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.
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.
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.