this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Members of the software developer community have reported deleting or altering their posts to prevent them from being used by OpenAI.

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[–] [email protected] 226 points 6 months ago (11 children)

People cheering on SOs demise don't realize what we're losing.

Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass. Asking the same question over and over, hoping somone is around to help.

It sucks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they'd finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord's forum feature is terrible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there's a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable... OK, I see your point now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Discord is straight up unwelcome on corporate networks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I give it a few months before the Community tier servers' data is dumped and sold to an AI model company.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

So four months til GPT starts calling everyone "kitten"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

Once upon a time, they stepped forth from the forests of IRC, but back into those dark woods they then one day marched.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass.

It sucks but can you blame them? It's a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.

We're going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.

This doesn't necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it's being applied to is real.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago (2 children)

it sucks but can you blame them?

For picking discord I very much can blame them, I figure it won't be long until that goes down the drain too.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.

We're going to see a lot of changes in online community tools and in the way people use those tools. Lemmy is not exactly revolutionary either, it's modern but it's still a forum at its core.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.

yeah, as Stack Overflow could. Discord is bound to the stakeholders, and is already getting enshittified.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

and is already getting enshittified.

Not yet. They're still trying to squeeze money out of people with their profile pic frames and stuff. They've yet to introduce ads into app (for now).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

they did an ai, but it got shut down.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's purely because of how easy it is to create and manage a community. Imagine if there were a way to make a Lemmy instance without any fees or knowledge of selfhosting, it would be an instant success.

They don't operate well at scale needed, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Not just that, it forces to create an account just to view!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 6 months ago

Discord is honestly the most awful way to create a helpful community.

It’s a great way to give the 20 most active members of the community someplace to trample on top of newbies trying to get questions answered.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than "it's been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn't even write into it!" I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you've merged onto the highway.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 6 months ago (2 children)

And search engines are unable to index the questions and answers, so good luck finding the already answered question.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Pretty soon search engines won't be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won't look that out of place anymore.

If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won't be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You're forgetting about the schmuck on the other end of that equation that has to answer the same question a thousand times over.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

A server I'm in actually has a bot that, whenever a user types a command, will respond to a question with an answer.

Simple example:

@\Johnny: "Hey, my browser says 404, what does that mean?"

@\Support: !\404 @\Johnny"

@\Bot (using Discord's reply feature to reply to Johnny's post): "'404' is a common error message that can be caused by a variety of issues. Here are steps to resolve the most common issues:..."

I didn't feel like typing out steps to check if the website is down for everyone or to fix it if it's just you, but you get the idea.

The server I'm in doesn't typically handle questions about that, either. They're more specialized to something more specific that that, but, again, you get the idea.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. I really hate when people use Discord for stuff like this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago