'Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord' (kotaku.com) 158
Luke Plunkett, writing for Kotaku: A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. The site explained the move like sites and companies always do (only a few are still using them), and it made sense the way it always does (that's a lot of money for not much gain), but that doesn't mean the process itself isn't something that sucks. [...] Readers are then urged to move to the site's Discord, because of course they would be. Now, I don't want to pick on Eurogamer here, as like I said up top, in every individual case companies and sites have their reasons for doing this. The most frequently cited are the fact that forums need to be maintained (true!) and that people's conversational habits have changed, with forum use dwindling (also true!).
But I simply do not care, because a) I don't work for these companies, and b) I'm more interested in looking at the long-term damage this is doing to the internet. Forums and Discord are apples and oranges. Users aren't being moved from one similar thing to another, they're being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions. Discord is great for talking in the moment. [...] Forums aren't the same though. They're nothing like it. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they're far from perfect -- I'm sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate nor considered on forums -- the point is that they're more permanent. Forums create a record, an archive we can search through, so that whenever we want to revisit issues, or find help with a problem, or see what was happening during a certain time, we can do that. There's a paper trail, and while sometimes that leads to embarrassing takes on tv shows and game reveals, other times it's providing an enormous help with technical issues or parts of a game you're stuck on.
But I simply do not care, because a) I don't work for these companies, and b) I'm more interested in looking at the long-term damage this is doing to the internet. Forums and Discord are apples and oranges. Users aren't being moved from one similar thing to another, they're being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions. Discord is great for talking in the moment. [...] Forums aren't the same though. They're nothing like it. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they're far from perfect -- I'm sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate nor considered on forums -- the point is that they're more permanent. Forums create a record, an archive we can search through, so that whenever we want to revisit issues, or find help with a problem, or see what was happening during a certain time, we can do that. There's a paper trail, and while sometimes that leads to embarrassing takes on tv shows and game reveals, other times it's providing an enormous help with technical issues or parts of a game you're stuck on.
Its efin annoying (Score:5, Interesting)
lot of the electronic music forums closed down and they all went to FB so now unless you're constantly in touch with the dj or promoters only way to find out about local events especially "underground' ones in through FB groups.
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Arduino Forums move to Discourse, still annoying, really bad UI and most of the long term users hate it to fuck yet the Arduino Mods proclaim it's lovely, needs no modification and it will entice all these new people, the people who only like likes and badges and can only use a mobile.
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And yet, the AVR irc channel on libera.chat (server that replaced freenode) is active.
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That wasn't forums. Forums made up a small minority of performing arts advertisement. There was a lot of legwork, posters, word of mouth, and sure a bit of forums as well. But my point is Facebook supplanted a lot of this and forum posts were only one victim in this fundamental shift in the way performing arts were marketed.
This is all the more reason to get annoyed at morons who think Facebook is some pointless shit that is only used for spamming messages online. The reality is a lot of of things are now c
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Old people always complain about what young people are doing.
Would it kill you to call your grandfather occasionally, young'un?
Re:Its efin annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
25 years ago, there was a similar kerfuffle about mailing lists and Usenet groups moving to web-based forums.
Old people always complain about what young people are doing.
Thing is... Usenet groups and web forums ultimately have equivalent capabilities. Arguably Usenet has the advantage that it's not got a single point of failure, but it also lacked things like indexed search. Mailing lists were more akin to say... Twitter than web forums.
Discord is fundamentally a different type of interaction that web forums, as the summary makes very, very clear. Discord is ideal for realtime discussion and incredibly poor at archived/delayed lookup. Conversations meander as team members think of things related to the topic, which cascades into an unsearchable mess. With forums people inevitably get told to start a new thread to discuss a related but different topic.
Sure, many old things are obsoleted by new things. But the hammer is still the correct tool for interacting with a nail. The complaint isn't that web forums are old and Discord is new... it's that the hammer is being replaced by a screwdriver.
Re:Its efin annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
Old people always complain about what young people are doing.
That doesn't mean they're wrong / incorrect ... newer and/or different isn't always better.
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Facebook is for old people.
