Instead of having information available publicly that can be found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a question that most likely already was answered before?
It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something like that up to date instead?
So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted" writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering the same question again and again and again and again and again.
Trust is something that documentation for a project has to earn over time.
People will assume the documentation is incomplete and out-of-date, because that's the default for most things.
If it's comprehensive and stays up-to-date with new changes, the project community will eventually come to realize they and start trusting it. But it takes time to build up that track record!
Maybe there is some kind of negative reinforcement, too. The way it feels to me is: "I won't write documentation, because users don't read it -> Oh great, I will use ChatGPT to support my users -> The users don't know how to read documentation (or anything other than a 500-letters answer to a chat question) because they do everything with ChatGPT-like prompts -> I won't write documentation, because users don't read it".
Same for many things: most people tend to complain about CMake, but almost every time, I quickly realize that they don't know how to use CMake. Either they complain about it and never used it, or they complain and use it wrong. Therefore many devs try to build alternatives that will solve that problem by "being better than CMake". Turns out I have seen Meson projects that were a big mess, it's not just a CMake thing. On the other hand, people who learn how to use Autotool/CMake/Meson usually manage to make it quite maintainable.
Here the negative reinforcement would be: "People don't learn how to use the tools properly -> They make a mess -> They complain about the tool -> Someone makes a "better tool" -> People don't learn the new tool and make a mess -> repeat.
I truly believe that we could solve many problems by teaching people how to learn, instead of building technology that helps them being productive without learning.
Regarding the CMake documentation, though, I have been relying on it forever (that's pretty much how I learned CMake), and I personally find it pretty good. That is where I believe there may be some kind of cultural change: I am fine reading the manual (`$ man <command>`) and RFCs and documentation like the CMake one. It feels like "the modern way" is to find an example that does what you need and mimic it (hence the success of stuff like Copilot).
I just feel like my way is more powerful: I can both leverage official documentation (and RFCs, etc) and examples, and I can actually use them together (e.g. read the example, see new stuff there, and go read the official docs about those new things). IMHO, only being able to rely on examples that do almost exactly what one needs is a bit of a loss; people should learn to read actual manuals.
I read all the Unix man page of every command line program I used but there were only a few of them. There are a zillion of tools now, I can't spend days reading their docs: I won't be able to deliver to my customers and get paid. Googling how to do X magically works well enough.
Discord is the very last resort, only if desperate. I tend to keep very far away from tools that have discord as their primary documentation. There are always alternatives.
Now you could be like clearly that should just be in the web documentation but people still show up and ask even when it is and RTFM isn't exactly nice.
2. People read the docs when you send them a link to the relevant doc page. Having docs makes your chat support a matter of linking to the right page.
Saved time today VS saved time tomorrow, the constant question for startups :)
It means you've done a good job with the product and people don't need help to use it.
Of course I understand it is reflective of the current situation where naturally it is not worth seeking expertise when software gets at minumum a redesign every six months if not thrown out completely. But I'd really question is that actually good situation to be in?
It's fine to have Discord, or something similar, for when you users come to you with a problem, but then you need to consider if you have to go back at update the documentation. Early in my career hanging out on mailinglists was much more popular, frequently you'd ask a question and the maintainers of whatever software you where using would take the answer and put them into the regular FAQ or documentation. Now we replaced Discord with mailinglists and that might be sensible, the feedback loop just should not be excluded. Discord is terrible place to store knowledge.
(I like writing documentation.)
Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the shots, then that would make-sense.
...just something I've noticed.
Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website.
Paying for documentation.
Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls.
Documentation on just a website.
No documentation.
Random forums I have to sign up for that are separate from the help desk sign up that are separate from the actual services signup.
Not be able to search across others issues and to solve problems without needing to ask.
Using HN to get assistance.
Using Twitter to get assistance.
Hoping my email doesn’t get lost or stuck in spam either way.
Having notifications so I can respond.
Not having to sit on some website in some chat window.
Not having to use some crappy web form that won’t take my screenshot because it’s 2MB instead of only being at most 1MB.
Not being able to add attachments at all.
Being able to have a real time conversation with someone.
Still having a search function.
Have something that works well on mobile and desktop. (Oh, but websites work well on both… OH no they don’t have to. People can easily screw that up and make websites that work horribly on difference devices).
All of these things can be solved, but they aren’t.
And keep in mind, the context of the discussion here isn’t documentation that ONLY exists on Discord. Rather, documentation that exists on web AND also stuff that exists on Discord. So, stuff that has yet to make it to the website.
