I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool.
I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc.
Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
I ran phpBB for a while just for myself, partly out of nostalgia for the online forum days.
I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it.
However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy.
After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now.
Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
Because if you go that route then you are saddled with a full linux VPS that you must install things on.
For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
Yeah, nothing like finding some old dusty phpBB that has been completely over run with bots spamming NSFW stuff. 5/5 much better than Discord. Very industrious.
I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects".
Yeah, the solution to using a Discord is host random shit yourself that someone _might_ maybe need. That's a hard pass. The very reason why I am on Discord is that I don't need to host my own shit. Been there, done that, I have better things to do.
I'm appalled by the number of people answering this comment very negatively / quickly dismissing the self hosting option with a hostile tone.
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.
> Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable
I greatly prefer forums to ephemeral IRC or walled-garden Discord/Slack/etc. However I don't like the moderation time commitment, especially with in a climate of aggressive spambots and twitter-style idiocy at scale.
I also like blog comments, but those seem to have largely split into spam-filled cesspools on one hand and "comments are now closed" (after 10ms) on the other. HN is something of an exception, but I'm sure it requires aggressive and time-consuming moderation.
Constant security threats also make self-hosting an ongoing maintenance headache even if it's in the cloud.
If you don't care about the project, why even open up a Discord server you will never look at? The point with open forums is to get feedback and provide customer support
I'm building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0]
Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.
I suspect people are using it partly to deliver a more regular and visible heartbeat.
Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues.
GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison.
Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message.
Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion.
As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
I'm in a few FOSS chats, and I tend to find there's a lot of people who a) need an answer right now and b) need relevant information pried out of them with a crowbar.
And then they'll DM you if you look helpful.
I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.
Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity's sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.
2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience.
3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
plus the main advantage of discord is you can easily knock up a free Q&A bot that answers all the questions people ask because they didnt rtfm or search the forums.
> This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in.
Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
What are you talking about? You can't write a custom client and the official one is closed source. Scraping chat history is also against the TOS and get get you blocked.
That’s even better. Why would anyone post on a forum when learning the minutiae of the Discord API and its strict TOS conditions in order to implement functionality that’s broken in the client while avoiding getting banned is an option? It’s a dead simple solution!
That's kinda funny. I assume when discord wouldn't have banned all the wonderful lightweight alternative clients that existed they would only get a small portion of the hate today
I normally don't reply to stuff like this because you are clearly arguing in bad faith. I just wanted to point out you either have failed to read my comment in context, are intentionally mischaracterizing what I said. Going from what I said to "write a custom client for Discord from scratch" has to be a joke. Also that TOS violation thing is simply not true. You are well within your rights to download the history of your own discord server.....
> I normally don't reply to stuff like this because you are clearly arguing in bad faith.
I’m not sure why you’d feel the need to come back and do a victory lap. You’ve thoroughly debunked the idea that the Discord search UX is less than stellar by pointing out that you personally built and maintain your own search UX based off of API that is both universally understood and governed by a TOS that none could possibly misinterpret.
I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there”
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
Luckily since there is no expectation of an archive, migration is fairly straightforward if there is an alternative. If there are no alternatives, I guess they can try IRC ;)
Overwhelmingly the word I'd use to describe Discord's interface is "one". There is one interface. It's an interface that most people seem to like, but we've lost an important freedom there. It's against the EULA to modify your client or use an alternative one.
If with IRC one can have any interface, I would not call Discord's better.
IRC had a higher barrier to entry and a lot more common expectation of kickbans for various reasons (justified or not).
Plus the concept of +v doesn't really exist on discords. Sometimes you'd be stuck lurking while only a select few could speak.
And frankly being able to embed images/videos degrades the seriousness in various ways as it can become a bit of a meme/comedy competition (and they scroll disproportionately more text off.
And avatars mean less space is actually text..
<[@+]?shortnick>: <text>
is pretty much the optimal format for information density, which is ironic that twitch chat uses it (to mostly spam emotes)
Some degree of informational amensia is a good thing. We've all hit the "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more".
I don't understand your example. How does "informational amnesia" help against "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more"? If you can't find a solution, you should ask on the Q&A channel, regardless of informational amnesia or not.
I try not to argue against my users for "what is best for them." If they overwhelmingly want Discord, I'll give them Discord. The goal is to be ready to jump ship if need be, and there's a few ways to do that.
