Hacker News

points by anthonypasq 2 days ago | 0 comments

i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.

how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.

queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.

[–] RHSeeger 2 days ago

Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.

But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that

- Can't be found in search engines

- Abysmal search functionality

- Abysmal discoverability

[–] nantangitan 2 days ago

What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality? Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.

[–] desolate_muffin 2 days ago

Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.

[–] LoganDark 2 days ago

It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.

[–] LoganDark 2 days ago

Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??

Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.

[–] demibabs 2 days ago

THIS. It pisses me off to no end and it seems like something they’re totally uniniterested in fixing.

[–] Barbing 2 days ago

I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?

Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?

[–] LoganDark 1 day ago

My guess is it was better than nothing and they have incredible scale to deal with. (Like millions of messages per second scale.)

[–] yangm97 2 days ago

But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.

[–] 28304283409234 2 days ago

Few things are.

[–] 5555watch 2 days ago

Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.

And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...

But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.

[–] lrvick 2 days ago

Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)

Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.

A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.

The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.

If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.

Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.

[–] esseph 2 days ago

> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product

Sooooooo what is your solution?

You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.

Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.

[–] lrvick 2 days ago

IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.

[–] rcxdude 2 days ago

IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).

[–] lrvick 2 days ago

I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.

OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.

[–] rcxdude 2 days ago

Sure, I'm just pointing out that you're going to be losing a lot of functionality that way and it seems most people would prefer the functionality.

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.

The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.

[–] esseph 1 day ago

> OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.

As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

I have been an IRC operator for over 25 years, and never funneled any data to any third parties.

That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.

[–] esseph 1 day ago

> Matrix

Is a piece of shit with awful UX.

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?

You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.

[–] keithnz 2 days ago

yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.