this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right

pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?

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[–] ono@lemmy.ca 188 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (7 children)
  • Terrible format for archiving knowledge
  • Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
  • Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
  • Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
  • Prevents indexing by web search engines
  • Antithetical to interoperability
  • Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A web forum is far better in most cases

It's sad when a web forum is better than the tool you're considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it's weird.

I'm old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there's a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)

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[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 142 points 9 months ago (1 children)

PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!

[–] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 12 points 9 months ago (6 children)

While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

I'm pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 11 points 9 months ago

You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.

[–] jeremyparker@programming.dev 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It's going to get worse, not better.

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[–] centof@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.

Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There's even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.

Usually everyday people don't setup forums, that's the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.

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[–] vvv@programming.dev 105 points 9 months ago (3 children)

it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 87 points 9 months ago

The worst part is that they act like you can set up an account without a number, but then it acts like there is 'suspicious activity' and requires you to verify with the phone immediately.

Just rant into this yesterday trying to set up a work account as my work phone is not a mobile phone with sms.

Was registering really suspicious?

[–] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 9 months ago

Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.

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[–] rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 77 points 9 months ago

Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 58 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮

[–] Fudoshin@feddit.uk 11 points 9 months ago (10 children)

It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me "boomer". I'm only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn't a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.

The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it's funny. :/

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[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 53 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it's better than this shit.

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 33 points 9 months ago (2 children)

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.

Or a wiki or IRC or Matrix or Lemmy or Mastodon, etc. There's so many FOSS platforms for this kind of thing to choose from. How someone looks at all those options and then chooses Discord is beyond me.

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 8 points 9 months ago

Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.

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[–] dbilitated@aussie.zone 44 points 9 months ago (2 children)

yeah I've really noticed it's hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.

and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.

whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 9 months ago

dude i give up completely, you think im joining a random discord full of a bunch of people i dont know with a culture of who knows what dialect?

Nah fuck that i'll just go use some dudes random piece of scrapped together software that's actually pretty based instead. To that guy who wrote the bash script for flashing windows ISOs under linux. Thank you.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And then to top it off users get annoying and angrily point at sticked posts, wikis and whatnot when people ask the same questions for the nth time.

[–] Gestrid@lemmy.ca 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This. I literally just joined. I have no idea what the server layout is or where all the important links are.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 9 months ago (2 children)

My biggest pet peeve is when you join a new server and you have 15 different steps you have to do before you can ask a question. Verify with a bot or two, send picture drinking verification can, send emoji here, ask for emoji there, introduce yourself, publish your whole biography, wait for the pope to bless your account, and then, maybe, you are allowed to use the #help channel. I'm not a discord user, I don't know what this all means ffs!

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[–] janAkali@lemmy.one 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (16 children)

I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

at least subreddits show up in google results, that's the only good thing about them.

[–] janAkali@lemmy.one 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)
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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐

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[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 21 points 9 months ago

I feel like so many people talk about how it's not searchable or other concerns but for me I don't really care so much because there's an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project.. This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.

[–] words_number@programming.dev 20 points 9 months ago

FCK DSCRD!

(They should use lemmy instead :-P)

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 17 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Discord performance is inversely proportional to the number of servers you’re in. Until Discord addresses this, it’s a shit tool for this use case unless you participate in a tiny number of servers in one facet of your life. Unlike chat tools like Slack that allow you to focus one server or community tools like forums, Lemmy, or VCSaaS which don’t consume resources when you don’t use them, Discord just tanks everything. Since you can’t easily hop in and out (something community tools let you do because, you know, you’re not constantly polling the server), you can’t self regulate.

Every single gaming community, coding community, project, store, hobby group, friend group, and professional group (study group too) has their own Discord. It’s a goddamn nightmare because Discord does not prioritize basic community functionality. Voice and streaming kick ass, but I need some server management and resource optimization.

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[–] Faresh@lemmy.ml 16 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn't electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.

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[–] peak_dunning_krueger@feddit.de 15 points 9 months ago (17 children)

The people in this thread are open source power users who don't get and don't want the features that discord offers. It's no surprise you'd rather have your forum back. I don't think that's how it's going to work.

Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don't lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:

https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 11 points 9 months ago

I have no problems with discord as chat/supplement (and I remember setting up irc-discord bots in the past so you could totally have both) it's when discord is the only way to interact that it's annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, can't really search discord externally for content and I definitely have found the search function annoying at best.

That said, video guides instead of manuals also annoys me, but that's a different issue.

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[–] denast@lemm.ee 15 points 9 months ago (12 children)

While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.

Discord's main problems:

  • Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
  • Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support

However alternatives we have are not ideal either:

  1. Old-school web forums
    • Great for info archival / organized tech support
    • Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what's new
    • Due to slower pace of communication, it's harder to just log in and "hang out" with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.

  1. FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that's what most use)
    • Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
    • Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it's a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There's often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
    • it's FOSS and Private, though

Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive

[–] Montagge@kbin.earth 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would rather be pen pals than use discord

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[–] CodeMonkey@programming.dev 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?

We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don't want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.

I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don't understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.

In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.

With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.

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[–] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

The most important downside for me is: I'm looking for some information about an issue I'm having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn't help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.

I'd rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.

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[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
[–] belated_frog_pants 11 points 9 months ago

Its awful, history isnt kept, requires account creation on a non FLOSS app. It sucks. Forums were better.

[–] MinusPi@yiffit.net 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh my fuck I'm so glad these characters died out. Dolan memes were the bane of my existence while they were a thing.

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[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago

Even worse if there's a github page, but they've disabled issues and discussions.

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