Comment by Kiro
3 years ago
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.
3 years ago
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.
That's why "archive to the web and let Google handle it" is a good solution.
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.
That depends a lot on the channel. Some channels are exclusively monthly public announcements, of new version of software, or bugs, or announcements of conferences for example. Or job opportunities with instructions on how to apply.
Some channels contain a high level of knowledge in the same way as a forum, knowledge you won't find posted again, perhaps because the person who posted it no longer works at the company. Some channels are used for work purposes, similar to Slack and MS Teams, and contain async information across timezones about product development, or bug-investigations updates, or design discussions, which are more real-time but valuable to be able to find again. Some channels contain the information needed to enter and participate in multi-month long competitions. The information is not posted anywhere else, even though that would be useful and well suited to a blog or issue tracker.
Some places are using Discord not because it's their favourite thing, but because many other companies and projects in the same field are now using Discord, so it's become expected by users (like Twitter). After all nobody wants to install yet another application, but if everyone in a field already uses Discord for work, then that's what you have to use as well.
My first year of Discord was entirely because it was required by my job, as it was the way everyone communicated at that company.
The point is it was the only way everyone communicated at that company aside from a negligible number of emails (maybe 10 emails in a year), and some Telegram channels with outside parties. So nearly every formal announcement and work-related message, as well as real-time chat went through the company's internal Discord server. When I occasionally searched the company dev channels I found a treasure trove of relevant technical knowledge I couldn't find anywhere else. Knowledge I couldn't get in a reasonable time by asking current people. But being Discord search rather than a web page, it was really hard to keep track of things found, and that knowledge was effectively lost.
At my current job we use Teams the same way the last company used Discord. Teams is worse.