Discourse has either integrated logins and OAuth2 third party login. I implemented both.
Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.
And what plans do you or your users have for when Discord enshittifies?
As always: nothing.
When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist.
But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new.
Please read my other replies, although it is fair to ask me this! Like I have noted, I do have some plans to jump ship if it comes to it. I have the vast majority of my user base on a mailing list for announcements (security related and important administrative, not promotional). If push came to shove I’d use it to make an announcement. I always have a backup for discourse immediately, and I have an archive dump of all threads and chat data from discord. I have a plan to make a simple import script for all “forum” threads in discord to discourse and release that at some point for others to use for their communities.
Do not assume the worst of posters, some of us are just as smart as you I promise, it isn’t fair to assume I had no plans :).
Could be a bias too. I really dislike Discord. I'm on too many discords. It's just one of those network effect things that I wish wasn't everywhere.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
Here is the thing. You may be seeing more people seeking help because they are repeating the same questions again. Where as before they found the thread with the answer.
To me this is the biggest drawback for discord over forums.
From my experience it happens just as much on forums. Hell, just take a look at Stack Overflow! If someone is wanting to reanswer a question for the nth time, I have no problem with that, and the helpers in my community don't either. As another poster said, as well, sometimes "repeat questions" age out after a certain point, where a newer method is actually more appropriate than an older one anyway.
"As another poster said, as well, sometimes "repeat questions" age out after a certain point, where a newer method is actually more appropriate than an older one anyway."
I rather like the approach of editing the original question/solution or posting the latest solution there as otherwise this just creates fragmention.
Editing is somehow even worse than doing support on Discord, where at least there is a history and the (bad!) search or one of the regulars might remember something to find it.
> I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.
Reddit definitely demands an email to register. It's unclear to me whether they verify it (I didn't bother to check), but it's the first thing they ask for.
Specifically signing in with a consistent persona. All of these link to an actual "work" identity. Sometimes I want some customer support. Other times, it's a gaming identity, or a writer identity.
Part of the problem is that communities can get really nasty, worst case going as far as writing bad reviews at the place you work at. So it's useful to containerize your identity.
Sign in with Apple allows you the opportunity to generate unique email address aliases per service when you use Sign in with Apple to log in to third parties.
Say for example that your “real” iCloud account is muzani at iCloud dot com.
You browse to my hypothetical forum and choose Sign in with Apple. Then Apple lets you choose if you want to use your “real” mail address or if you want to make a new alias specific to this service. You make an alias an it will look something like emperor_virginia.9p at iCloud dot com.
It’s super convenient and easy to use, while at the same time doing a great job of keeping your identities separate between separate services.
I explicitly avoid all of those and am willing to do the extra two clicks to get a real account.
I have no idea how long these random companies will keep providing auth services, I don't want to be part of the mess when they inevitably stop the service or start charging. It barely solves the account fragmentation problem because every website supports a different random combination of providers. It centralizes everything more than it already is, further increasing your dependence on these companies. Not to mention the tracking.
But the biggest thing is that with a native account I know that I'll be getting all the features of the app and everything will work normally. There have been too many times where I've experienced "your account does not support this feature" because of a botched external auth integration. Remember when Spotify users with Facebook sign-in couldn't change their name from the default string of random characters?
No thanks, the "effort" is more than worth it for me.
Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords.
This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.
You're allowed bots, so why can't we archive it and make it more easily searchable? Those programming channels with QA style threaded answers would be great to log and make searchable. Is it against Discord's ToS or something?
> nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down
some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
Say what you will of StackOverflow, but they completely solved this problem nearly a couple of decades ago. Answers may be getting outdated depending on what you're looking for, but new answers are always welcome and the site tends to always have the "current" best answer - and very search engine friendly.
And if you somehow are able to find an archive of the chat somewhere, you have to try to piece together the conversation because there are six other conversations going on at the same time. Not to mention, all of the valuable information/insights that was never shared in that particular discussion because no one with that knowledge was online at the time.
I just can't understand why anyone would think using a chat app for support is a good idea.
> first read the error message clearly and try understand it,
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
I know this and do this, but I would add, make sure you _actually_ read the error message and don't _think_ you read it. This bit me just yesterday as I was encountering an issue and spent a good 30 minutes trying to solve a problem I thought I'd been having. When I re-read the error message it was clear that I'd been too careless and not fully understood the issue. It happens from time to time and then I'm more cautious for a while until I get _just_ complacent enough to have it happen again.
