Discord != Documentation

I fucking hate Discord. It's a walled garden. You need an account to see the content and you can't google shit. It might be great for real time communication, but I can't grasp how its usage has evolved beyond any of that.

I recently built a 3D printer where the entire community for it lives on Discord. Their website instructions are horrifically out of date because all of the current changes have been discussed at some point on Discord. What should have been a 2-4 day project turned into a 2-3 week project due to the garbage involved in trying to strain information out of a massive multi-channel group chat with terrible search.

Also "I'm so sick of this question" well then put the answer somewhere that's indexed by search engines. Siloing knowledge into discord is an awful idea.

Discord != Support
Discord != Archive
Discord != Issue tracker
Discord != Update news distribution platform

Requests to Discord are blocked by my company’s newest filters as “gaming”. 😶

I'm 50 and I have a 23 year old "RTFM" t-shirt.

Kids these days:

> StackExchange bad! Those elitist pieces of shit closed my question I did 0 research for and they were not nice.. Imma go and ask the same question on The_Next_Place, where there's still someone who hasn't gone mad answering it for the thousandth time.

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One wouldn't be too wrong to point at similarities between cancer and Discord in how it quickly takes over different systems (e.g. issue tracking, discussions, Q&A, documentation) and replaces them with a single non-functional thing (chat).

But, to play the devil's advocate, Discord seems to have some kind of a forum functionality, however I've never encountered those Forum Channels myself.

I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don't approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That's when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.

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So much yesss, that drives me nuts, regardless of age!
I know that it's just hip and familiar to many, so I put with it with the few projects I'm really interested in and I can't say it doesn't work well, but please, why are there SO MANY??

I think it can be useful for complex questions, but in my experience most of these discord servers are full of people asking very basic questions and very jaded people giving incredibly rude and cynical answers

This hits home. Discord is a terrible product I don’t know why anyone likes it.

I see a lot of things that have a discord community.

Why is this? Is it a way for someone. To earn extra money? Or do they just like that platform?

This applys to so much more than just programming now, sadly

Hate this so much, very much into 3d printing (voron right now) and huge parts of the community are on discord it's just an absolute pain to use

Totally agree, please let the doc be doc, not a chat.

PS: what were the original subtitles of the screenshot? :)

Fuck Discord.

To be fair, a discord comment from five years ago is still more helpful than Amazon AWS's actual documentation.

I'm not 41 yet, but even if you csn somehow make a chat room app replace the functionality of code documentation or a few simple example code snippets... should you? You're also hosting on GitHub and not on MEGA, even though you could...

RTFD, or something like that.

Pull requests welcome!!

Matrix chat as the core developer hangout I find is similar

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I'm usually on the documenting side of things. If something like this starts unfolding, I produce text or HTML files anyway, they go on github/lab/whatever, and I wash my hands of what happens next.

In the end I write documentation mostly for myself. When the company can't figure things out over Discord or whatever ephemeral chat interface they use, I get called anyway.

Also, putting documentation in a format that has way too many features so just reading docs takes up 40% of CPU usage. Yes ,fuck you for using gitbook, i hate it so fucking much

The only real alternatives to Discord is Matrix and Revolt. I am on both and there are a good number of people on there but they aren't too active. Wish they would be more popular and widely used

I don't think GitHub is social enough or the right tool to address bugs, talk about issues, or completely missing - ask for expertise. It's not even democratic enough and done in such a way that makes what to work on clear at times.

Some code is still more art than work or science but still there is a notion that maybe if there was a better tool than GitHub there would be no need for a discord.