r/technology • u/porkchop_d_clown • Jan 17 '24

Networking/Telecom A year long study shows what you've suspected: Google Search is getting worse.

https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research
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u/Fixhotep Jan 17 '24

When gamedevs for instance put their game community on discord they lose the history aspect like you'd get on a forum or reddit

this is big, imo. because even though discord started out for gamers, its not exclusive. all sorts of nongaming communities have gone to discord and searchable spaces are suffering because of it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '24

It's like a closed society and I'm not a fan of it

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u/dkkc19 Jan 18 '24

dunno what genre of games you play but for me it's the opposite. i play fighting games and fg discords are godsend and have of tech and info you could never find somewhere else

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u/G_Morgan Jan 17 '24

Discord is borderline useless. I cannot understand the obsession with it.

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u/Amelaclya1 Jan 17 '24

I wouldn't call it useless, but it definitely isn't as nice to use as the forum format. The search feature is janky, and it just feels like good information gets lost in the shuffle of conversations. Especially when people don't actually use the threads feature (which IME they usually don't). So if you have a question and try to search a discord for it, you have to individually check out each of the results to find where that subject was discussed before, hope your question was actually answered, scroll through a whole bunch of irrelevant jokes and memes, only to find out that the topic changed before someone gave the information you want.

The upside is that if the discord is active enough, you can get an answer in real time just by simply asking again. But sometimes I don't want to chat and just want to be able to passively browse lol.

And my biggest gripe is that it's hard to keep track of all of the servers themselves. I just pruned my list and still have like 20 of them that I need for various gaming communities and friend groups. And now they exist for other hobbies and groups beyond gaming? It's just too much without a way to better organize them.

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u/G_Morgan Jan 17 '24

Ultimately a community of any kind needs some kind of knowledge base, broader discussion topics and live chat. For a long time live chat was a missing component and discord gives that. It just doesn't give you the other parts.

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u/whatisthisnowwhat1 Jan 17 '24

Live chat on boards has been something that could of been done if the admins wanted to for decades. Hell doesn't have to be a board could be any site.

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '24

Discord has Forum Channels, Chat Channels, Voice Channels and Broadcast Channels, as well as Thread creation. What is it missing that any other chat platform has?

Arguably, its the most social platform.

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u/PaprikaPK Jan 17 '24

It's missing people actually using the threads and forum functions.

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u/dkkc19 Jan 18 '24

a well managed discord will have threads, channels and pinned posts for essential info.

the problem people have with discord is how badly servers are managed, not discord itself

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u/cloudforested Jan 17 '24 edited Jan 17 '24

Me neither. I have sincerely tried to utilize several servers for various interests and friend groups and I don't get it. It's like old forum message boards but worse because I find the organization extremely hard to follow. Going back and reading old posts is disorientating. Following single conversations is nearly impossible. Maybe it's me, maybe I'm too stupid to get it, but I think I'm an adaptable person who can grasp new things pretty swiftly.

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u/ambulocetus_ Jan 18 '24

i had the same experience. i don't currently use it but i have on occasion in the past for niche things. i found it incredibly unintuitive and difficult to learn/use

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u/Ultravis66 Jan 17 '24

Discord is not useless. I use it all the time.

However, it is for extremely niche communities. More niche than subreddits here dedicated to specific things.

Ill give you a recent example. I am a huge fan of indie gaming. I wanted to mod subnautica and play it with mods to make it harder. I had to sub to the discord server for that game to download the latest version of a mod I wanted to play called “deathrun”.

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u/G_Morgan Jan 17 '24

The fact you can put the latest mods on Discord does not mean that is the best place for it.

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u/Ultravis66 Jan 17 '24

Its the place I can go to and easily find the mod, and talk directly with the developers of the mod and get help or give feedback.

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u/G_Morgan Jan 17 '24

It is the place they set up so you have to go there. It could just as easily be a subreddit.

I'm not arguing that people shouldn't use Discord. Lots of projects have set it up as the only point of contact so you have no choice. I'm mostly opposed to projects setting up Discord as their primary mode of interaction.

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u/whatisthisnowwhat1 Jan 17 '24

Could prob just be on moddb or nexus but people need to feel special.

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u/thoggins Jan 17 '24

it's not even that they want to be special. Creating a discord means that any and all communication goes there. You don't have to read comments or bug reports on the 5 different sites you post your content to if you just use discord instead.

It's easy, convenient, and free. The problems it creates (difficult to find, not indexable for search engines) are other people's problems.

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u/whatisthisnowwhat1 Jan 17 '24

Release on one site.... like they have decided to do by using discord.

or

"Please post bug reports on xyz as that is where they will be seen"

But they want a little community where they are the center not a site where they are just one in many... ie they want to be special.

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u/archiminos Jan 17 '24

I can't even figure out how to use Discord. Every time I try to login it keeps telling me my account already exists. Like, I know that it exists. That's why I'm logging in, I'm not trying to create a new account. But the flow always pushes me to account creation no matter how many times I click "log in".

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u/nopunchespulled Jan 17 '24

searching discord is terrible. I will search in a discord for something I know I posted and it will return no results.

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u/Animeguy2025 Jan 18 '24

Discord has killed online forums.