• DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.

    • wholemilk@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn’t be used for documentation in place of forums though.

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yea, I don’t get the documentation stuff. It’s like saying you’ll use Google Chat history as your documentation.

        • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don’t want all their stuff centralized to Discord’s servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.

          I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they’re going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they’ll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that’s where everyone is.

          That’s absolutely not to say that it’s a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.

        • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Seriously. My only interactions with discord are in ways that its replaced a simple web forum or IRC channel.

          • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Well if that’s your only exposure to it, then yeah I could see why you think it’s not good.

            But if you just want to hang out with a regular group of friends async and in voice chat, it’s pretty damn good.

        • Wodge@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Counter-counterpoint: He did eat something off his foot in front of an audience.

      • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I may be getting old, but I think D*scord (I’m all for cencoring it like a slur) isn’t any more simple than a phpBB or something similar was. Quite the opposite actually, at least for any user trying to navigate the the darn thing.

        • CliveRosfield@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Having used both, if you can somehow navigate a phbb board then you can easily navigate discord. The only thing stopping you is you.

          • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Maybe navigating is the wrong term. It’s just impossible to find stuff relevant to me on discord. On any given larger server, there may be a few channels I could be interested in - but they are just a single chat log, often with lots of off-topic spam, and many different people having almost separate discussions at the same time. On any given larger phpBB, stuff is mostly separated into different threads with all the off-topic posts being delegated to a single thread. It’s better searchable and better organized.

    • voxelastronaut@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        My office has official chat (teams) and unofficial chat (Mattermost).

        I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a more casual discussion platform at work, which is what Mattermost had become.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord

        Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once

        At least mods help mask all the other missing features

    • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.

      Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was “calls” and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.

      I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it’s over complicated and feature creeped electron shite