Comment by badwolf
5 years ago
This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop"
Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site
1. It's the project's web forum. https://forums.fooproject.org/ . Not random at all. If you're lucky, your registration for fooproject works for the forum as well.
2. Well, we don't like registering with a large corporation either.
> and figure that sites navigation,
Suppose it's a web forum, one of the trusty varieties from the 2000's. What's there to figure out? The exact placement of settings in the user profile pages? You'll live.
> let alone their privacy/data policies.
In this day and age, the effective assumption is: It's all potentially public and the US government keeps a copy forever. Wish it were otherwise.
... and actually, the privacy is typically better on smaller independent platforms than on large ones. The large ones are probably already hooked up to the NSA, while for the smaller ones it's just a potential.
> Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Slack is a painful experience, and not even that easy .
Reddit... yes, but there's not much of a UI to be difficult.
Discord - I have almost no experience with it TBH.
> People are comfortable using them.
No, they're not. Some are. Those who aren't, tend not to use them unless they have to.
> They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
A web forum is a pretty uniform thing. I hope you're not complaining that not all forums are controlled by some huge single company...
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site,
Simple fix: add login with google/github.
Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great.
Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.
I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my google account.
"I don't want that either."
Then use a password manager. Pick your poison.
Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just phone number/sms verification
This is what openid (the original) was designed to fix. You get to own your identity and delegate it if desired. But adoption didn't really happen.
But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right way around it for you?
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> This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop"
The only people I see unironically talking about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people that talk about _other people_ supposedly proclaiming the year of the Linux desktop. "This recurring discussion reminds me of a decades-old strawman/dead meme" is not a good way to introduce any straight-faced argument.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Why do you speak of Discord and Slack as if they were eternal, and that we were all taught to use them as surely as we learned our ABCs and cut up our food? At one time Discord and Slack were that "random weird site", and I'll note that for vast numbers of people outside of nerd and tech communities they still are. As for me, given a choice (and outside of work I do have one), I'd touch neither because I find them both to be terrible software.
I agree, and I think OSS projects should learn from these commercial successes and use their learnings to feed into OSS product experiences. But to some extent, Discord and Slack are both quite new. They were obviously quite successful at encouraging people to sign-up. There must be something there that makes Discord or Slack seem more trustworthy than "random weird site".
Most board software follows a simple tree layout. Not hard to navigate.
No one wants to register for slack or hand over government id for discord or use the reddit app.
This recurring complaint is very "nothing existed before me" millennial-speak.
In fact, no one wanted Reddit outside of Digg users, the vast majority of its traffic are bots and it's a poor substitute for the forums we're talking about.
As for Slack it's basically a rebrand of IRC for corporate Windows users, and Discord is just a testament to the laziness of the author of Ventrilo.
What no one cares about is your opinion on "privacy/data policies" if you think that the whole world being filtered through 4 sites is somehow a net positive in terms of "privacy/data policies."
Do you think we should replace HN with discord or slack?
can we get oauth on HN so i can login everywhere with my HN account?
I, for one, am not comfortable using Discord or Slack because of the very nature of synchronous communication.
The only time I tried to use Discord it demanded I send them my government ID.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site
Definitely better than being forced to provide my cellphone number...I'll take registering on "some weird site" (weird way to talk about a projects community hub) over giving a dubious company that keeps escalating its hunger for new policies (usually just to grab more data) my number.
I agree and I've been wondering, why doesn't someone make something like a Discord/Discourse hybrid? Guilded has forum channels and yet it misses so many of the bells and whistles for moderation and discoverability that Discourse has.
Basically, I want a Discord-type app, with it's UI and one login, and then blended with the Discourse forum power.
Are you imagining that the forum features are separate from the chat? I guess which aspects of discord would you like to merge with the forum concept?
I'm working on a topical chat site where instead of servers/rooms, it's posts w/chatrooms. Curious to hear more in terms of how you envision a hybrid that would have appeal.
Honestly, I like how Guilded has set it up but not how they seem to 1) not be developing the app that quickly and 2) not communicating much with their users.
They have separate channel types, where one is a chat channel (like Discord and other chat groups: a linear chat stream) and another as a forum channel (that has unexpanded topics that when clicked show a linear chat stream, also able to pin certain topics to the top).
What I like about it is that I can find slack/discord/group text channels to really frustrate me when I've missed some things. Seems very hard to sometimes get caught up on what people are saying, often many conversations happening at the same time, and having to scroll back a lot to figure out where it began. Ah! That may be it, channels don't seem to have a start, so I find I try to search for the beginning and get overwhelmed trying to see how the conversation "started." Whereas with the post/topic style channel that most forums have, it's quite easy for me to see where the conversation started (at least where this branch of it did) and don't feel the stress to go all the way back.
FB seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet has the posts expanded so one doesn't just sees the title, sees the whole post, which can make it hard to scan to see which to read. HN seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet, as FB, lacks many of the forum features or doesn't seem to do them well, like sorting/searching/filtering/pinning/moderation/etc.
I basically kinda dream of Guilded but with faster development, doubled or tripled down focus on their forum channel, and a superpowered member directory.
> I'm working on a topical chat site
I checked it out and I like the look. Seems like HN or reddit in a way, but without the indented threads and just having a linear chat form. If a lot of people chat on each post, I think I may get similarly lost to Discord. I do have a few ideas that popped into my mind that excited me, please feel free to take them or leave them:
1) Embed the article/content directly in the post column? Not sure how technologically feasible/legal it'd be, but I'd love to have one site that brings content in reader mode and then having that chat column next to it, so that I could read and then comment in the same spot. I don't like clicking away and coming back, especially with the columnar setup, I think I'd love the full side-by-side.
2) Somehow limiting who can type in the chat column, maybe per article or per community or something. I think I've dreamed of having a place where I can watch 2 people chat, maybe 3. I think conversations can get quite diluted/convoluted with more people and I love the idea of just reading what two people think, especially ones I respect, especially who may have expertise on a specific topic. Maybe it could be less of a pure open-to-everyone chat, and maybe has separate 1-to-1 chats in there about the topic. I dunno. Something about me would love to see a 1-1 chat of you and your friend talking about Incubus, and then maybe a former Incubus person and another famous rocker talking about their reflection on this, etc. Perhaps this is too out there and not clear enough, not sure.
Anyway, would love to chat more with you on your endeavor if you'd like to :-)
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I think Matrix or Mattermost have Discourse and Discord bridging. Wonder how that can work.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Discord is GARBAGE, and you don't know what you're talking about.
But they'll register for Discord/Reddit/Slack.
Then presumably complain about the Internet becoming 6 big platforms and a search engine.