HN has a particular culture that dislikes social media and due to the nature of these sites, once a culture is established, it attracts more of the same since everyone upvotes the dominant cultural position. Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. Listen to your users.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
Sure if your customers want to use discord and you're ok with putting your community there, then go for it.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Oops, I didn't consider that it was sarcasm. I thought it was mocking the actual average HN perspective (which I'm dissenting from, challenging that average user to explain themself).
It was not intended to be sarcasm. It was indeed a criticism of the average HN perspective which I find far removed from the perspective of a given user.
I do, but I don't think a lot of people on HN consider them as such, which is a fun jab at the hivemind. You'll see a lot of threads where people deride social media but say "HN is the exception." Maybe that's what you meant by sarcasm, and if so you're on the nose.
There are a lot of contextual questions raised by that though - are the people who interact with the project the community? How many people are being interacted with? What are the goals of said community?
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
Is it possible to somehow bridge discord and, say issues on GitHub or another forum so that people can use discord but the information is just pulled from other sources and they're redirected there?
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
It's popular because it's familiar, but also people because are so impatient they want real-time and fast responses to their questions. But then you get a flooded channel of questions being drowned out by memes.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users.
I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it?
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
It's only a problem because he can be an asshole sometimes, and he very nearly always gets in first, (I swear he never sleeps), so yeah, sometimes not a great intro to a community that does exist, honest, not that you'd know from the Slack threads.
To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
The discord should clearly state the community standards, including some variant of "don't be an asshole". Most importantly, the standards must be enforced.
These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid.
Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.
That's because those platforms provide instant gratification, which attracts people with too much time. Busy, conscientious people are not going to loiter around and repeatedly answer questions that newbies ought to be able to solve on their own with proper tools (i.e., not Discord, Slack or IRC).
Who's going to answer the questions if knowledgeable people are repelled? I don't engage with these platforms because, among other UX sins, I know that their poor discoverability means I will only be helping one person and not the legions of people in the future who will encounter the same problem.
This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se.
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.
Sometimes these people need a hard truth. I’d say most times. They usually won’t “get it” in the moment, but the only way they can ever get it is if someone respects them enough to say it.
These sorts of bans aren’t just good for the community. They’re also good for the recipient. (I’d only say that in the short term, depending on the person, there could be a danger of self harm and people should always be kind and careful.)
It doesn’t feel good. But that pain you feel is you caring about that person. Understanding that makes it easier.
"someone respects them enough to say it." "They’re also good for the recipient."
I've never seen anyone learning anything from being permabanned from anywhere. This is just post-facto justification to make yourself feel better for removing those people - but don't believe it even for a second that you've helped them in any way. Helping the community? Could be. Helping the banned person? Hell no.
To the degree that anything is 'wrong', it's your argument. You haven't experienced a thing even indirectly, therefore, you conclude, anyone else who claims to have experienced this thing must be lying (at least to themselves) to make themselves feel better about bad actions which harm others. This is just cynicism.
Your argument also requires the hidden assumption that the person making the claim you disagree with (specifically me), was the person performing the action rather than the recipient of the action. While it is true I have ended relationships (including permabans), it was by being the recipient of such endings that I came by my knowledge so this assumption in a practical sense is false.
I was banned from a Discord server for reasons like these, and I found it really helpful for knowing for sure that I needed to change my behavior. I think it fundamentally comes down to the person; I have struggled with knowing how to “read the room” and when something is acceptable or not, and it was a very clear “it’s not” after the ban.
This is the difference between banning in the aughts versus now.
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
I find blocks are almost necessary for me to be able to stand to use Mastodon.
There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.
One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.
So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.
You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.
While I can relate to that, as that's how I made Twitter tolerable, is that really as much of an issue on the Fediverse which doesn't have algorithmic recommendations? I only have to see posts from the people I follow and I don't follow anyone who has a tendency to like "rage post"ing so I basically never see that sort of stuff unless I look at the global feed.
I think people have misconceptions about algorithmic feeds.
You can measure what inflames people or you can predict what inflames people, measuring is always going to be more acccurate.
… and you can do that measuring by counting boosts or (on HN) taking the ratio of comments/votes. 0.5 is about the median, articles that go above 2 are well in the danger zone.
