Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.