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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fr. I have fun on discord when it’s a smallish server/fewer people are online. But I’ve been on a couple more massive ones, and I just can’t keep up with the conversation(s) happening too quickly. Maybe it just takes getting used to, but I haven’t had the chance since my phone tends to crash from it lol
How large are we talking? My company of <50 is full of adults which use Slack with restraint. We have organised conversations and no one uses memes or reaction emojis.
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.
I mean that’s even more problematic as the entirety of your comment is rude, you start with “attention hoes” and then point out the way the text was written with bad intentions. I don’t know what you don’t understand about your comment being bad.
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.
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.
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.
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