One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord r/malefashionadvice, the biggest Reddit community still inaccessible in protest of Reddit’s new API pricing, is encouraging its users to congregate on Discord and view guides on Substack.
I’m glad they’re leaving the old site, but Discord serves different purposes and isn’t a replacement. I’d recommend they start a Lemmy community.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.
The new generation of Internet users simply does not search. Watch this exasperating behaviour grow exponentially with all the AI bots, GPT whatnots and LLM shenanigans.
Zoomers overall can’t use computers, they grew up with phones and apps. Everything has to be handed to them in a closed off environment.
This is very broad and does not apply to all people. You should be more considerate before generalising an entire generation of people
Perhaps that’s why they said
Zoomers overall
Also not sure what’s so inconsiderate about their comment. I feel like it’s pretty widely accepted that zoomers generally don’t have the same tech problem-solving skills that many gen x/y people do. No one’s claiming they’re dumb. It’s a byproduct of growing up with tech that has been designed for simplicity and ease of use.
Apologies. I may have misinterpreted the meaning behind the comment
All good!
Revanced did this and it’s infuriating. I just hop in once in a while and ask the same dumb question because I can’t be arsed to scroll up 200 posts to find the answer; just to underscore this point.
I agree that Discord is a bad replacement for web forums, but you can search in any server that you belong to.
So in your opinion, if I search discord for
virsh # start win10-ts1-1507 error: Failed to start domain win10-ts1-1507 error: Cannot access storage file ‘/media/wenzel/OSWatcher/vms/win10-ts1-1507.qcow2’ (as uid:64055, gid:108): Permission denied
How likely would I be to get someone with the same problem and a solution?
It would depend on which server you’re searching in.
Wouldn’t it just be nuts if I could search multiple different discord servers at the same time? And it would show me a bunch of different results on the same screen? If only something would get invented.
It would also be nice if you didn’t have to join a server to search within it – you could have a page that searches all servers and shows you results. Maybe one day…
that you belong to
This is the issue. You need to log in, and join the server in order to access this information. Idk if it is still true, but there was a limit to the number of people who could join these communities. Which further complicates access to this information.
Yeah, somehow people got the idea I was saying this was good or comparable to the Web. It definitely isn’t. Saying that there is no search is wrong, though.
Fair. However, at least to me, the way you worded it seemed to be missing the point of the person you replied to. Yes, you can search a discord server, but they aren’t able to be indexed by search engines in the way that forums can which is what I believe was the point he was trying to get across.
Thought the same when I was reading this, weird they wouldn’t migrate here, unless they are unaware of the Fediverse
I must admit I’m quite surprised more subs that are closing shop these days aren’t at least attempting to move to Lemmy. It’s as if most of the mods are completely unaware of - or, for some unknown reason, are avoiding - the fediverse.
I had no idea this place existed until about 2 weeks ago. It’s really not common. Non of my friends have any idea what lemmy is when I tell them I quit reddit
Same here.
In addition, I think it might turn people away just a bit to have to explain instances and that it isn’t quite as simple as sign up and get at it.
Not that it’s all that complicated. But, it definitely isn’t as straight-forward as Reddit is.
Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn’t anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?
Yeah def not a good replacement for micro blogging. It’s almost impossible to catch up Discord even with slow mode on.
I find Lemmy cool. Hope more people leave Reddit for it and we can rebuild a decentralized place no one company can control.
Plus, I’ve seen communities try this during the blackout. I didn’t see the outcome for other communities, but on/r/Dota2 at least, people despised the suggestion because the discord already had an establish culture and that culture was basically shit.
So you were told to go take your activity and do it in a place of a different format, with different levels of topic focus, on a more personal level, in a place where you’re basically an outsider butting in and the people there don’t even really share an interest in discussing what you want (which was at the time a big tournament).
That’s an astronomically terrible idea. And the worst part, not just did we have THIS website, we also had other forums (even the steam forum). I dunno what reddit mods have to be smoking to willfully ignore those in favor of a chatroom.
I‘ll bet you a $100 (not really) they are mods on discord as well and their urge to keep control over the community is the real driver for them.
So they could start their own community here or magazine on kbin and be the mods of that.
It’s going to be really difficult to get most people used to the idea of decentralized federated services.
Thats not the problem. The problem is the usability. Making an account? Finding different communities? Find the right app? Everything really difficult. Thats the problem.
I’m fairly techy myself, not the most techy but I can admin a Salesforce instance, write a wordpress plugin from scratch, I can get by in React…
I’ve found migrating from reddit to lemmy frustrating. I still don’t know if I’m doing it “right”. Ive not subscribed to anything, nor tried to track down my old communities on here because it all just seems tedious and needlessly complicated.
Threads is winning over Mastodon because you click a button and it’s Twitter but a different color.
Indexing it is hard to impossible, too. Collective knowledge does not truly get retained
I’m on a Discord where people thread conversations and it drives me nuts. There are other reasons I’m there, but I’ve been tempted to leave over it.