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Facebook is for old people.
Um, no. Old people know better than to go anywhere near Facebook!
Transition to a single company's control (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a big qualitative difference between the two kerfuffles. Like mailing lists and Usenet groups, web-based forums are not controlled by one company. Unlike mailing lists, Usenet groups, and web-based forums, Facebook is controlled by Facebook Inc, and Discord is controlled by Discord Inc.
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What's not true is young people using Facebook.
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember what the Internet lost when forums replaced Usenet. We couldn't stop it then, and you can't stop it now.
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But in some sense the forums should be money makers, because of ads. And remember how everyone says that adblock is evil because advertisements are such great things and our views of them are amazingy valuable. So when I search the internetz for answer to some tough question I very often find that the top 20 hits are identical, and they're just copying verbatim from one valuable forum. The sole reason they do this copying is because it's free money - they have no added value, they just want to get up ther
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The problem is, people pay for ad-free forums, which often gets them discord server access, then those paying people move from the forums to discord, leaving the free users on the forum.
Thus the forums lose money since it's just full of freeloaders and the paying people paid to chat on the discord.
At least, that's how it seems, because it's always "if you subscribe, you get access to the discord server!" (I'm not even sure why it's called as server, since as far as I can tell, it's not really a server...).
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Maybe they could have stopped it. In the example given the community could have set up its own forum, paid for it themselves, and maybe even got agreement to have it made official by the site owners.
Problem is they don't want to put their own time and money into it, they want it provided by someone else for free. Probably running an ad blocker too.
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People were using forums before the internet was even public, and many people were still using forums when usenet got replaced by RSS feeds.
It's funny though... what exactly did the internet "lose" when people stopped using usenet? Oh, wait, wait, I was there I know this one! Lots of racist spam. That's what we lost.
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Oh, wait, wait, I was there I know this one! Lots of racist spam. That's what we lost.
So is that why Slashdot is Swastika City now?
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Usenet still kind of lives. Look at Google Groups like comp.arch.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. Forums should be migrating to email lists and public-inbox [public-inbox.org] instead.
Chat is a useful tool for obtaining answers fast, but only the most popular (or best-funded) efforts can effectively staff a chat room 24×7. Following a busy chat closely is a time-intensive undertaking, and my human mind can only tolerate so much of that.
I wish communities would learn that Discord's main purpose is to monetize content for themselves. This benefits the end-user not at all and it's not necessarily a sweet deal for the site administrators, either. Any time you let a private entity interpose itself between you and your users, you become dependent on their continued benevolence and support to keep your community going. They don't even have to act maliciously to destroy what you have built—greed or neglect can also do the trick.
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Email lists are not as easy to search or scan through, and lack decent media support.
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Ah yes, I miss usenet. It seemed back then I can ask questions like how to configure a video input board for a computer and get useful answers. Nowadays when seeking help it seems to vector to a website that gives very general remedies of little value. Or forums where you read of many others having the same problem. There may be a specific forum but you have to know exactly what it is called (if you knew then already have the skill to fix your problem).
Yes usenet had problems but you could ask whatever yo
To be honest, not much lost (Score:3, Insightful)
I think moving from forums to chat rooms makes more sense.
Aside from the huge signal to noise ratio, a lot of archived info is obsolete. Maybe casual conversation should be just that: casual, and not stored forever?
Look at Amazon's product Q&A. Half of the people who respond to peoples' questions don't have a single useful brain cell in their head. That content should disappear.
Modern search engines have become really bad at differentiating which information is relevant in which context, especially when it comes to age. If you search on a lot of tech problems, you'll find tons of outdated "solutions" on various forums.
Re:To be honest, not much lost (Score:4, Interesting)
What I dislike is the limited search stuff. With a forum, I can do a search, find something relevant, and read that. With a Discord chat, it is trying to figure out the often mentioned topic and find any info before it wanders off into some random other topic.
Outdated "solutions" are still a path forward. I'd rather try that, than to join a new Discord server, try to find my way around and be polite, so don't tick off any mods, then maybe ask a question. Even asking likely won't return much info, so one often has to phrase something that is either wrong, and people will pile on to auto-correct, or take the chance at getting smacked in the face with the banhammer and state, "no way 'x' can do 'y'." in a provocative tone, and have people correct in no uncertain terms.
Discord is great for real time chats about stuff, but it is more of an ephemeral and transitory chat site, as opposed to a place where one should have topics that are answers, then saved so people an easily find them in the future.
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Google have a lot to answer for regarding forums. One forum that I frequent discusses a very niche topic. There's over 100,000 posts made over 7 years of completely original English language content, thousands of members, and no spam whatsoever. There are literally no other forums discussing this (apart from a low-traffic sub-Reddit)
If you type the name of the topic into Google, do you suppose the forum features on page 1? No. Page 2? Nope. In fact, it doesn't feature on any of the first 10 pages of Google.
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Google may de-index a site for valid reasons. I had one disappear when the owner hired a scam SEO company that loaded it with porn meta keywords. Meta keywords, that was a long time ago.
Whatever Google Webmaster Tools is called now can show you some hint of what's going on with indexing your site. If it were your site.
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Oh, the site is indexed. Put some text from the site in quotes, and Google finds it straight away.
Google simply treats it as insignificant, even though it is by far the largest store of knowledge about that one topic in existence.
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What I'm suggesting is... we don't search through chats either.
If someone comes up with a useful solution, it should be specifically archived in such a way so it can help other people. Why put the burden on search engines to try and figure out what you are searching for? They're not that accurate. People who want to make info available will make it available.
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I think moving from forums to chat rooms makes more sense.
Aside from the huge signal to noise ratio, a lot of archived info is obsolete. Maybe casual conversation should be just that: casual, and not stored forever?
Sure, for casual conversation, chat rooms are by far the better option. But when the go to form of contact for a Linux distribution switches from the forum, where everything is searchable and archived, to Discord, where the signal to noise can fly up quick, I have a hard time agreeing.
There have been times that I have gone hunting through forums for a problem that I'm sure others have experienced (nothing obscure or oddball), posted said problem, only to find people telling me to get on the Discord so that
Re:To be honest, not much lost (Score:4, Insightful)
In contrast, Discord is very good for sharing terse bits of info of temporary value. Great for active discussions, making announcements, etc. They are good for building communities around places and things like games. And for that, there is a point to hide information from search engines. Discord most certainly has its place, but it absolutely is not the same thing as a forum, it does not serve the same purpose nor is it a suitable replacement for one. I wish people understood that. But then again, we live in a world where supposedly smart people think that Sharepoint can replace a suite of tools for information management.
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Aside from the huge signal to noise ratio, a lot of archived info is obsolete
One man's obsolete is another man's primary historical source. Geocities was archived for this reason. I'm not sure how well that went, and I'm not sure if a google search would turn up Geocities material or I'd have to go IA to find it, but it has value.
See also, period advertising. People skimmed over ads in magazines 100 years ago, but now it's fascinating to look at ads for car companies from that era which built only 80 cars, and any number of other things that were considered boring and useless at
Re:To be honest, not much lost (Score:4)
Aside from the huge signal to noise ratio, a lot of archived info is obsolete.
About what topic? No seriously tell me what topic you specifically associate with obsolescence not being an issue?
FFS man my mother recently knitted a baby sack thing (I'm sure it has a name) using a pattern she found on a forum post that was almost 20 years old. I recently repaired an old CD drive using a schematic I found on a forum post from 99 from an old Technics forum. The internet is full of information from decades ago that is as much relevant today as it was at the time.
You not having a specific need for it doesn't mean we should purge it.
Look at Amazon's product Q&A. Half of the people who respond to peoples' questions don't have a single useful brain cell in their head.
Amazon's product Q&A is not a forum, it's a shitshow where idiots go to vomit letters in borderline incoherent patterns. *THAT* content should disappear. *THAT* content is not in any way representative of the overwhelming majority of internet forum discourse. Hell there's more important and relevant information on 4chan.
Modern search engines have become really bad at differentiating which information is relevant in which context
Modern search engines provide you with direct tools to specify context. They aren't bad simply because you don't know how to use them. Heck I often default back to using Google to search a specific forum using the site: operator.
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and most modern search engines have removed Boolean operators.
Bing and Google have boolean operations including and, or, not, wildcards, support nested grouping of wildcards, exact matches, synonyms, metadata searches and ranges. So that covers nearly every search currently done on the internet outside of China.
Contextual search still very much exists as well, it's just processed in natural language. If you know how to talk to me then you know how to do a contextual search on Google. The people who can't are usually the ones who think they are more clever than the sea
Back in the day... (Score:3)
Move everything back to Newsgroups. Has everything mentioned and still exists. Even has real life filtering. Forums do a poor job of that.
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newsgroups are still around, for certain open source projects and nerdy interests. gmane.io is alive and well
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Usenet was better in theory, but lots of groups needed volunteer moderation. Forums were better at that for a while, but the walled-garden aspect made me queasy. Then running the server software became a bigger task as time went on: security patches, moderation, resources. Then, for article commenting at least, along came easy-peasy third-party Disqus with its paltry features - not even threaded. Reddit and a few well-run forums are about the only thing left for my own mundane interests.
If I were running a
A better idea (Score:2)
The other issue I have with Discord... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"...In a recent case, an online newsletter outed a Catholic priest who was a frequent user of the Grindr gay hookup app. The newsletter purchased the Grindr usage data from a third-party data broker. Even though the data set had no identifying information, the newsletter found him using his device ID and location data. The ID showed up in gay bars, his work address, and family addresses, which was enough to
Discord is not indexed by Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Discord is not indexed by Google or other search engines, so any information there is invisible to web searches. It's terrible for discoverability of information. In the less common cases where Discord servers are actually archived, downloading the dumps and searching them locally is a huge pain for the folks that actually bother to do so.
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It's terrible for discoverability of information.
Absolutely spot on. I have never been on Discord and I don't know what it really is or does, mostly because searches for information on various topics has not ever led me there. I am a member (and now moderator) of a particular forum for 10 years now because a search brought me there once upon a time. If Discord had any use in the realm of information discovery, I'd have ended up there organically by now.
Re:Discord is not indexed by Google (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely spot on. I have never been on Discord and I don't know what it really is or does,
It's essentially corporate-owned IRC.
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It's essentially corporate-owned IRC.
But also with emojis and a shitty inconsistent UI designed by ADHD gamers.
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yes I admit the "data", the discussion in Discord servers in many cases can be quite valuable to people interested in topics discussed. So what? No, the world doesn't get to see it, it's an interactive medium for people to discuss. You don't join a particular "server", you don't get to see.
What's your problem? I'm not deflecting anything. You're the one unclear on the concept. No one owes you that information, but if you had the gumption to join a particular server and behave, you'd get to search. No
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Discord is not indexed by Google or other search engines
That's because Google and other search engine aren't yet good enough to make sense of memes. Half of the discussions on Discord occur in the form of animated GIFs. Seriously: try following a convo with Discord apps javascript and images blocked: the convo is unintelligible.
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It's not so much that Google can't make sense of the memes (which may be true but is not an unsolvable problem by Google's engineers), but rather search engines are deliberately blocked from accessing the relevant content such as /channels by the site's robots.txt [discord.com]. As iggymanz commented above, this is by design, which I'd certainly agree with; but I disagree with their other point and argue that this is a bad thing, not a good thing.
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Agree (Score:5, Informative)
I agree - particularly when I'm looking for something informative like how to replace a certain car part or the like, I often find the information or an answer buried in some forum post that could be 10-15 years old.
Personally I'm still a very active forum user, but at the end of the day I think its not profitable for companies to run them. Most of the popular forums I visit are run by enthusiasts of whatever subject the forum caters to. Sometimes they make enough on banner ads and user donations to pay the bills - other times whoever technically owns the forum just pays the hosting costs out of their pocket because they enjoy it. Sort of the old BBS model from the pre-internet days - if you wanted to run a BBS you typically were doing so because you enjoyed it not because there was anything to gain.
