One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord r/malefashionadvice, the biggest Reddit community still inaccessible in protest of Reddit’s new API pricing, is encouraging its users to congregate on Discord and view guides on Substack.
I’m glad they’re leaving the old site, but Discord serves different purposes and isn’t a replacement. I’d recommend they start a Lemmy community.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.
The new generation of Internet users simply does not search. Watch this exasperating behaviour grow exponentially with all the AI bots, GPT whatnots and LLM shenanigans.
Revanced did this and it’s infuriating. I just hop in once in a while and ask the same dumb question because I can’t be arsed to scroll up 200 posts to find the answer; just to underscore this point.
I agree that Discord is a bad replacement for web forums, but you can search in any server that you belong to.
So in your opinion, if I search discord for
virsh # start win10-ts1-1507 error: Failed to start domain win10-ts1-1507 error: Cannot access storage file ‘/media/wenzel/OSWatcher/vms/win10-ts1-1507.qcow2’ (as uid:64055, gid:108): Permission denied
How likely would I be to get someone with the same problem and a solution?
It would depend on which server you’re searching in.
that you belong to
This is the issue. You need to log in, and join the server in order to access this information. Idk if it is still true, but there was a limit to the number of people who could join these communities. Which further complicates access to this information.
Yeah, somehow people got the idea I was saying this was good or comparable to the Web. It definitely isn’t. Saying that there is no search is wrong, though.
Fair. However, at least to me, the way you worded it seemed to be missing the point of the person you replied to. Yes, you can search a discord server, but they aren’t able to be indexed by search engines in the way that forums can which is what I believe was the point he was trying to get across.
Thought the same when I was reading this, weird they wouldn’t migrate here, unless they are unaware of the Fediverse
I must admit I’m quite surprised more subs that are closing shop these days aren’t at least attempting to move to Lemmy. It’s as if most of the mods are completely unaware of - or, for some unknown reason, are avoiding - the fediverse.
I had no idea this place existed until about 2 weeks ago. It’s really not common. Non of my friends have any idea what lemmy is when I tell them I quit reddit
Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn’t anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?
Yeah def not a good replacement for micro blogging. It’s almost impossible to catch up Discord even with slow mode on.
I find Lemmy cool. Hope more people leave Reddit for it and we can rebuild a decentralized place no one company can control.
Plus, I’ve seen communities try this during the blackout. I didn’t see the outcome for other communities, but on/r/Dota2 at least, people despised the suggestion because the discord already had an establish culture and that culture was basically shit.
So you were told to go take your activity and do it in a place of a different format, with different levels of topic focus, on a more personal level, in a place where you’re basically an outsider butting in and the people there don’t even really share an interest in discussing what you want (which was at the time a big tournament).
That’s an astronomically terrible idea. And the worst part, not just did we have THIS website, we also had other forums (even the steam forum). I dunno what reddit mods have to be smoking to willfully ignore those in favor of a chatroom.
I’m on a Discord where people thread conversations and it drives me nuts. There are other reasons I’m there, but I’ve been tempted to leave over it.
Discord is VERY different from link/thread aggregators/forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. I just don’t understand subreddits that move to Discord.
/r/buildapcsales/ has an official Discord server now, and it just sucks compared to Reddit’s format.
Also, Discord doesn’t show up in search results for if people are trying to find an answer for something. And the search in the Discord servers sucks for this kind of thing as well.
Elaborating on /r/buildapcsales specifically with earlier comment:
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord actually has “Forum” channels that work like Reddit. You can create posts and search for them. So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
Not a fan of them moving to Discord instead of Lemmy, but anyway, fuck Reddit.
I didn’t know about Forum channels, thanks for the heads-up. Are they crawled by search engines, though? I feel like with people deleting their reddit posts and moving to discord, it’s already becoming a lot harder to find information online.
Considering you don’t find Discord server logs on Google I’d say: No.
Discord is its own thing.
Google results have been down the drain for years, the only reasonable results I found were by appending reddit or site:reddit.com. Now even that is gone :-/
Duckduckgo and Brave Search often shows Reddit results for me even without
site:reddit.com. Though now because of how Lemmy works with all of these instances, we can’t easily usesite:anymore. Hoping that search crawlers will be able to just index Lemmy/Kbin instances fine to pull the results in search engines in the future.
So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
I am part of some Discord servers that utilizes this. Downside is that it doesn’t have comment threads which might be one of the things that made Reddit popular. Also, because Discord is more meant to use for chatting, people type a lot of non-productive stuff that you have to go through instead of filtering from top/best comments. Servers that have slow mode turned on (can only send a message every # of mins) to help still has this issue as well.
Aside from the “not searchable from the outside” thing, another HUGE point against it is no branching comment threads. It’s all classic style quoting.
Plus, at least from the perspective of actual personal discord usage (as opposed to “official community” usage), the fact forums are not available unless if a discord server has a permanent open invite link on their server list and more than a certain amount of people gives the whole forum thing a bad taste. We just want to organize some stuff internally without opening up to people we don’t know where they came from. But you can’t even Boost to get access to the feature. We’re active enough thay we’re always getting access to new features months early compared to other servers, just not the stuff that’s meant for schools and company “owned” servers I guess.
