's intended for, a gaming voice/text chat server.
  
  Yeah I don't get the hate for Discord here. If you use it for customer service or as a substitute for documentation, I can imagine it being annoying. It's like using Excel for absolutely everything. Excel isn't that bad, it's just the people that use it badly make it so.
- Seriously fuck discord
- No don't, it's a good chatting service, much better than Messenger for one. Fuck users who misuse a chat app as customer “service” rather than writing documentation!

I'm not 41 yet, but even if you csn somehow make a chat room app replace the functionality of code documentation or a few simple example code snippets... should you? You're also hosting on GitHub and not on MEGA, even though you could...

Pull requests welcome!!

RTFD, or something like that.
- I think you mean RTFM. But in this case it's WTFM so I can RTFM.
  
  No, i think op is saying RTFD as in "read the fucking discord"

Matrix chat as the core developer hangout I find is similar
- true

I'm usually on the documenting side of things. If something like this starts unfolding, I produce text or HTML files anyway, they go on github/lab/whatever, and I wash my hands of what happens next.
In the end I write documentation mostly for myself. When the company can't figure things out over Discord or whatever ephemeral chat interface they use, I get called anyway.
- > I produce text or HTML files anyway
  I do extensive in-code documentation. The compiler discards all comments so I don't worry about commenting my code. Source code is for humans to understand and write anyways.
  
  Oh, yeah. My source code is like 60% comments by weight (or more). Although I typically produce separate standalone documentation for management or semi-technical staff. You know, people who know enough to possibly break something, but not enough to fix it afterward. I find it useful when trying to train new people too.
  
  Also writing documentation in-code like JavaDoc or equivalents has always seemed great for me. Then you can have your toolchain generate the written documentation directly from that, and it can be updated easily based on what's actually documented in the code (but that does require that people keep that updated)

Also, putting documentation in a format that has way too many features so just reading docs takes up 40% of CPU usage. Yes ,fuck you for using gitbook, i hate it so fucking much

To be fair, a discord comment from five years ago is still more helpful than Amazon AWS's actual documentation.
- at least you can google Amazon’s wrong answer, there’s no way to Google a right answer that’s locked away in a Discord room …

The only real alternatives to Discord is Matrix and Revolt. I am on both and there are a good number of people on there but they aren't too active. Wish they would be more popular and widely used
- I think you're missing the point here. The solution to the "documentation on a chatroom" problem is not putting documentation on another chatroom.
  
  The lack of indexable pages is a killer, what a waste of human time to be answering the same basic questions because every previous answer gets sucked into the black hole of a walled chat room with bad search.
  
  Ah I see what you mean. The point completely went over my head. Yes, I definitely agree that documentation should be on GitHub or something so it's easily and openly indexable.
- No love for Mattermost?

I don't think GitHub is social enough or the right tool to address bugs, talk about issues, or completely missing - ask for expertise. It's not even democratic enough and done in such a way that makes what to work on clear at times.
Some code is still more art than work or science but still there is a notion that maybe if there was a better tool than GitHub there would be no need for a discord.

143 comments

Kids these days: