Over the last decade, Discord has become the de facto community space for gaming, and there are a lot of huge servers out there that you can find by scrolling through its public servers page. But starting on November 16, some messages in these huge servers will be viewable from Google.
This has been asked for, a lot actually. One if the major downsides of using discord for supporting “your thing”, being a game or software, is that people can’t search for problems they encounter using search engines. Everything that happens on discord can only be searched for specifically there. People need a discord account and join a server (that they need to know about) to even start searching there. If you use a forum or similar, it gets indexed and searchable. Discord used to be a closed, proprietary black hole of information in this regard.
This is because people are using Discord for something it was never intended for IMO. It’s just a gaming communication thingy, right? Shoot the shit in the chat, talk with voice while gaming. That’s how I learned it back in the day anyway.
I dunno what’s wrong with like a forum or something. I guess those need maintenance. But surely discord does too.
This is backwards in more ways than one.
First of all, how do you know what it was intended for? It started with gaming, because slackware for gamers wasn’t something that existed, let alone for free. I’m sure they always planned to expand in any way and direction they could. Surely the plan was never “we will only ever serve gamers”!
Forums require a specific sign up for every forum to post, but can be read and indexed freely. They also aren’t a “live chat”, provide no way to hop in a call and just share the screen for support (as an example). Answers take time, even for trivially simple questions. Ironically discord now includes and hosts forums. But for all of it, you only ever need one account. To be clear I hate this, too. Walled garden kinda bullshit, which they fully control.
But again, why and how we got here doesn’t matter. Here we are. It just is. The “support history” and knowledge or whatever you want to call it, it’s in discord. It’s inaccessible unless you know it’s there and where to look (which “server”). Being searchable by Google is just better for the status quo. Which we can’t naturally change, no matter how much we want to or hate how it is. You can shake your first at clouds screaming “you’re all doing it wrong!” all you want, and be right while doing so. The recent data/history is still on discord, not in forums.
Yup. I hate that it’s used as a forum and message board and website and social media feed.
Really crowbarring those features in, still a decade later. And it’s still difficult because it’s inherently not such a platform, exactly!