https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10181706/working-with-a-...
Sometimes I can't make a working minimal example because I work with info that can't be placed online and writing something ground up that is similar enough and decoupled from the hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of lines would take me a week or two and may not end up even working out.
IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go.
Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat.
Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.
You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.
2. On top of that you can make info on and solutions to other issues/problems actually available and accessible. Like the one the author describes later in the same text
Instead all this info is locked behind a proprietary chat platform
I have a long-held belief that the single best community information database format is Stack Overflow. (As opposed to wiki, chats, user groups/mailing lists, flat/threaded forums.) An editable top-level question, answered by several editable top level answers with different weighting on different things. (And then chat or small comments, there should be a place for some busywork that should carry no relevant information ideally.) Not necessary the website, but the format.
The second is blogosphere, allow users to write articles and engage in comments. For some reason basically no communities have these. They tend to have discord, and maybe a wiki.
But once we opened a Discord for our product we had so many more questions and users coming in. I do not like that it is locked up on a proprietary platform organised as a chat interface, but damn is it popular and often-used. Having users communicate with us more regularly is very motivating, and we've had so much more quality feedback by having it available
It is, unfortunately, where a lot of the people are and it makes your user base feel very "alive"
It's almost as fast as the Discord and much friendlier to searching and context.
I make a point of avoiding the Discord simply because I want my questions and answers to be searchable by people who come afterward.
Any question that is more than a couple of years old and applies to something under active development risks having the "bubbled up" answer being actively incorrect.
Maybe this is just because I'm not developing in Javascript.
I think this is likely due to the incentives SO creates. I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. I will often contribute to a discord question even if I don't full know the answer just because I think I can add something useful.
On SO, at its peak, you got an answer even faster because it was public (i.e. the answer was already there, you just searched for your question).
So you're comparing minutes to instant.
Why they cant? it's up to them to add support for it
> I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart.
Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip...
Is the Zig creator not there? I'm pretty sure he is.
The general policy of the Zig Software Foundation is to not have blessed community spaces outside of spaces used strictly for coordinating the development of Zig (those currently are the Ziglang GitHub Organization and the ZSF Zulip), so all communities are equally non-official.
The main Zig Discord server is owned by community members and is actually not even the only Zig server on Discord.
Yes, Stack Overflow collated these questions and answers better but then at least you could google for something and get the answer, rather than asking again.
A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.
Over time I've seen plenty of comments like this one about platform A vs platform B and I find them all absolutely uninteresting. Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere.
Some people prefer Discord and they made a comfortable home for themselves. If you prefer a different platform (which could be a matter of personal preference or an objective advantage, it really doesn't matter which it is), then go make yourself a comfortable home there and start offering help to others on it.
If you're a newcomer and can't really offer much help, then you're asking for people who do have that knowledge to help you on a platform of your choice. That's certainly something you can wish for, but you can't demand it, regardless of how much objectively better your platform might be.
It actually does when users are pointed to discord to ask the same questions over and over.
Look at the two example questions in OP's quote. Sending users to discord for those means nearly nobody else will benefit from the answers.
And I think it's fair to point this out.
2. OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience. Zig has multiple communities and you can get help also elsewhere. A blog post that recounts one's experience doesn't need to list all other ways of getting help and it's wrong for you to assume otherwise.
IME discord's search is terrible. When I try to find previous questions it seems like it uses a naive exact word search, so if I change my keywords slightly it finds different results. I haven't tried Zig's channel so maybe they do it better. But in general, I stand by my comment.
> OP is not sending anybody anywhere, they're just talking about their experience
The quote was clearly recommending the Zig Discord channel as a place for anyone learning Zig to go and ask questions. This is "sending people there".
The built-in search software for a lot of forums is for lack of a better term, abysmal.
Consider this search on SO - user:172406 javascript userscript
consider the same search on google - vfclists javascript userscript.
It is the first answer on the list and note that I didn't add "stackoverflow" to the query.
Not being searchable outside of Discord is the problem (matrix / telegram also suffer from this) as it places useful Q&A and discussion behind a wall.
Discord is not a suitable platform for developers. I think Matrix is pretty good but, fuck it, I'll take IRC over Discord - it's still perfectly functional.
Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? Discord is basically just a chat platform, and while it's nice that there are always people there who are willing to answer the same questions over and over again, you can't rely on that staying the same in the future. Whereas SO crowdsourced a "canonical" answer to a question, and if someone came up with the same question later (and didn't find the existing answer via the search function or Google), they could be pointed to that answer.