Comment by chillfox
3 years ago
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.
> 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.
That's the difference between the "cozy web" and the web 10-15 years ago. The communities used to grant everyone the right "to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline" by default; in fact it was weird to gatekeep things that could be useful to others - the only thing that was gatekept was "write access", and it was done based on attitude, not on someone's ability to do networking and invest large amount of time on an ongoing basis.
Of all groups, it's both ironic and sad to see this happening to open source projects in particular. Those projects owe their very existence - and people participating in them owe their skills - to that open, indexed, no-strings-attached knowledge-sharing culture.
The alternative here is that people are more of a burden on the community, not less. It's more disruptive to have noobs asking the same questions and having to be answered by community members every time. At least from where I sit.
I don't think asking noob questions makes you part of the community in the way it matters here - actually contributing.