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points by RHSeeger 2 days ago | 0 comments

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.)