Got this issue with the Voron 3d printer project. They claim RepRap open source heritage but then hide most of the discussion behind discord's doors.

Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently "migrated" their Github discussions to Discord... I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!

Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.

All those reddit communities who migrated to Discord are in for a shock when they pull the exact same shit in a few years.

I use it, but it's basically "Free Ventrilo but not as shit." I have nothing of any value on it. It can be yoinked behind a paywall at any time.

I fucking love Discord and use it for as much communication as possible...

...but I also agree with everything you say here

It wastes everyone's time. The project maintainers have to keep answering the same questions, and the users don't have instant access to answers

What printer is this so I can avoid it?

There was a man at CERN once who was sick of questions. His name was Tim-Berners Lee.

I hate the amount of software that is gated behind a Discord server.

No, I don't want to join your garbage Discord server just to use your software. Just host it somewhere else.

I mean, it's not wrong? Discord is still primarily a gaming app built as a replacement for TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The non-gaming use cases are still in the minority.

I’ve only seen it so far in the discord group for the city building game Cities: Skylines. And it’s still a mess.

And then some uppity moderator of some Discord channel for a niche mod for some game gets pissed at users for asking the same question repeatedly, when it's not obvious at all from any non-Discord source.

Looking at you, Our Summer Car -_-

And the people asking basic questions probably don't want to be asking anyway. I know from my days on the arch forums you will alway get basic questions even when the manual is exhaustive, but I see so many discord communities where the documentation is woefully incomplete, and the result is predictable: a constant flood of basic questions.

And the people being rude about it have created their own frustration. They picked a bad platform and are mad about how it's going. Further people who aren't deeply involved see what a bunch of jerkasses the community maintainers are and just disengage.

Discord is easy to setup and use. It’s basically a chatroom with history. It can help build a community. It’s also a horrible way to store/archive information because it focuses on real-time communication. At larger scale it also tends to get too noisy.

It's free*, insanely easy to set up, you don't have to worry about port forwarding or ddos or hosting fees, has powerful moderation tools, and there's a plethora of easy to deploy bots that help manage permissions and automate routine tasks. Literally, if it had a proper web-accessible forum similar to phpBB, it would be perfect.

Lots of users gush over Discord for some reason. My impression is that more technically minded people don't really like it, but your average user uses it for almost everything and encourages more services they like to use it. Hence why many reddit subs moved to Discord - the mods didn't necessarily prefer it, but they were sent an overwhelming number of requests from their users.

I just tried asking a question yesterday, and realized there's basically no way to save / bookmark / whatever a specific thing... it's seriously just a fucking chat room.