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.
If you thought Reddit or Lemmy mods were bad, wait until you deal with a forum admin on a power trip.
They’re the same people. If someone is on a power trip, it suck regardless.
Yeah plus mods do all the shit the rest of us don’t want to do
Mods don’t do shit anyway. You could remove them and every community would immediately improve. Doing absolutely nothing in this case will be better than what’s going on now
Naw, thats when the freeze peaches people come and turn it into a cess pool of racism and trolls.
If you’re talking about discord yeah. Not exactly what they do there but I also haven’t used it in years.
On forums they remove spam, CP, all that shitty stuff no one wants to see.
nah man,
mods that are doing their (unpaid) job help with:
- removing trolls & spam
- removing things that break the TOS
- obviously enforcing the rules of the community
- and if the format allows for that I also believe they should mediate conflicts between members
corruption and power trips are another thing, it’s a really common problem because any amount of power can get into people’s heads and make them act like assholes. I believe a part of the problem is also opting for the path of least resistance, where instead of solving a solvable problem a lot of mods instead opt to just get rid of it. But then how much bullshit are you capable of putting up with?
don’t get me wrong, I myself am an anarchist, but today’s internet is not built to be sustainable without moderation. Anarchism relies on mutual aid and keeping each other accountable, which is just not possible in a place where everyone is anonymous, can create a hundred alts, and doesn’t even need to look another person in the eyes as they hurt them and the communities they are active in
I agree, let votes deal with it and take mods out of the equation.
I always find it weird when people complain about getting banned by “power tripping mods”. I have only had a few encounters with a moderator who I thought was being overly obsessive about arbitrary rules. Most of my time, I did not care to resubmit contents to a group who did not want to see it anyways. The few times that I did, I carefully tried to address the moderators objections and my repost was allowed.
Sure, there are definitely some idiots who are obsessed with their perfect view of what should be said on a forum, but most of the time that I have seen, it is a user who cannot act right and doubles down on their stupid when they get called out on it.
Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site’s greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what’s going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you’re never going to catch up and still give a shit.
Problem with reddit is that everyone thinks they’re a comedian and people just upvote the same repeated jokes over and over. You still have to wade though tons of garbage to find the good stuff, and thats after filtering tons of shit with RES. Reddit was great at one point but it got exhausting.
If you nested the comments by time and layer instead of votes and layer it would reduce the amount of attention seeking behavior.
First!
-_-
Reduce
You can collapse whole comment trees, though, which cuts down scrolling time.
You can with a decent App…
On old.reddit, it’s the
[-]button and on new reddit it’s done by pressing the vertical lines on the left of the comments. I don’t know about mobile.
r/science was great in this regard. They moderated the threads to weed out the exhaustion.
I wonder if something that combines reddit and slashdot could work well. Instead of simply up voting things, you do “+1 funny” or something.
Never really put my finger on why, but that must be the reason I’ve never been active on any forums, just lurking, but I’ve always been very much active on Reddit and now lemmy. Combine that with the need to register an account to all the different forums and the fact that you can’t catch up to all of them from a single front page.
Then you find modetated forum and you can follow anyone, not just a community/subreddit, and over the years…
Great for sharing and storing valuable rare information too.
They both have their place. I’m on linear forums as well as here, and other types convo format social media
Forums never went anywhere. It’s just that the techno hipsters found something new.
Forums never went anywhere
sadly it appears that they all but have. so many projects out there decide that Discord should be the only way to discuss development, report bugs, or offer tech support.
Forums didnt, but users did
Like WTF is a comment section under a post if not a type of forum?
It is. Slack and Discord didn’t kill forums, Reddit did. Because Reddit is a mega-forum. Instead of creating a specialized forum somewhere on a website you need to maintain, it’s easier to just create a subreddit. Bam, new forum!
And we’re discussing the disappearance of forums on a forum…
Tapatalk made all my favorite forums pretty shit
Sent from my SM-G935T using Tapatalk
Reddit/Lemmy is like a forum, but bad. They don’t have a good way to see unread additions to a thread, making long discussions impossible.
I wonder if that is what the chat view on lemmy is for. I tried it out, but I couldn’t understand how it is sorted.
It says it’s sorted by new, but the post times don’t seem to match that.
Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
I’ve checked out a couple old newsgroups that I know of, but not much was going on. One of them was a little active and I peruse it every now and again, one was just some troll and a bunch of spam. Any good tips resources on finding newsgroups that are activeish?
Uh. Ever try to follow along in a forum when people start quoting each other and then having side conversations? The old forum layout sucks, Lemmy and Reddit with their parent-child thread-based systems are infinitely better.
