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Also, why would anyone want to use Discord as a forum? It's horrible, not easily searchable, and you need a proprietary app. Nothing good about it.

I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official purposes.

> I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official purposes.

Going back in time you can replace it with: Discourse, forums, website, IRC.

New generations of devs / manager decide to use "the current tool" to connect with their users. Too bad they also think it a good idea to nuke the older channels.


This time, the "current tool" doesn't allow searching via the web. Most discord forums I'm on are basically black holes in which questions keep getting repeated.

Exactly, it doesn't even help the owners themselves, because people will keep asking the same things over and over again. It's not like a forum where you can easily search by topic.

The owners do not care as much, because they're not the ones who answer the questions - a cadre of "volunteers" do.

I’ve launched projects that became bigger and discord is just kind of expected when building from the ground up and great for corralling a community

I mentally categorize larger established organizations as something different

but logically I can’t really see the difference, so I understand why

I also understand the negatives of that particular platform for getting information efficiently

but I understand why they do it


Expected by who? Plenty of big projects don’t have a discord.

You can just use the website.

Edit: It's <<Discourse>>, not <<Discord>>.

Edit 2: Oh, they moved from Discourse to Discord :-)) That is just messed up.


You can use your web browser, as well.

It is still shitty as well. UI/UX are terrible.

It’s about the same as the desktop app. It doesn’t feel like a web app. The desktop app is better because it doesn’t feel out of place.

It’s not a bad UI/UX IMO, but it can take some getting used to. For the notifications I have to check several options such as “silence @everyone and @here”. Sometimes I find the updates annoying. But it’s among the best chat UIs I’ve tried.


It's definitely good UX for a chat app. It was good UX from the beginning, when they had a dark mode before a light mode and made voice chat not require installing anything (which was many peoples' first real-world exposure to WebRTC technology).

It's poor UX for a support forum where you want communication to be one-to-many as much as possible (to spread info to the largest number of people with the smallest amount of info producer effort as possible).


How about the new forum style channels?

Those actually are bad UX, imo. In the servers I've seen implement them, they devolve into basically chat anyway. People still re-ask questions because the search functionality is the same as searching chat, which people weren't doing before. The layout still favors short messages over in-depth posts.

(I do find Discourse to be among the worst web forum software, and I can see similarities between Discourse and the Discord forum-style channels, so some of this may come down to personal preference. Discourse always felt too recency-biased and ephemeral to me compared to e.g. MyBB or phpBB, for example.)

Keep in mind also that it's still behind the walled garden of Discord's authentication and hosting. Imagine if you had to install the Tapatalk app to actually access any InvisionFree/ZetaBoards/Tapatalk/etc forums back in the day. It was annoying enough that mobile users were nagged to, but it would've been unthinkable to require desktop users to. (And being able to launch the app in your browser, while removing friction to "installation," isn't the same thing as actually being on the web-- search engines can't index Discord channels, Discord messages don't have human-readable URLs to share elsewhere, etc.)

Edit: Also, very relevantly to this thread, you can't just grab a webpage snapshot to archive a Discord channel like you could with forum threads. You've got to either take a screenshot (while dealing with scrolling) or scrape the data via the API, being careful not to trip bot protections or violate ToS, and then figure out how to present it separately.


Chat is a poor replacement for forums.

It feels like an electron app, which I would argue IS bad UI/UX.

Subjectively it doesn’t feel like one to me.

100% agree. Passwords + OTPs are the best solution, IMO. No big tech can control this, and it's easy to keep a grasp on all the credentials we have.

WebAuthn? No, thanks.


How does big tech exert control over your usage of WebAuthn?

By enabling relying parties to blacklist or whitelist the devices their users are allowed to use.

It’s one more brick in the wall preventing general-purpose computing. Want to authenticate to Banana Computers? Well, you have to use one of their oDevices, because they will not let you use a RoboPhone to store your passkeys.


You seem to be thinking of attestation, which is not a thing anymore with at least Apple's and Google's implementation. (They both had it for their non-synchronizing device-bound authenticators, but have heavily or even entirely rolled that back in favor of passkeys.)

And since any solution excluding either of these is a non-starter, ironically the passkey push has made WebAuthN more open when it comes to client choice.

So while I agree that Apple and Google not allowing passkey exports (yet; I am cautiously optimistic that they'll eventually be pushed to offer that too) runs the risk of locking in non-sophisticated users, the future is looking very bright for everybody posting here at least.


Yeah, you're missing the point of why attestation is in the spec in the first place.

Show me a widely available service that filters authenticators based on attestation attributes?


I agree. I will not use them, not as a user, nor as a developer.

It's impressive, but it's completely broken on Macs with a normal mouse connected and Firefox, because scrollbars appear everywhere and they break the layout.


Old Italian Macs used a classical QZERTY keyboard, like typewriters, but no other computer keyboard uses that layout.

Normal computer keyboards use QWERTY (plus some accented letters). Luckily, Apple switched to that layout for Italian keyboards many years ago.


I've been using GIMP for 20 years now, but the UI is atrocious; you can tell it's been designed by engineers who know nothing about UX.

Even the most basic UI elements, such as the slider bars, are horrible and unusable.


Also, Glimpse has been abandoned since 2020.


>sent, often in bulk, to a consumer

That's the key. The FTC defines spam as something sent to a consumer; in this case, the receiver is not a consumer but a business.


I’ll lay it on the line. In the many years I ran mailservers for a living and for a hobby, I was elbows deep in fighting spam. One of the consistent patterns over the years was that spammers would go to elaborate lengths to explain why their spam wasn’t spam. If it’s unsolicited commercial email, it’s spam.

Again, there’s a wide spectrum from v14gr4 p1ll5 to a legitimate vendor in my job space reaching out to me. They’re not all alike. But if it’s commercial, and unsolicited… it’s still spam.


I agree with you -- I don't like receiving cold emails on my work email address, and I treat such emails as spam. But I don't think it can be configured as spam from a law standpoint; but this is just my opinion, IANAL.


Here’s a 2024 link from the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

> Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

That doesn’t specifically mention spam, but it does indicate how strictly regulators define what they consider to be commercial email. And if it’s unsolicited commercial email, i.e. UCE… it’s spam.


> YouTube wasn’t always tied so strongly to a Google account

They still have a page to recover a pre-Google account. It used to be a clearly outdated page with old graphics, now they made it a bit "better".

It's here: https://www.youtube.com/gaia_link


Facebook still has an ancient and hidden interface called "mbasic". It was meant for old phones with a basic browser.

It's very old and now it's half broken, but you can still access it from https://mbasic.facebook.com/

Now they announced they're going to retire it on December 3rd. A piece of another internet era is going away.


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