Discord is VERY different from link/thread aggregators/forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. I just don’t understand subreddits that move to Discord.
/r/buildapcsales/ has an official Discord server now, and it just sucks compared to Reddit’s format.
Also, Discord doesn’t show up in search results for if people are trying to find an answer for something. And the search in the Discord servers sucks for this kind of thing as well.
Elaborating on /r/buildapcsales specifically with earlier comment:
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord actually has “Forum” channels that work like Reddit. You can create posts and search for them. So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
Not a fan of them moving to Discord instead of Lemmy, but anyway, fuck Reddit.
I didn’t know about Forum channels, thanks for the heads-up. Are they crawled by search engines, though? I feel like with people deleting their reddit posts and moving to discord, it’s already becoming a lot harder to find information online.
They cannot be crawled by search engines, unfortunately. Information online is going scarse.
Considering you don’t find Discord server logs on Google I’d say: No.
Discord is its own thing.
Google results have been down the drain for years, the only reasonable results I found were by appending reddit or site:reddit.com. Now even that is gone :-/
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So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
I am part of some Discord servers that utilizes this. Downside is that it doesn’t have comment threads which might be one of the things that made Reddit popular. Also, because Discord is more meant to use for chatting, people type a lot of non-productive stuff that you have to go through instead of filtering from top/best comments. Servers that have slow mode turned on (can only send a message every # of mins) to help still has this issue as well.
If Discord could have the forums be published to a website so it shows up in search results then that’d be a huge step forward.
Aside from the “not searchable from the outside” thing, another HUGE point against it is no branching comment threads. It’s all classic style quoting.
Plus, at least from the perspective of actual personal discord usage (as opposed to “official community” usage), the fact forums are not available unless if a discord server has a permanent open invite link on their server list and more than a certain amount of people gives the whole forum thing a bad taste. We just want to organize some stuff internally without opening up to people we don’t know where they came from. But you can’t even Boost to get access to the feature. We’re active enough thay we’re always getting access to new features months early compared to other servers, just not the stuff that’s meant for schools and company “owned” servers I guess.
I’ll just drop this here: [email protected]
They probably already know how to use Discord, so they think that it’s easier to migrate their community to a service that they already understand vs. researching an alternative, learning how it works, and then trying to migrate their community.
Also, a lot of their members are probably on Discord already, so you don’t have to try to convince them to sign up for a new service on top of everything else I mentioned earlier.
Sales seems like one of those things that makes sense for Discord, most of them are time limited so no need for an archive to search through
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord prevented 3rd party clients before it was cool.
If the objective is to avoid being forced to accept changes to software you use… why choose another person with the same power over you rather than free software?
Same story with Twitter users going to Meta’s Threads instead of Mastodon. Most people don’t see privacy online as an important matter because it’s non-tangible for them. They go with the “safe/popular” option only for the story to repeat itself later…
Because nobody really cares about free as in freedom. Speaking in hyperbole, of course, but you step outside of our tech savvy bubble for just a moment and it feels that way very quickly. As far as they’re concerned, Facebook is free. Threads is free. Switching from twitter to threads is just switching from one shitty free thing to another free thing that they think will be less shitty. Of course it’s less shitty now, they want users. Mastodon? Pleroma? Seems kinda confusing, what’s a server? Is FB a big server? Yeah… Free software alternatives have some PR problems to overcome at the moment. Now if there could be a new thing, a killer app, that was free? That would be insane.
At least their client isn’t hot trash like reddit though 😂
Isn’t it? It somewhat-works in the browser but you don’t get proper noise cancellation there nor quite some other features. Their native client is using an ancient version of Electron that, at least on Linux, leaves a lot to be desired. No audio-share, no proper Wayland support, no High-dpi.
There are quite a few amateur GitHub projects with patches and repacks to show how things should be done.
If a client is only good on Windows, then it is not that good. Remember Skype?
I game on Linux and discord worked fine for me. Anyways this isn’t really an apples to apples comparison. The reddit client crashes a lot and injects ads in the feed and lacks all the nice stuff of 3rd party clients.
I was on discord for 3 days. It was awful. A dumpster fire is, by my definition, still hot trash.
If you’re gonna say it’s bad you could at least explain the reasoning
That’s fair. I used the mobile app, so this may differ for any other user access points. It kept trying to read data that I have already denied, like location and access to sms as two examples. It also kept crashing at odd places. I’m sure there was a pattern, but I didn’t stay long enough to extrapolate it. Now, I know that the network is useful. However, at least at the time, the app was garbage and I had had enough of the leaks (as per my firewall) it was causing on top of the already privacy invasive defaults. I don’t shame anyone for using it, nor do I think it’s “the devil” or whatever. However, I do think the UI for the mobile user at the time was absolutely unacceptable as the official app, and the fact that the mobile web page almost forced you onto the broken app was also unacceptable. As I only ever used it for one community, I didn’t spend much time to find an alternative (if one even exists), and maybe that part’s on me.
