> Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly.
How is that silly? I know there’s threading now, but it has to be used by everyone. If you find someone that asked the same question you have, but without a reply, is it unanswered or answered out of the thread 1000 messages down the page? Without threading it’s a disaster.
> How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?
Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.
I used to post a lot on forums. I’d post well tested, reproducible examples that exactly demonstrated my problem. I’d also take an “ask a question, answer a question” approach where I’d skim the first page or two of unanswered questions and leave a reply if I knew something off the top of my head.
Almost every Discord or Slack “support” channel I’ve tried is terrible. They’re a way for companies to reduce support by shifting the expectations towards ignoring users. Drone (CI) did this recently. Their Slack channel is nothing but users asking questions (at least for the several days I saw before unsubscribing from emails).
I think the real reason Discord, etc. are popular is because it’s low effort. No one expects you to come in with a fully baked example. It’s a conversation. So instead of the old expectation that you’d come prepared with a concrete example of your problem, you just blurt out some half-assed question and wait for someone to prompt you and hold your hand through the whole issue.
The price for that is the loss of people that want to participate in a high effort community rather than an emoji filled meme-fest with content splattered at mile-5 on the 1k mile continuous scroll. At least that’s my opinion.
We had a brilliant, visionary solution to this whole problem. It was called Stack Overflow. Real questions with actual answers, no faffing about. Tragically it has been dying a slow death for seven or eight years and as of now looks like it will just be milled into LLM food.
SO is definitely the best there’s ever been IMO. I’ll repeat myself a bit and say that I think the reason platforms like that are dying is because many people don’t want to make any effort and the expectation you try to be a good contributor is a negative for them.
I bet 50% of the problems I’ve ever had were self solved by trying to build an example that showed exactly what issue I was having.
> Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.
People on forums were free to ignore your posts as well, but they didn't, because they cared about their users. Discord isn't the cause of indifferent dev teams.
Presumably they mean forums that can be found with a web search.
Searching for FreeBSD stuff I usually get the answer from forums.freebsd.org, which is usually the first search result.
With Discord, when I search for something related to a videogame[1], I usually end up in a wiki. I never get search results for anything that happens inside the wiki's official Discord "server"[sic], even though I'm fairly confident the Discord should have 10x the amount of search results.
[1]: Or any topic, really. I'm using videogames as example to give as much advantage as I can to Discord.
How is that silly? I know there’s threading now, but it has to be used by everyone. If you find someone that asked the same question you have, but without a reply, is it unanswered or answered out of the thread 1000 messages down the page? Without threading it’s a disaster.
> How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?
Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.
I used to post a lot on forums. I’d post well tested, reproducible examples that exactly demonstrated my problem. I’d also take an “ask a question, answer a question” approach where I’d skim the first page or two of unanswered questions and leave a reply if I knew something off the top of my head.
Almost every Discord or Slack “support” channel I’ve tried is terrible. They’re a way for companies to reduce support by shifting the expectations towards ignoring users. Drone (CI) did this recently. Their Slack channel is nothing but users asking questions (at least for the several days I saw before unsubscribing from emails).
I think the real reason Discord, etc. are popular is because it’s low effort. No one expects you to come in with a fully baked example. It’s a conversation. So instead of the old expectation that you’d come prepared with a concrete example of your problem, you just blurt out some half-assed question and wait for someone to prompt you and hold your hand through the whole issue.
The price for that is the loss of people that want to participate in a high effort community rather than an emoji filled meme-fest with content splattered at mile-5 on the 1k mile continuous scroll. At least that’s my opinion.