Comment by apignotti
3 years ago
Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with?
I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
3 years ago
Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with?
I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.
>Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Discord started as a way for gamers to chat with one another. Initially the developers even wanted to sell games directly from the platform [1].
I think it would be incorrect to position Discord as a privacy-oriented platform when the desktop client needs to be run in a sandbox because there's no real way to disable data collection.
1. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-discord-game-store-is-now-open/
This.
Discord came about because all the instant messaging services (eg: AIM, MSN) had recently died, Skype was hot flaming gasoline garbage, Teamspeak and Ventrilo were tedious and expensive (for gamers), and otherwise there were no other means of reliable, easy, free, convenient means of voice communications.
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It's beyond ironic that Discord called itself that, being the successor to OpenFeint and its privacy lawsuit scandal, and being proprietary.
Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.
Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.
Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.
[1] https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...
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I'm not sure Discord knew what it wanted to be. Private for your friends, but not end-to-end encrypted. Chat for streamers with rooms, but not a streaming platform. (They tried. Twitch also tried to make a Discord-like desktop app.)
Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)
My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.
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Not everything should be preserved forever. It's actually really nice to be able to talk online and not have it form a permanent record that can be instantly referenced by anyone.
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It's not made for knowledge discovery; it's for gamers. Just look at that busy UI! The content is assumed to have no historical value.
But because it's free, and forums suck, people are using it for knowledge
Forums don't suck it's accessibility the biggest strength of discord is probably that they let you discover the communities and even take part in the conversation without signing up. It's just like IRC back in the day choose a username and of you go and if you like it converting the temp account to a normal one is just 2 clicks.
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It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
I would argue it makes no sense to index the vast majority of content without good search. If your search is good enough, you can index everything and then surface only the good stuff at query time.
Indexing trillions of messages is outrageous.
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Interesting comment. I would think Reddit is similar in terms of content, yet “site:reddit.com <query>” is common as a general search pattern (pre-blackout)
Discord is made for realtime chat and instant messaging. People don't put a lot of thought process in the vast majority of what they write. The format of ressit encourages a bit of a slower conversation and therefore more thought through comments. You barely even have time to edit a message before it's already irrelevant in discord.
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Discord has 'indexing' and search, just like how Slack does. It's just not on the public & open web - only searchable inside of Discord.
Pretty sure that wasn't the spirit of what GP was asking
> I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
It wasn't overlooked. The point is to make it difficult for outside users to access information unless they sign up.
What I wonder is why would anyone that cares about archiving/search would choose to use Discord?
Apparently because it is very easy to setup and offer a place where people can join.
More and more open source projects are using it and I don't really like it, but what easy alternatives can you recommend to them?
Genuine question, as it is an open issue for me. I want to focus on my project, not setting up and maintain a forum, mailing lists, etc. on top of that.
> what easy alternatives can you recommend to them
Github discussions.
A project I follow moved all their Q&A from discord and it's a joy to both search and ask now.
Discord is actively hostile to anyone simply wanting to browse.
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Those are the biggest aspects, but the private aspect is actually an important part of why many open source projects are using it. They don't really want to be having those sort of conversations in github issues or the discussions page or anywhere indexable.
Like getting on a call with a coworker or a collaborator on the project. You can technically record it or leave it open to the public, but most people do not because they just see it as not "informing the public" worthy.
I don't know either, but I'm not the Discord target audience. I've tried but it gives me a headache like a Vegas casino.
I'd rather see something simple and plain (and functional) like phpbb.
Matrix, but that doesnt really fix the searchability problem
Discord is a chatroom first. What non-enterprise chat comes with archives?
A forum is totally different.
And even then, forums weren’t designed to be archived from the start. People just wrote web crawlers and search engines.
(I know Discord has some forum-like functionality now but the point stands.)
Discord does have search, but I really hope they do not improve it.
The lack of good search really prevents the hostility towards new users that you often see on Reddit/forums where every question is instantly answered by a one liner "use the search" reply.
Discord communities are some of the most friendly and welcoming communities I have ever encountered on the internet. I think a large part of it is the chat nature and inability to easily pull up old comments.
I always use discord search to find answers, but a lot of people don't bother. I'm not sure answering the same noob questions over and over is fun for anyone
Maybe not, but it makes a community feel very welcoming
I'd rather have the tools to find things without having to interact with humans.
No one are automatically entitled to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline, although a community may chose to make it available.
Perhaps you should consider getting your answers from ChatGPT in the cases where a community has decided to be for themselves instead of the greater internet.
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