Huh?
Who has ever had to log into something to view documentation? Discord seems to be the only example!
Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it, pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any way.
As for the last one, well, getting you on to a Discord and into their marketing drip feed is a lot cheaper than having a sales call.
Very normal when working with ICs.
It was once very common. Microsoft had a "developers club" that basically sold access to their APIs docs.
And at least with discord it's easy to source answers from your community instead of paying developers to handle support.
The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic.
There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach.
I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.
The the first page of results are from, in order:
mygreatlearning.com
udacity.com
geeksforgeeks.org
stackoverflow.com
w3schools.com
micropyramid.com
edureka.co
pythonmorsels.com
tutorialspoint.com
pythontutorial.net
On the other hand, if I went to the python community discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from a real human in seconds. (the python discord is particularly excellent, by the way)
www.w3schools.com
stackoverflow.com
docs.python.org
Google is in a sad state it seems.
The returned sites do?
If I google "php __construct" I get php documentation as the first result.
Google knows when someone doesn't find the answer they're looking for from a result, I suspect the results you're seeing are the ones the majority of searchers for that query wanted.
def __init__(self):
self.data = [] x = MyClass()
I would guess google A/B tested those results till python.org fell off the front page.
More to the point, I don't think either google or the people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python __init__?".
I know that it doesn't have to be either a long explanation or a quick and concise snippet of information, it can be both. But I find that a lot of docs will either have long explanations or short snippets (because time is finite and doing both is duplicating efforts), and in those cases, I prefer the long explanation.
In a fresh and new project. But how will it look in 5 years when the user numbers are smaller because of other new projects?
The knowledge still needs to be transferred to wikis etc. so that it can be preserved long-term.
Knowledge in forums or now Discord has a shorter half-life until it's gone completely.
That's sad.
Mostly due to Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union
100%. But different strokes for different folks, as well as at different times in the evaluation/discovery journey. Many devs don't want to talk to someone.
From the perspective of the product company, things are a bit different. If you are pre-product market fit, you probably want every interaction with a possible customer/user you can, so you can move towards understanding the problem space. Set up discord for that.
Once you find PMF, it's all about setting yourself up for scaling. We made a choice to scale back chat and focus on online, public forums, and it worked out well for us. If you want to talk to a human, you can absolutely engage with our sales team, or in other public spaces like Twitter.
That said, some projects are big enough or inspire enough people that the community can scale on discord. Haven't seen that often, but it happens.
> Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).
Agree for generic programming queries, but for product specific queries, I haven't noticed that. And product specific queries are what documentation and forum are designed to help with.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/google-co-founder-larry-page... – May 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
> On December 3, 2019, Larry Page announced that he would step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
But Google has dumbed down so hard that scammers using generic keywords outcompete everyone including yourself (or outright clone/farm SO/Wikipedia/whatever), which is why many people add "stackoverflow" or "reddit" to the search terms, and the latter broke a few weeks ago when many subs went private.
The most annoying thing is, Google could shut down a lot of these scammers if they would invest in a couple hundred people to look at the most frequent questions and rate the top 20 sites - everyone caught to be a blatant spammer gets the boot, and everyone selling fake dick enlargement pills or whatever gets the police with the full support of the billions of dollars of Google. But they seem to have completely stopped all effort into their core product...
Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.
I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.
> Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless
It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.
It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the communication at all yourself. Win!
This isn’t some new degradation today’s youth have inflicted upon us. Discord is just the new IRC.
Which in many cases is, effectively:
"To read the FAQ just provide your phone number to verify your newly-created Discord account even though you just verified your email address."
Previously treated on Hacker News:
"Discord is a black hole for information"
Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one). Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting all their content on some third party centralized service? I don’t get it.
Aren’t all Discord “servers” controlled by one company? And why did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?
Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.
Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.
- Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related,
- No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0])
Not a great bet to go to keybase with the Zoom acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210
0: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...
Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951 (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in unix.
Sorry you feel Matrix feels half-baked; meanwhile we're busy doing a major iteration as per https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20 and https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e.... Right now the target is more WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage style messaging than Discord/Slack/Teams, but we'll (re)address the latter eventually.
Are clients encourages to implement potential features before they're merged?
But Discord has the advantage that people already have an account and all the so called servers are within the same GUI. (This convenience also makes it a walled garden)
Just want to point out that they fixed this, it's possible to create Topics once the channel's community reaches 200 users.
Though this probably isn't what most users want for a support channel. Having one place to go is simpler then a community with a dozen company meme channels that you have no interest in seeing.
> Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
It goes to hell if you make the mistake of enabling E2EE for channels since the key exchange bogs it down and only a few clients support encrypted message search. Otherwise, yeah the Element clients have pretty bad UX especially when comparing to Telegram. Some other clients like Nheko improve on it but don't cover the full set of features, so while I'm a user of Matrix I find it hard to continue to recommend Matrix over chat ecosystems with better usability.
For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to moderate, it's basically almost no effort.
To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it just does.
Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people, but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving community that feels good to you.
So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is only people who are already happy Discord users." But that should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move toward the broader audience and that will include addressing concerns like in the article.
Are they discussing this on twitter or reddit? Are they making YouTube videos? Did one of them start a Discord with lots of people there? Once you see what works, make an official one.
Funnily enough Discord was the only one I didn't start myself. I liked something async with proper Google searching better.
So even when I tried, I wasn't able to steer them.
Survivorship bias? You're counting all the people who want to use discord as support for using discord, but since you[1] have no other avenues for the non-discord people you don't know how many users you've lost simply because you've silenced them.
IOW, you're[2] looking at the 5 people who express support for discord but ignoring the 500 who hate it enough to not use your support at all.
I think, if you're a business using discord for user support, you should should be wondering, if you've got 100k users, why are only 1k people in your discord?
[1] Not you personally; for all I know you have multiple channels, which include discord. The places who normally use discord only have one channel for users to use.
[2] Once again, not you personally.
I'm 44, so for me a forum is ideal, Discord is way too intensive.
Then one of my members started a discord years ago and a lot of members went there. I switched everyone to an official one, and one member volunteered to moderate.
I would say most questions come from Discord, then YouTube comments, then email. My own forum wasn't as popular so I closed it due to lots of spam that I had to manage.
I also pushed hard for Reddit but never took off (I liked reddit more)
One thing to mention that is probably important: this is in gaming sphere with lots of kids, teenagers and young adults. Also used in schools by teachers.
A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground, documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's how it should work.
Ory does offer onboarding for commercial clients, for that you can set up a call in 1 click here: https://www.ory.sh/contact/ - we can kick off a guided onboarding session on the same day if you want to move fast.
It provides a great funnel for users to join the community, establish a feeling of belonging and identification with the product.
I‘d go the other way around, and fix Discord‘s documentation problem: A chatbot that automatically answers user questions based on previous answers and the docs. We‘re building exactly that at https://awesomeqa.xyz/ - feel free to check it out :)
It supports voice, video, and text.
It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.
It supports web, desktop, and mobile.
I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.
Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.
Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.
I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten.
I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.
You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?"
Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.
It will also stop many potential users from ever becoming actual users.
I do wonder if those doing this are self-selecting for the "right" type of user.
Discourse is what people want as a modern forum.
Two good examples are https://discourse.nixos.org/ and https://forum.level1techs.com/
Then the message input field tries to be way too smart and is way too dumb at the same time. They've somehow broken macOS's native text replacements, iirc the thing eats some characters if your message starts with them, BUT — if you just type someone's @username and don't select the completion that pops up, the mention wouldn't work.
The UI to add reactions to messages is comically bad. It shows your recent emojis, then 5 kilometers of the custom emojis from all the servers you're on (that you can't use anyway because you don't have the subscription), and only then the rest of the unicode emojis.
Then there are all the incredibly obnoxious popups, banners and tooltips that promote the paid subscription. And the "what's new" popup. That's also obnoxious. Like, maybe, just maybe, if I'm not paying you, and have been using your service on the free tier for several years now, you should consider me a lost cause and stop raping my eyeballs with your stupid upsells in the hopes of converting me into a paying customer?
Also, my files are way too often "too powerful" with no option to have the server compress them to its liking — it's rare that I need to send a bit-perfect copy of an image or a video.
I'll be building a modern multi-protocol desktop IM client as my next project sometime in the future. Discord will definitely be at the top of the list of services to support.
If you have startup and no docs + complicated product -> discord is super easy first step. It also has a nice loop: if you see a question over and over, move it to faq, if its still repeated perhaps add better labeling/hints to your forms, if it still persists, damn maybe rethink your offering/product(or accept CS as vital part).
In the end I don't want to deal with meta stuff. I want a nice seamless product period. Discord while awkward is a good first thing that you should absolutely have - you can bootstrap it in 10 mins. (Depending on your customers ofcourse, if you are selling insurance to old folks, for obvious reasons it's not good)
It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer.
If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.