Am I the only one who hates that the place for "discussion" is Discord? I feel there are better options but I see it far too often these days... sigh
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Discord is terrible. But it’s also easy to set up & easy wins out over good but annoying every time.
Maybe unpopular take here, but I love discord as an excellent fit for specific use cases. I think plenty of groups that should be web forums use discord wrong, but for several of my favorite communities:
- They are better smaller, I don't necessarily want or need them to be discoverable aside from word of mouth.
- They are better without search history, because the discussion is more ephemeral and personal instead of assuming that anyone is digging history in after hours
- Ad hoc voice chat rooms is a useful boon because of exactly 1 and 2.
- No ads. Yes I understand the privacy issues, but I would still prefer to have opt in subscriptions, no ads, and my chats are harvested than many alternatives for small communities that need to subsidize costs. (Again fediverse, if not ads, requires a buy in in terms of technical operational costs)
- Trivial to build specialized addons in the case your community has a need.
Good examples for me are: Friend of Friend Groups for organizing dinners or parties Online gaming communities Book clubs Co-worker chat alternative to slack
I'm a little surprised that people feel like Discord does a good job of (4) and (5). On (4), Discord's ToS used to permit Discord to resell your personal data in bulk (and still might allow it; haven't read the ToS in a while), all guilds are co-located in a single database, and rumor is that three-letter agencies are allowed to make relatively complex queries against that database. On (5), Discord is well-known to ban alternative clients, hacked clients, API clients, extensions, addons, and even chatbots, without any due process or recourse.
Like, yes, it's a nice service, but is it really that much nicer than Mumble or IRC?
My biggest issue with Discord is that most discussion boards moved there and it's ridiculously hard to find anything there. Plus it's a privacy nightmare..
Yup. Discoverability in Discord servers is dire. The privacy issues are the bonus shit topping.
“How dare you not read through six months of discussion threads in order to find the last time your question was answered” is such a great way to welcome newbies to a project.
Discord is actually pretty good at the thing it was designed for: realtime comms between friends, both text & voice. It’s terrible at everything else & I wish people would stop using it, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen any time soon.
what do you mean you don’t want to beg answers out of the most hostile parts of an inevitably toxic, entrenched discord community just to know how to fire up the expensive open source hardware you’ve purchased? oh the search feature discord is actively making worse didn’t surface any answers? then suffer
*scene*
...It's Fine, Guize. discord totally won't hold all this history and context for ransom the moment it suits their income model or it feels convenient to do so, they're not like Slack. look at all these free features! we need to learn nothing from the past!
god.... I just want to enjoy being able to post gifs during this conference? what's so hard to understand?! ....gah, stop overreacting so much...
*/scene*
(just in case it's hard to tell, I'm rather not a fan of this state of affairs)
[e: lemmy ate my scenetags [e2: wow it has really shitty filters for this]]
but the alternatives don’t have the group voice chat and screen sharing and nazis I use for gaming. therefore I will continue to use discord for everything, especially the non-gaming stuff it sucks at
People have been modifying the code to copy housing designs without permission from the original designer. As such, it is in the housing community's best interest for updates to the code to no longer be published. The MakePlace community agrees with this approach too.
I might not respect the terms of free software licenses, but MMO interior designer IP rights are sacrosanct!
You have your laws and licenses, but I have the makeplace community, lets agree to disagree (on discord? Please come to my discord, im lonely).