The solution honestly is just move to a different forum. And if there isn't one for the niche you're interested in then fire up phpBB or some other free forum software and set one up yourself. One thing that the modern internet HAS brought is relatively cheap hosting or even cheap virtual machines that are always online and ready to serve up whatever you need.
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You can always charge $10 to register and have paid avatar changes and other upgrades!
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Still doesn't address the owner of the forum died. Bye bye forum.
Get off my lawn! (Score:2)
As a customer, we are always looking for prices to rise less for products we want than average. If we are willi
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Several years ago I went to the water department to discuss a bill. When I was younger, it was full of people, take a number, get personal attention for your issue from someone who could fix or tell you why not. What I found is the building had been closed to the public, and one security guard. It was basically a telephone bank. You could walk in a call someone, but no one to help you with forms.
I think you might have made a wrong turn and ended up at the state prison instead.
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You likely don't have a "water department," those of us who do can still get customer service.
You more likely have a water company.
Pavlovian disgust (Score:3, Insightful)
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uh, you do know you can turn off notifications, sound and visual? And not install their app, just use the thing in browser so there a zero things to bother you when you don't want to deal with it?
Not saying discord is all grand but I do use it for a hobbyist reasons and also with some friends in a private on.
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But if you ignore notifications the message just gets "lost in a sea of messages".
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and there is no problem. you tell people you have channel or server muted because your'e busy, and only interact when logged in. you can even put in your profile description. it's one of many possible presences in a server and it's fine.
the costs of forums (Score:2)
are four-fold: 1) bandwidth, 2) infrastructure, 3) maintenance, 4) moderation
The bandwidth costs you can try to reduce by using a CDN, but that only gets you so far depending on the size of the forum and how well you cache. The infrastructure costs depend again on the size of the forum, but also the kind of software. If you can run it on super cheap servers and you don't get that much traffic, great, otherwise you might need a couple decent sized ones for a regular amount of traffic and multiple instances f
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An alternative would be to create a Wikipedia-esque non-profit hosting company for forums. They support one kind of forum software, and if you have a forum, they'll give you tools to export/import your existing forum into their system. You pay no (or little) money, or the community funds via donations. And they can run ads to recoup costs. If you pay for the domain, each forum could have a custom one. They could help automate spam-fighting, spread out maintenance, and try to reduce costs.
This sounds like a more liberal variant of reddit.
Three Forums Lost for Me (Score:5, Informative)
I've lost three forums to the "move to Discord". The population for all of them have died off quickly. The remaining people are bros that dominate discussion. Chatrooms are bad for in-depth conversation. They're HORRIBLE for creating references for future readers.
Re:Three Forums Lost for Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Reddit slowly but surely absorbed general discussion, current events, generic tech stuff, generic gaming, and so on. Why discuss with a relatively small audience when you could discuss with the entire hivemind?
Discord seems to be finishing the job reddit started by peeling off the niche interests that aren't large enough for reddit's algorithm to care about.
Annoyingly enough, most of my hobbies (especially wrenching on cars) have an insane amount of knowledge trapped in forums that are likely all dead photobucket/imgur links or just plain gone. Often times internetarchive has caught the text, which I guess is something, but that certainly didn't help me with "here's the problem, I circled it in red") from 2006. =\
Re:Three Forums Lost for Me (Score:4, Insightful)
They're HORRIBLE for creating references for future readers.
Exactly this. I'm generally fine with forums moving to Discord (though I won't be following them) if the communication taking place on them was purely transient in nature to begin with, such as coordinating a group or discussing the latest episodes of a vapid reality show. But I've read through countless pages in forums for software, home A/V, video games, coding, and any number of other subjects, trying to find offhanded mentions someone made six years ago to a thing I just encountered that I can't find mentioned in any of the usual places, but which a search engine suggests might be related to my query.
When we're talking about enthusiasts and experts sharing their collective knowledge about something, you lose a LOT by shifting the conversation to a closed system like Discord. Forums can be indexed, archived, and preserved. Not so with Discord. It's fine if the point of the conversation is simply to be there in the moment, but if anything of substance is being discussed that could serve future people, Discord is the wrong medium.
Agreed (Score:2)
DIscord sucks as a forum replacement.
There are better free forum replacements like Google Groups, or Reddit, or... but these are also highly undesirable as they are different companies and are likely to go away or change significantly and take all your historical forum posts with them. Sort of like what the article is complaining about and also like the dark days of Deja News replacement by Google Groups.
Reddit (Score:3)
I think Reddit might be the better answer. Reddit has some great info on certain topics already. Also you don't have to worry about the company who owns the forum cutting out info they don't like.
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Reddit has gone off the deep end in a number of ways, especially as a result of things like the Boston Marathon bombing Reddit fiasco [bbc.com]. Now the company is terrified of doxing to the point you can't even post a link to any social media posts (unless a long list of criteria are met). Then every subreddit is moderated by its own gestapo that enforce their own rules and the like. Too confusing, too much overlap, too much noise.
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All you can really do on Reddit these days is to play the Reddit game.
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No worse than Ars Technica.
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But at least /r/posthresql, /r/csharp and /r/wireguard does not suffer to bad from the above mentioned problems.
Do you want them to?
The sad bit is that trolling works great on Reddit, and there's nothing a sub moderator could do against it.
centralized (Score:2)
The internet needs to stay decentralized. That way, if one company is hit with something, everybody else isn't hit at the same time. Right now, a lot of communities are one successful attack away from being completely crippled... all of them at the same time.
Besides: discord is intended for gamers, not for other crowds. Also, it's slow as elephant dung and eats cpu for breakfast. How it ever became as successful as it did is beyond me.
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The more they change (Score:2)
Save the forums! (Score:2)
Where else am I going to find a five year old post that completely describes the obscure problem I'm having and can't find anywhere else, just to say "fixed it" without providing any details about what the fix was?
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Just install this patch, bro. [megaupload.com]
Search is the big one (Score:2)
Forums you build a legacy of knowledge, then can point to it for those who don't search.
Discord you have to repeat the same things over and over and burn out mods. And if the person who knows isn't there at the moment, users get wrong info instead, and wrong info becomes de facto standard info as it gets repeated by those who don't know better. Then someone who knows tries to correct it but gets outnumbered by the incorrect.
(Yes, I started a large Discord years ago that is still active although I've moved
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Other people have suggested something like this... and honestly its a good idea.
https://support.discord.com/hc... [discord.com]
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Anyone who has ever been to a board as a knowledgeable member for more than 1 month knows that nobody uses the search function, no matter how much people claim to do so.
On any support board, you know the FAQ after no more than a month of tenure. But making an actual FAQ doesn't really do anything, for the same reason.
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As a Reddit mod which has a worse search than most forum software (use Brave search or Google instead on Reddit), it's actually a minority who want engagement who don't use search. Folks who want immediate answers use search to get them. Folks who don't care as much for an immediate answer who want to felt heard are the ones who post redundant inquiries. Which is also why they don't take kindly to being told "just search" or "here's a FAQ link", as what they want isn't exactly what they're asking, if tha
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Just as long as I don't have to hug them.
This is going to eliminate information (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it, message boards and forums have a much, much longer tenure of information than media like Discord could hope for. Which is a-ok for a discussion that nobody cares anymore 3 days down the road, but as soon as actual information is distributed, like, say, how to solve an issue with a piece of software, this means that 3 days down the road, that information is gone.
I am fairly sure that everyone here sooner or later encountered this situation: You're dealing with a curious quirk in a piece of software and you're googling for information. Eventually, you find someone talking about it in a thread from 10 years ago, with someone providing the solution to the obscure and probably 2-of.-a-kind problem (one per decade).
Now, of course you could as well ask again. But that requires that the person who knows the answer is still in any way interested in the software and thus follows the Discord channel, is still interested enough to actually answer it becasue it's probably a boring problem for them by now and of course it requires them to even notice your question.
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I find far more often that while the 10 year old fix may still work, all the menu options and tabs you're supposed to navigate through have changed name and been relocated. I would much rather ask again.
