• cally [he/they]
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    11 months ago

    Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.

      Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.

      Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.

        Search engines can not index discord.

        archive can not archive discord.

        Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.

        Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.

        • merdaverse@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          This. There are so many OSS projects that are over-reliant on Discord and it will bite them in the ass in a few years.

          • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            and so many people are already searching for solutions to problems and cant find them, because they are locked away on discord.

            I fucking hate it.

            and its only gonna get worse with the years to come, as more data is centralized in discord and locked forever away from search engines, or worse, lost with the discord gets deleted or if the company goes under.

            and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.

            as annoying as havin all the answers on reddit was, at least they popped up in a search engine so you could find an answer to what your problems were.

            • merdaverse@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.

              Exactly. The problem is admins encourage it to be used for technical discussion as there are channels dedicated to that. And Discord has picked up on the need for structured discourse and have reinvented forums, just shittier and more closed.

              The way to prevent all this information going into a black hole is for admins to stop encouraging Discord for this kind of usage, in addition to users moving to more open alternatives. Godot for example is moving in the right direction. It has recently opened a shiny new Discourse instance, now the only thing that’s left is to burn the Discord forum with fire.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            11 months ago

            I can’t wait until Discord have to start charging for features that are currently free (since they have to be profitable eventually), projects using it freak out about it, and end up switching to a different closed-source hosted system that’ll do the same thing years later. It already happened with OSS projects using Slack that migrated to Discord. People just don’t learn from the past.