I personally just don’t get Discord and find it very annoying when it’s the only means to communicate about something. And it certainly doesn’t feel like a good replacement for Reddit due to the many reasons mentioned in this thread.
How tf does that make sense?
It doesn’t!
Hot take but this is worse than them just staying on Reddit.
Is this really a hot take? Discord is awful for anything but active discussions in the moment. Trying to retrieve any information from the past on a Discord server is infinitely worse than even Reddit’s (commonly mocked) search function.
Discord is just a very different platform compared to Reddit. Personally I feel like Discord is amazing to stay connected with friends and other small communities. But it’s simply not made for large communities the way Reddit is. Or was.
I would disagree on the grounds that this will functionally just break up the community, which is the best outcome. People will get bored and move on to the next thing, and both reddit and discord will lose.
Because everyone knows that live chat rooms are exactly like message forums with content that can be voted up and down.
Discord is not an appropriate replacement for Reddit.People are only saying it is because it’s popular.
Discord is terrible for being able to go back and see shared knowledge.
I don’t understand why some are migrating to discord, it is not a reddit alternative in any way shape or form
Protesting a walled garden blocking third party apps, by moving to a walled garden that never allowed third party apps, is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen on reddit.
I’d also like to mention meta too with how some instances have been open to hearing them out. It’s like people went and deleted their reddit content because they didn’t want to add value to the reddit platform for people to find through search engines and interact with, but then they are fine with provoding content that can be engaged with for Zuckerberg over Spez? Call me crazy but Reddit is still way better and preferable to providing content for their userbase to interact with than Meta.
Not only is Discord a bad replacement for Reddit, it is another monolithic platform struggling to find a business model. The enshitification of Discord is real, and is going to get worse.
I disagree. Discord is one of the only non-federated social platforms resisting enshittification.
Back at the very beginning they said that any monetization they offered would be optional add-on purchases (not ads) and that those add-one would never involve removing the existing core features to sell them back.
Almost a decade later and they haven’t show any indications of straying from that promise.
Discord is an acquisition away from enshitification, and they have primed there moderation to make it possible. Source: Ive host a server for 3 years.
I’m not sure what your point is… I said they have resisted so far, not that they would be immune forever. OP implied that they already had problems, and nothing you’ve said contradicts anything I said. Source: I’ve been hosting multiple servers for over 8 years.
Resisting enshittification seems a bit stretched, just a few weeks ago they made the username case worst by going back to traditional unique usernames instead of discriminators allowing anyone to have the username they want. They also tend to change the whole UI/UX every few weeks it seems, 2-3 months ago, swiping would reply to a message instead of opening the members list, etc. I’m still using it to keep in touch with friends and school, but I would ditch it in an instant if I could.
I agree with the username change and I wish they had changed it earlier. If you’ve ever tried adding friends on using the old names, you would know how painful it was and how much better having a “normal” username is.
Anyway, whether or not you think those are “good” changes, I find it hard to argue that those specific changes could somehow be interpreted as driving shareholder value at the expense of users.
I’ve used Discord since 2016, never really had issues with discriminators but I can understand how someone new to this concept can have a hard time to grasp how it works. I think Discord could have explained it better instead of removing it.
Fair enough, I saw enshittification not only as driving shareholders value but also the user experience. Discord keeps making questionables UI/UX changes. I’ve found less enjoyment using the app the past years.
It’s not just about understanding, it’s about being harder to remember. Can you honestly say you remember what your discriminator was without having to look it up?
And even if so, do you really expect that most people would remember it without having to look it up?
The reality is that most people aren’t going to remember a 4-digit number that they didn’t pick.
I have to add people every week and never had a single person that knew their number. If it wasn’t for the “nearby scan” feature, I imagine a lot of those people would have just said “fuck it,“ because looking up the number is so annoying.
But people are used to remembering a username they chose, especially if they can reuse the same one (or two) in multiple places.
I’ve never really though about this aspect, it’s been easy for me but that doesn’t mean it is for everyone. Most people I added over the years where already on Discord so it was as simple as clicking the invite button. Never had much trouble IRL too because they were pretty active on Discord and knew their discriminator, or I would simply give mine.
Even if I’m still a bit sour about the change, I can totally see why it would be easier for most people.
Anyway, my initial comment wasn’t to bash you or anything. Clearly, my exemples weren’t the best. I now have better outlook on this username change. Thanks! 🫠
Yes, but they are already shoving those paid features in your face. It is only a matter of time.
I got a bar all last week at the top of Discord for a free trial of something else. That sounds like enshittification to me.
Haha. Why though? What’s the point?
Out of the frying pan into the fire I guess.
We need a way to mirror Discord to the web so it can be searched.
Seriously. A firmware I use only really uses discord to communicate. It’s near impossible to find fixes for anything on there.
Getting into keyboards then finding out that to find the source for firmware requires joining a Discord channel is so annoying. For those type of things wish there was a XDA forum equivalent for keyboards.
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