Comment by EdwardDiego
5 years ago
What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help.
I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and what happened instead".
> What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help.
For me there is also c) I can browse the content that is already there without signing up. Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.
>Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.
Why not? It's just as easy to join a discord server as to visit a site. If you don't have a Discord account already you can just type something random for your nickname.
Click the link, hope you're not inadvertently joining with your porn account, type a nickname, sit in the waiting room for 10 minutes until you can click the emoji that says you read the rules, get in, get notifications from unrelated channels because someone used @here begging for boosts, write out your question, get pinged again by a bot because you levelled up, then discover it wasn't the server you were looking for after all.
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I disagree. It's harder.
> you can just type something random for your nickname.
See, already harder.
I don't want to join something just so I can read it. I'll join it if I want to interact.
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Oh yes, that's an amazing reason.
Slack is great for the masses to get someone's attention. Not much else. I'm betting most of those requests start with:
"Hey, I have a problem, can someone help?"
No actual information follows, just minutes idle, waiting for someone to respond.
Slack is like a bird's nest. Baby birds chirp loudly, open up their mouths, and hope you'll regurgitate some worms into them.
And a cuckoo bird managers who said „i implemented slack on this project“ then threw out those little birds you mentioned and put his little bird in
I have often thought of cuckoo bird analogies in this context.
For me it starts with:
"Hello."
I wish it wasn't suicidal to point people to nohello.net in professional contexts.
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