Most importantly, they’re searchable on the internet.
Discord isn’t even really searchable on discord. It was never meant for this kind of stuff and it shows.
What? Discord search is great. You can search by users, channels, text string, attachment file type, date, etc.
Ok, so say something is up with my car and i want to look into fixing it. I’m not in any car discord servers, so how do i find what is up with my car with? I can search all the dates and users i want, but i wont find anything useful. 10 years ago i could have just googled my make and model with with problem and the first link would have been a Saturn owners forum i never heard of with a thread detailing the problem thoroughly as well as estimates of how much i can expect to pay to fix it. Discord is just a modern IRC; it’s great for talking with your buddies in real time and having that all be logged, but it’s a terrible way to find information.
Lol yeah, now when you search google for stuff like that the experience is:
You find a website with a link to an owner’s enthusiast discord for your car’s model.
But then once you join you have access to one channel called #rules
Then you figure out you have to react to that one message in that channel with a tire burning out emoji and you get access to another channel called #introductions where you have to describe yourself and your car.
Then if a mod thinks it’s genuine, they’ll let you in to the other channels.
You finally get in and search for your issue. Your issue is really specific, but you don’t know the technical terms to search for, so your keyword of “brake squeaking” pulls up all a massive unorganized list of results purely sorted by post date of anything including those keywords, no way to sort by relevancy or popularity, so you scroll, and you scroll.
You find one message that is close, but you need more info. But before you can post in the #help channel you have to make 3 posts in #general (to fight spam of course).
Finally, after succeeding in the requirements, you copy a link to the message you found in search and post in #help.
A mod tells you to use the search, that question has been answered. You explain that you already did but you’re not sure exactly what to search for. You are now banned
Discord’s walled garden and conversational approach is awful for gestalt knowledge storage and access.
Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site’s greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what’s going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you’re never going to catch up and still give a shit.