In my mind the chronological feed with boosting is pretty toxic on its own, an “explore” feed based on what is getting boosted is even worse.
YOShInOn’s main feed I look at every day is based on (1) clustering and (2) prediction of my upvotes and downvotes, I don’t particularly upvote toxic articles, in fact, I make a point to down vote them so my feed is calming and low in sensationalism. (Though there was a time I was into articles from The Guardian about how the UK is going to hell…). So that kind of algorithmic feed is not inflammatory.
If you use “boost count” or judged sentiment or the like you could make a model that amplifies or diminishes angry content. The thing is voting and boosting is not all bad, I post a lot of flower pics to Mastodon because they get boosted, up to a point discussions on HN are a good thing, If you used a sentiment model to suppress angry content in a voting/boosting process that might be very good.
Sometimes I think about making an “angry toot” model but I can’t stand the thought of looking at 5000 angry toots (well, i have thought about testing a weight loss plan based on inducing a psychogenic fever and maybe that would work…)
People have got worse, there are far more of them than in the early days, and the online/offline boundary has collapsed. And I think as we've all got older we become accustomed to the sad truth that misbehavior slides seem to rarely be recoverable. People lean in to their awfulness, until something terrible and offline happens.
> Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.
Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.
Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.
> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.
And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.
> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.
Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.
Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?
>Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
The issue with blocks as implemented on reddit is that they effectively work as moderation tools that instead of following some community norms are in the powers of individuals who are happy to abuse them. In at least one Reddit community it was enough of a problem that they made ot a rule that blocking someone was a bannable offence. Blocks should just be mutes for those blocking them. not an effective unilateral ban for whoever gets there first.
Check out rule 11 on https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/about/ (they have relaxed the rules a bit because Reddit doesn't provide for a non-abusable block, which is important and useful functionality). But essentially it's disruptive because you can simply block most of the active members of a subreddit and get an unchallenged soapbox, which in a community which wants to correct misinformation is not desired (I think they fixed this particularly stupid idea but for a while you could just block all the moderators and it would be quite difficult for them to even notice you)
But by virtue of blocking most of any given subreddit to get "an unchallenged soapbox" I mean... you will get that, but:
1) Your post will get very little traction or engagement, which means it'll be buried in New quite quickly
2) You won't really be a bother to the community at all, because of 1. Like, if someone posted something that was incredibly offensive to all in a given community but then hid it from everyone... like, is it even really posted? Isn't that just basically shadowbanning yourself?
I'm legit trying but I'm having a hard time picturing what purpose this would be used for, on the part of the poster. Seems like a huge waste of time to be honest.
People should be reminded that rules are more of a guideline than a strict plan to follow, especially in the online world. Banning people is a crucial part of forming a community, and you should feel no shame for applying it where necessary to guide the atmosphere towards a better place.
Most internet community rules seem to spawn from a fear of authority. A mutual fear from the rank-and-file and the rulers. Endlessly debating a million little rules is safer than questioning each other's judgement. Authority resolves both those situations efficiently, but it demands a morality: a fair standard applied across all people.
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
Possibly. I was thinking more about Bay Area tech people who can't handle deep conflicts and outsource morality to their managers. But hey what do you know there is a Bible verse for this: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A15...
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
I use to run a lot of tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the hardest problem I had was the people I call “Superturkers” who would do a very high volume of work that is just barely acceptable in quality.
On some level they are very hard working and if I banned them it would take longer to get my tasks completed. If they did 5% of the work that they do the low quality wouldn’t bother me because (1) a little of that diluted in the whole is OK and (2) the individuals would not come to my attention.
With some feedback some of those people might get better (I was always open to paying more for quality) but I also didn’t want to get into arguments with those folks.
Save yourself the rules-lawyer hassle and add a rule saying essentially "all the other rules are good-faith guidelines, but we can ban you for any reason we want." This is already a de facto rule in all forums/etc; forums that don't state it explicitly just have moderators stretch and contort the other rules to essentially become this rule anyway.
A general principle I've used in moderation is that after I admonish someone about a behaviour what I expect is that they will scrupulously seek to keep as far clear of that line as possible.
If they're hovering right over it, they're out, based on the administrative burden principle.
The other rule is that all arguments with moderators are short, and lost.
I swing the banhammer early and often without remorse.
If you don't learn after being reminded, there is no use keeping you around.
1 bad person can ruin it for everyone else - not having that.