Depends on the forum software, there are some that have proper threading
but making quote towers is part of the fun!
and necrobumping decade old threads. i confused a lot of people on ign making one of my only posts on a 10 year old thread. and i did that around 10 years ago haha. good times
All depend the subject. For some a web forum model is better, for others the reddit/lemmy is better. Then side convo should be handled by the webforum admins.
Posts a problem on a thread
PLEASE SEARCH BEFORE YOU ASK A QUESTION. THREAD HAS BEEN CLOSED, HERES A LINK TO THE RULES
searches with incorrect wording or phrasing and tries again
PLEASE WAIT 30 SECONDS BEFORE SEARCHING AGAIN
Finds tangentially related thread but not quite your problem and posts to it to see if anyone has had similar issues
BANNED FOR NECROING
extra points if you do it through facepunch
BANNED FOR NECROING
I never understood why forum admins hated this so much. If I have an update to an old issue, why shouldn’t I post it in the same place? Why create a whole new thread?
BANNED FOR NECROING
I’ve seen fora so ADHD they lock threads after a month or something. This is comical, given I work in deployment and management of enterprise OSes, which typically lock versions as maintenance branches at the start of their support window. Solaris10 will die after a TWENTY-SEVEN YEAR support window, but it’s typically a decade.
But if “necroing” is to update a thread after an arbitrarily-short time, and if people get banned for it, then the admins of that forum are naive and stupid. The way I solved a problem with my TheForeman installation (what junk) a few months ago leveraged something from 20 years ago.
I’m a fan of usenet’s “comp” tree, anyway. Forum threading has always come off as weird, and the format has always seemed a little emoji-heavy.
I think it depends on the forum. On the forum I am, there is no search timeout and necroposting is allowed as long as you bring something relevant to the discussion. And if you accidentaly create a new post that should have been somewhere else, the post is simply moved there.
The solution: download this file and flash it
Clicks link
You have to register before you can download files.
You register, login, download the file… And then you never see that forum in your life because you only had this one difficult problem with the device or it breaks completely and you buy a different brand.
That’s when you become a forum troll like Shrek
So that’s the reason why in the Star Trek future there’s a whole chunk of 21st Century history missing. Not because of a global war, but because everyone was posting on Slack, Discord, and gated social networks.
Forums are gated too?
Only for replying usually, at least for the ones I know
Discord for a group of your friends? Fantastic. Discord for a game/company/organization? Miserable.
i never understood why anyone would want to use discord for anything else than friends or small communities
Discord is a good user experience for talking with friends, but a privacy nightmare. Personally, most of my friends and I have moved to a Matrix instance.
Waiting on federated forums to become a thing. I guess one could host a simple phpBB forum and let users create sub forums or categories for their own use?
oooooh we could call it Lenny
Oh no not Lenny
( ͡°╭͜ʖ╮͡° )
Our Lenny?
Femmy
Discourse is adding federation: https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921
Lemmy actually offers a phpBB frontend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Some time ago lemmy.ml could be accessed through fedibb.ml, which unfortunately is down now.
Seriously, Discord is so chaotic I can’t even use it.
I don’t really see a lot of overlap between these technologies. To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product… Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
Discord is a place for keeping up with friends, finding a group for a game, or discussing something current with people that share an interest (e.g. discussing the latest episode of X show). Slack is for keeping up with current things and chatting with team members at work, and following alerts for an application that you’re supporting (because that’s way better than email alerts). I recognize that there are people that use these technologies differently, but they each have their own niche that I wouldn’t want to use the others for. Forums are not a great tool for instant communication or relatively “chaotic” discussion (it’s a lot harder to follow the splitting chains of thought compared to breaking side conversations into threads that are still easy to follow along in a channel), and nobody wants to constantly refresh to keep up with the conversation.To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product… Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
I absolutely agree with you. The problem is, increasingly others are not agreeing with us. Soooo many projects that fall into this category have 100% of all information(even documentation!) related to the project ONLY available on Discord.
I’m not saying that discord servers for support are a good solution – I think the problems with archiving and search alone should disqualify it as a support platform.
But forums have their own problems. I think it’s weird that forum advocates don’t seem to consider why it started to fade as a medium. Individual accounts for each forum, the need for active moderation of threads for relevancy, and practices that made for negative user experiences like rules against necroing are all valid reasons (among others) for why people moved away from forums. And I can’t think of a great way to prevent the “I need help!!” thread titles besides having moderators or approvals.
Knowledge management is hard, there’s a reason why library science is a master’s level degree lol
Jokes on you, i never left forums.
Forums are worth holding onto because they’ve been reinvented to be sleeker than they were when social media, etc replaced them
Remember Tapatalk for Android? It was an Android killer app a decade ago. I miss forums.
Forums for niche stuff still exist and are quite active.
Go back I have been rejoining and reclaiming old accounts.
