I understand your position and I’ve had pleasant experiences on discord in the past with people being very willing to help. However, the help I received for my problem is basically impossible to discovered for anybody else (in fact, I have a hard time finding this thread myself).
Discord is really great for realtime interactions, wether that be chatting or talking. But it absolutely sucks at retrieving information generated in the past. It’s not search engine indexable and the discord search itself usually isn’t of any help either.
On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past. Recently I’ve been diving a bit deeper into construction and I’ve found a forum in my native language. There are so many treasures there: experts from the field sharing experiences and advising on issues, people linking relevant threads, people asking questions and whole threads evolving from that. Sure, there is quite a bit of „toxic“ forum interaction as well, but there are so many gems that would absolutely be undiscoverable if the same interactions would happen on discord
I agree, this is a great value. I don't argue against forums, they need to exist.
I was just pointing out that Discord, in my experience, has not been a place of disdain like the original post claims.
Discord has done a lot of work to help foster a good community for all types, especially for the software development communities. If you haven't yet experienced Discord's forum feature, it's worth at least exploring. Here's an example from the Elixir community: https://share.barkerja.dev/4o8Ozk.png
If Discord ever did decide to make this content SEO, what then becomes the major point _against_ something like Discord and your traditional forum?
Still have to register though and the content is not indexed by a search engine.
Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?
It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.
And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately.
I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed.
Slack, on the other hand. Absolutely! Stay away for anything related to knowledge-base.