I believe in second chances but not in online communities.
It's even worse because whoever has enough free time to lurk and misinform also has the free time to network, so those people won't get necessarily banned but sometimes also be rewarded for being active in the community.
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
Doesn't the same thing happen with old school forums? There are some avatars I remember (I don't remember their user names) on certain product's forums who I know I can't trust, and they show up in every third thread I find on Google. At least they never change their avatar, if they did I might fall for their BS again.
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
I feel like it's different on more asynchronous mediums than just chats.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
Forums can also be small. Regardless of size, one or a cadre of like-minded or easily manipulated folks can dominate a forum.
I think the major difference between forums and Discord/IRC is that the conversations are more likely to be seen on the forums because they’re more persistent and can be more easily referenced to see the entire picture.
That’s certainly not impossible in IRC but it’s more work and less accessible to the less technically inclined.
That is presumably what they want though when they say they don't want (better options) getting bogged down in support - they mean they don't want to be the ones dealing with it, surely?
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
I joined the Bun.sh Discord a couple days ago to ask a question, and it got drowned out a flood of other questions or simply people hanging out making jokes. I think this is what you're talking about.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
That's being generous. "Nothing better to do" also translates as "works as sales / business development for the gigantic expensive legacy tool you're trying to work around". End of the day, when one guy is spending all their time on your Support, and you don't know why, and they're persistently nonconstructive or just plain making shit up[1], you have to start asking, "why does this guy care so much?". Shortest answer is often "Cuz he's paid to".
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better.
* The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages
* Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads
* Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity
* There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags
* There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results
* Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies.
I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.
TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.
Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.
As someone who hardly ever attempted to use a mailing list, I preferred forums because I was worried of waisting everyone on the list's time. In fact, the couple times I did use it, people complained about my usage. It felt like shouting for help in a room that may or may not be crowded. A forum felt more like putting a sign up and interested folks could engage though often nobody would. Chat is nice because there is an immediate back and forth and feels more beginner friendly / welcoming. However, chat needs an FAQ section. I think LLMs trained on chat logs may be an interesting tool.
Last time a gripe about discord being bad for documention was posted, someone linked Answer Overflow (https://www.answeroverflow.com/) as a possible solution. Still requires people to use discords threaded feature and doesn't capture chats, but helps with atleast having the questiond indexed in google and not sitting behind a walled garden
I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts.
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active.
The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack…
I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”
I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired).
hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.
self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip.
I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints".
It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
If the wrapper is an extremely ergonomic Discord bot (which is probably what the other commenters are imagining or would settle on if they tried to implement it) then it might work but it still seems like a worse solution with a lot of extra overhead compared to software that already does what it's meant to (and crucially, can't do what it isn't meant to).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadI know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc.
Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it.
However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy.
After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now.
Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
It gets the job done, and just about every host supports PHP.
For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
For a few dollars a year you get a shared host.
--
[0]: https://board.asm32.info/
[1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing
You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition
Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of.
At least in my POV
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.
I greatly prefer forums to ephemeral IRC or walled-garden Discord/Slack/etc. However I don't like the moderation time commitment, especially with in a climate of aggressive spambots and twitter-style idiocy at scale.
I also like blog comments, but those seem to have largely split into spam-filled cesspools on one hand and "comments are now closed" (after 10ms) on the other. HN is something of an exception, but I'm sure it requires aggressive and time-consuming moderation.
Constant security threats also make self-hosting an ongoing maintenance headache even if it's in the cloud.
If you don't care about the project, why even open up a Discord server you will never look at? The point with open forums is to get feedback and provide customer support
who cares about reddit.
microsoft has all the motivation to lock down developers. they already got most by the balls with vscode and copilot.
[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong
- matrix spaces not hidden behind auth
- indexed by search engines
- chat channels
- subreddit like posts with nested replies, voting etc
- private invite-only spaces
Hoping to get voice/audio working soon, along with encrypted DMs. Experimenting with activitypub integration too.
Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues.
GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison.
Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message.
Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion.
As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
And then they'll DM you if you look helpful.
I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.
1. This is what the "Ban" feature is for.
2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience.
3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
4. See 3.
I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in.
Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
I’m not sure why you’d feel the need to come back and do a victory lap. You’ve thoroughly debunked the idea that the Discord search UX is less than stellar by pointing out that you personally built and maintain your own search UX based off of API that is both universally understood and governed by a TOS that none could possibly misinterpret.