I’ll just drop this here: !buildapcsales@lemmy.ml
They probably already know how to use Discord, so they think that it’s easier to migrate their community to a service that they already understand vs. researching an alternative, learning how it works, and then trying to migrate their community.
Also, a lot of their members are probably on Discord already, so you don’t have to try to convince them to sign up for a new service on top of everything else I mentioned earlier.
Sales seems like one of those things that makes sense for Discord, most of them are time limited so no need for an archive to search through
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord prevented 3rd party clients before it was cool.
If the objective is to avoid being forced to accept changes to software you use… why choose another person with the same power over you rather than free software?
Same story with Twitter users going to Meta’s Threads instead of Mastodon. Most people don’t see privacy online as an important matter because it’s non-tangible for them. They go with the “safe/popular” option only for the story to repeat itself later…
At least their client isn’t hot trash like reddit though 😂
Isn’t it? It somewhat-works in the browser but you don’t get proper noise cancellation there nor quite some other features. Their native client is using an ancient version of Electron that, at least on Linux, leaves a lot to be desired. No audio-share, no proper Wayland support, no High-dpi.
There are quite a few amateur GitHub projects with patches and repacks to show how things should be done.
If a client is only good on Windows, then it is not that good. Remember Skype?
I game on Linux and discord worked fine for me. Anyways this isn’t really an apples to apples comparison. The reddit client crashes a lot and injects ads in the feed and lacks all the nice stuff of 3rd party clients.
I was on discord for 3 days. It was awful. A dumpster fire is, by my definition, still hot trash.
If you’re gonna say it’s bad you could at least explain the reasoning
That’s fair. I used the mobile app, so this may differ for any other user access points. It kept trying to read data that I have already denied, like location and access to sms as two examples. It also kept crashing at odd places. I’m sure there was a pattern, but I didn’t stay long enough to extrapolate it. Now, I know that the network is useful. However, at least at the time, the app was garbage and I had had enough of the leaks (as per my firewall) it was causing on top of the already privacy invasive defaults. I don’t shame anyone for using it, nor do I think it’s “the devil” or whatever. However, I do think the UI for the mobile user at the time was absolutely unacceptable as the official app, and the fact that the mobile web page almost forced you onto the broken app was also unacceptable. As I only ever used it for one community, I didn’t spend much time to find an alternative (if one even exists), and maybe that part’s on me.
Hot take but this is worse than them just staying on Reddit.
Is this really a hot take? Discord is awful for anything but active discussions in the moment. Trying to retrieve any information from the past on a Discord server is infinitely worse than even Reddit’s (commonly mocked) search function.
Discord is just a very different platform compared to Reddit. Personally I feel like Discord is amazing to stay connected with friends and other small communities. But it’s simply not made for large communities the way Reddit is. Or was.
I would disagree on the grounds that this will functionally just break up the community, which is the best outcome. People will get bored and move on to the next thing, and both reddit and discord will lose.
Because everyone knows that live chat rooms are exactly like message forums with content that can be voted up and down.
Discord is terrible for being able to go back and see shared knowledge.
Not only is Discord a bad replacement for Reddit, it is another monolithic platform struggling to find a business model. The enshitification of Discord is real, and is going to get worse.
Protesting a walled garden blocking third party apps, by moving to a walled garden that never allowed third party apps, is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen on reddit.
from bad to worse
Huh, literally never seen that sub in the 5 years I was on Reddit that I can recall
Same here. The sub is private now so i can’t check the members figure quoted in the article, but if correct, subredditstats.com puts it near the bottom of the top 100. So ‘one of the largest subs’ seems a bit of a stretch.
From one platform they don’t control to another platform they don’t control. See you in a while when Discord pulls some bullshit and everyone will be looking for an alternative to the alternative.
Ugh, I don’t know why but I find Discord incredibly confusing to use. I’ve joined plenty of different communities for game mods and android development and I can never find anything that I’m looking for. The UI is so busy and anything useful that gets posted is quicky pushed out of the way for comments. I really don’t understand how a reddit community would be able to move there in the first place.
Yeh discord is an absolute mess imo. As soon as there are any decent number of people it just becomes like a bloody twitch stream chat.
It’s a chat app, not a forum or Reddit replacement. I wish people would stop suggesting it as one.
Discord is also at least 2 completely different experiences IME. If you’re in a niche server, it can sort of work like reddit with threads etc, because there’s like one reply every 30 minutes to a day or 3.
If you’re in a busy community it’s clearly not at all like reddit, and is like all the huge chat rooms of the past and range from immediate interaction time waster to completely unusable for anything except watching text fly by.
I have never heard of that sub, and I frequently visited r/all to be honest.
Personally I feel like Discord is more like a chat app than a ‘forum’ in a way like Reddit and Lemmy are.
May as well leave Reddit for IRC. Completely different purposes. Shame.
IRC was a lot of fun back in the day. The other day I jumped on undernet using a web portal. Oh yeah there were people there but it was quiet as could be. I jumped around a couple channels like my old hangout #Florida and nothing. I may try again another day.
I clung to IRC as long as I could, but it basically became a troll haven for the last 4 people in the channel, just all trolling each other. I had such good, deep conversations on IRC once upon a time. And in a way that can’t be replicated in this era.
