Comment by Manuel_D
3 years ago
I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable. If slack created some awesome feature that mined your company's chat logs to train something like the Librarian in Snow Crash that would be a massive selling point even if it means fewer chats between human beings. It's s valuable because it produces an answer without taxing another human.
>I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable.
This could be completely hidden to the Discord devs though. They could very well be slavishly improving various internal metrics. If one of those is time spent in the app, then I could easily see search ending up a lower priority. It doesn't even have to be intentional.
Look at stackoverflow. They made their information extremely accessible and now search engines are riddled with sites ripping the content directly from stackoverflow, rehosting it, and winning SEO on specific questions which bleeds advertising revenue.
Discord, and 99.99% of companies under capitalism, do not care if they produce more value unless they get to keep that value.
I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.
Again, discord improving search would make users rely on their software more, since searching discord for answers becomes a part of user's workflows. Slack offering a premium enterprise "Librarian" feature would probably have significant demand. Usually, companies that offer more value can charge more for that value. I don't see the logic I how gimping search functionality somehow ends up improving these companies' bottom lines.
> I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.
No. There are websites that copy the content from SO to their Site, and then they SEO themselves to the top on Google, so that the SO Page is lower than the Copy Page.
This is not about the Google blurb.
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Stackoverflow made their content available to other companies. This is different making using the discord client and service provide quick answers.
If a random unauthenticated user can find it, which is what I am assuming people mean by making it accessible instead of locked in a discord, then other companies can pull and use the data too. What benefit does discord have to gain by making their content more accessible, that outweighs the possible losses?
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