3. I think he writes as a user. Do you expect the user to export every discord chat history.
4. See 3.
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
Overwhelmingly the word I'd use to describe Discord's interface is "one". There is one interface. It's an interface that most people seem to like, but we've lost an important freedom there. It's against the EULA to modify your client or use an alternative one.
If with IRC one can have any interface, I would not call Discord's better.
Whether we should be using text chat clients as FTP clients is another issue, XMPP is better for multimedia messaging.
Plus the concept of +v doesn't really exist on discords. Sometimes you'd be stuck lurking while only a select few could speak.
And frankly being able to embed images/videos degrades the seriousness in various ways as it can become a bit of a meme/comedy competition (and they scroll disproportionately more text off.
And avatars mean less space is actually text..
<[@+]?shortnick>: <text>
is pretty much the optimal format for information density, which is ironic that twitch chat uses it (to mostly spam emotes)
At least part of that is that the search in Discord is horrifyingly bad, and isn't available via search engines.
I don't mine Discord as a place to ask questions / discuss; but it's far less dysfunctional when combined with a wiki.
What forum owners want is to not have to deal with idiotic user logins and spam.
Both sides think Discord is good enough even though it isn't.
The problem is that everything else is so much worse.
Unfortunately, "user login" is an expensive cesspit of failure.
Discourse would probably be doing better if they actually ran a login provider rather than outsourcing it all.
Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.
As always: nothing.
When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist.
But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new.
And so it goes ...
Do not assume the worst of posters, some of us are just as smart as you I promise, it isn’t fair to assume I had no plans :).
I will apologize directly to you for my assumptions being incorrect. It is unfair for me to paint everyone with the same brush.
However, sadly, you are the first person I have had to apologize to for this.
Nobody else I have ever interacted with has anything remotely resembling a plan for leaving Discord.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
To me this is the biggest drawback for discord over forums.
I rather like the approach of editing the original question/solution or posting the latest solution there as otherwise this just creates fragmention.
I believe we need the history, especially when dealing with legacy versions. The first thing I usually check is the date or contexts to infer it.
But I do have a problem with having to ask a question that has already been answered a hundred times, instead of being able to search for the answer.
That's what made Reddit so popular.
What if the forum offered the following three options for sign in:
- Sign in with GitHub
- Sign in with Apple
- Sign in with Google
Part of the problem is that communities can get really nasty, worst case going as far as writing bad reviews at the place you work at. So it's useful to containerize your identity.
Reddit actually does this very well.
Say for example that your “real” iCloud account is muzani at iCloud dot com.
You browse to my hypothetical forum and choose Sign in with Apple. Then Apple lets you choose if you want to use your “real” mail address or if you want to make a new alias specific to this service. You make an alias an it will look something like emperor_virginia.9p at iCloud dot com.
It’s super convenient and easy to use, while at the same time doing a great job of keeping your identities separate between separate services.
I have no idea how long these random companies will keep providing auth services, I don't want to be part of the mess when they inevitably stop the service or start charging. It barely solves the account fragmentation problem because every website supports a different random combination of providers. It centralizes everything more than it already is, further increasing your dependence on these companies. Not to mention the tracking.
But the biggest thing is that with a native account I know that I'll be getting all the features of the app and everything will work normally. There have been too many times where I've experienced "your account does not support this feature" because of a botched external auth integration. Remember when Spotify users with Facebook sign-in couldn't change their name from the default string of random characters?
No thanks, the "effort" is more than worth it for me.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
That's actually mind-blowingly horrifying.
some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
I just can't understand why anyone would think using a chat app for support is a good idea.
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Discord is bad because if I don't like the default client, I can't use or build another one. I can do this with IRC/XMPP/Matrix.
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
The people who have choosen to use Discord rarely care that others abhor it. And it really sets the mood: this is not a community I am welcome in.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
if all you have is discord that's what you'll see
if you have a forum/gh-issues there are a lot of visitors who won't bother you but will get their answer
(Full disclosure, I've been that guy)
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid.
Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
You are the host, you define the rule.
These sorts of bans aren’t just good for the community. They’re also good for the recipient. (I’d only say that in the short term, depending on the person, there could be a danger of self harm and people should always be kind and careful.)
It doesn’t feel good. But that pain you feel is you caring about that person. Understanding that makes it easier.
