"Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.
Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.
This is why when we wanted to build a community around our product we went for Discourse instead of Discord (even though many people asked us for Discord instead). It certainly feels a lot less "lively" than a Discord server, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
BobaFloutist|1 year ago
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
mystified5016|1 year ago
jdwithit|1 year ago
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
trinsic2|1 year ago
happyweasel|1 year ago
dbg31415|1 year ago
Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days.
Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.
culi|1 year ago
nijave|1 year ago
notepad0x90|1 year ago
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
ghostpepper|1 year ago
zamalek|1 year ago
Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
rikroots|1 year ago
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
[1] https://discover.discourse.org/
skydhash|1 year ago
fastball|1 year ago
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
All about the right tool for the right job.
unknown|1 year ago
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