Forums? Nope! (Score:2)
Discord is a difficult-to-search text chat that I use exclusively for voice chat with gaming friends.
Forums aren't great (Score:2)
Before you mod me down, let me say that forums work fine as a concept. However, my problem is with the software. When I ran a forum, I specifically installed a plugin that would shut down the forums every time an update became available so I wouldn't become the victim of a security breach. It was a huge hassle to constantly upgrade the software every few weeks to stay ahead of the bad guys. I didn't want to pay someone else to run the forum either. I eventually decided that better documentation + Disco
Why not both? (Score:2)
Discord is live chat, for fast questions and answers and direct help from other users. Web forums are for in-depth discussions, with permalinks and search. There are different situations when one is better than the other.
I think the best communities I've been in have had both a web-based forum and a live chat (on Discord, IRC or some other service). Done right, the two mediums complement each other.
I got banned for voicing similar sentiment. (Score:2)
I was using a Google Groups forum and they moved to gitter.
I indicated on the mailing list that gitter was a way to lose information.
I got banned from both the mailing list and gitter.
IF users actually searched for their question... (Score:2)
...then we wouldn't have the bi-annual argument over daylight savings time on /. the way we have twice a year, every year, right on schedule, for the last 25 years.
Seriously, the forum idea relies on the idea of users willing to search for the question before asking it.
It never happens. It never will.
Usenet groups created FAQ files along time ago. Only the addicts read them. The newbies never did, and we still saw the same questions over and over. It doesn't help that corporate FAQ files are just marketing
Re: (Score:2)
We didn't lose. We automated [intercom.com] the answers. If people want to act like machines, then they can talk to one.
Tried Discord (Score:2)
Utter shit, app deleted off my phone. And what's with the Cuntu$erve style numerical IDs? Discord needs to move past 1991.
The big problem moving away from web forums (Score:2)
Web forums are fine, as you can search them using Google.
The problem with Facebook Groups is that Facebook is closed, so no search engine like Google can search them. Facebook's search sucks, and you can only search public groups. You cannot search private groups if you aren't a member of them.
Reddit can be somewhat searched by Google et al, but it's not great since comments are difficult to search. And Reddit's own search is terrible.
Re:I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
So you're ignorant of what it takes, why don't you try it for real, the full monty with sufficient storage, and backups and archive, and get back to us. I do know what it takes since one my servers is similar, around $200 a month.
Re: (Score:3)
So you're ignorant of what it takes
More like he's ignorant of your standards. Web sites and forums can be any scale.
I've been running a forum and a couple BBSes for over 15 years, and my hosting costs (for my entire web site) is in the ball park of $250/yr. Granted, I used to have thousands of visitors 10 years ago and now I have only a few dozen these days, but I still keep it around since the cost and effort is minimal, and I only run it for fun.
Re: I call BS (Score:5, Informative)
The hosting costs are cheap. The moderation and security administration costs are crazy expensive unless your time is free.
Re:I call BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I'm running such a forum, I can tell you that it's not that cheap. Yes, hosting is affordable, even if you have to use a powerful machine because the forum is just part of the deal, 100 bucks a month go a long way. The problem is a different one. First, webservers are a prime target for attacks. Simply because pretty much every frontend you might be using can contain any number of security flaws. So you're constantly patching, because you can rest assured that whenever some new flaw rears its head, the usual suspects are crawling the internet in search of a server lacking the relevant security patches. Simply because it's a huge target.
So yes, I'm doing other things too. But considering at what price I can sell an hour of my time, I can see why people would be willing to dump forums in favor of a server they're not responsible for.
Re: (Score:2)
So why are hosted, modern forums not a thing? That way all that effort is on a company whose business it is to handle it. Disqus is the closest I've seen to this.
Re: (Score:2)
It's IRC for the ADHD and oh-shiny! generation.
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Re: (Score:2)
Discord stores the chat and you can search it. Also, it is common to have sub rooms in a channel. You can also pin text or multimedia.
It still sucks as a forum though.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, reddit is basically a forum, right? that would make more sense for me....
Reddit is to Slashdot as Discord is to forum :-)
I refer you to this post: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]