I've never seen anyone learning anything from being permabanned from anywhere. This is just post-facto justification to make yourself feel better for removing those people - but don't believe it even for a second that you've helped them in any way. Helping the community? Could be. Helping the banned person? Hell no.
Your argument also requires the hidden assumption that the person making the claim you disagree with (specifically me), was the person performing the action rather than the recipient of the action. While it is true I have ended relationships (including permabans), it was by being the recipient of such endings that I came by my knowledge so this assumption in a practical sense is false.
You can always push them to a misc channel and if the community really likes them they'll chat over there?
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.
One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.
So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.
You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.
You can measure what inflames people or you can predict what inflames people, measuring is always going to be more acccurate.
… and you can do that measuring by counting boosts or (on HN) taking the ratio of comments/votes. 0.5 is about the median, articles that go above 2 are well in the danger zone.
In my mind the chronological feed with boosting is pretty toxic on its own, an “explore” feed based on what is getting boosted is even worse.
YOShInOn’s main feed I look at every day is based on (1) clustering and (2) prediction of my upvotes and downvotes, I don’t particularly upvote toxic articles, in fact, I make a point to down vote them so my feed is calming and low in sensationalism. (Though there was a time I was into articles from The Guardian about how the UK is going to hell…). So that kind of algorithmic feed is not inflammatory.
If you use “boost count” or judged sentiment or the like you could make a model that amplifies or diminishes angry content. The thing is voting and boosting is not all bad, I post a lot of flower pics to Mastodon because they get boosted, up to a point discussions on HN are a good thing, If you used a sentiment model to suppress angry content in a voting/boosting process that might be very good.
Sometimes I think about making an “angry toot” model but I can’t stand the thought of looking at 5000 angry toots (well, i have thought about testing a weight loss plan based on inducing a psychogenic fever and maybe that would work…)
As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.
Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.
Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.
> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.
And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.
> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.
Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.
Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?
The issue with blocks as implemented on reddit is that they effectively work as moderation tools that instead of following some community norms are in the powers of individuals who are happy to abuse them. In at least one Reddit community it was enough of a problem that they made ot a rule that blocking someone was a bannable offence. Blocks should just be mutes for those blocking them. not an effective unilateral ban for whoever gets there first.
1) Your post will get very little traction or engagement, which means it'll be buried in New quite quickly
2) You won't really be a bother to the community at all, because of 1. Like, if someone posted something that was incredibly offensive to all in a given community but then hid it from everyone... like, is it even really posted? Isn't that just basically shadowbanning yourself?
I'm legit trying but I'm having a hard time picturing what purpose this would be used for, on the part of the poster. Seems like a huge waste of time to be honest.
This is not your problem.
A support forum is not a "social outlet".
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Some users waste hours and hours of moderator time per week and it would be nice to have a written rule to point to for a timeout
On some level they are very hard working and if I banned them it would take longer to get my tasks completed. If they did 5% of the work that they do the low quality wouldn’t bother me because (1) a little of that diluted in the whole is OK and (2) the individuals would not come to my attention.
With some feedback some of those people might get better (I was always open to paying more for quality) but I also didn’t want to get into arguments with those folks.
If they're hovering right over it, they're out, based on the administrative burden principle.
The other rule is that all arguments with moderators are short, and lost.
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
I think the major difference between forums and Discord/IRC is that the conversations are more likely to be seen on the forums because they’re more persistent and can be more easily referenced to see the entire picture.
That’s certainly not impossible in IRC but it’s more work and less accessible to the less technically inclined.
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
I'm not defending Discord as a solution though.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
Forum Channels FAQ: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better.
* The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages
* Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads
* Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity
* There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags
* There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results
* Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies.
I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.
That's not possible with Discord.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216
I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $).
Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.
TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.
Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
I've never seen this forum before but this I never expected it to be This bad. Is this some kind of mobile only design paradigm?
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
The same could happen with amy Discord. No users means no users, no matter if it's Discord or Reddit
But I can find and read a subreddit via search engine without joining anything.
But if users want to start and join one to shoot the breeze, I think they are mostly going to pick Dsicord.
I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active.
The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
The same will happen with Discord's successor, but the Discord data will most likely be lost at that time.
I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”
Threaded replies, in whatever form, have been the killer feature for me to grok more data that may or may not be relevant.
hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.
self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints".
It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community