Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord

I&#x27;m longing for the return of the mailing lists.<p>Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.<p>Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I&#x27;ve been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don&#x27;t think it works. It&#x27;s hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it&#x27;s in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren&#x27;t present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.<p>And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren&#x27;t what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have &quot;why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message&quot;. Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones &#x2F;s<p>Too bad Google Wave didn&#x27;t pick up.

I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability but also because it&#x27;s difficult to have multiple identities with Discord. It&#x27;s frustrating to be looking for help with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join their Discord server. I don&#x27;t want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give up at that point.

Maybe it&#x27;s just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming), but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it&#x27;s way better to use a system I am already signed up for. I don&#x27;t want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton. It&#x27;s also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I&#x27;ll never visit again, and then I get bombed with emails after I&#x27;m done. And when I leave, it&#x27;s worth noting my comments&#x2F;questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I&#x27;m gone [1].<p>I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I&#x27;m just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>[1] It&#x27;s worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.

As useful as discord is for its primary purpose, it&#x27;s probably also one of the worst development for communities in the last decades. Discord is a chat, not a forum, nor a wiki. It&#x27;s just not meant to make knowledge accessible. And even proper discussion are barely possible after a certain group size.<p>But on the other side, it&#x27;s a very well protected walled garden, and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the world there quite well. Not really sure whether it&#x27;s good to have so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public attention.

As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be any modern forums that I can just host.<p>If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back.<p>But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like the early 2000s.<p>Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never really get developed?

My friends and I started a website devoted to a multiplayer game back in college at the turn of the century. It had a forum that was heavily used. Somehow, 20+ years later, it&#x27;s still going. 14 million posts and 196 people online now. And the game series has been dead for over a decade. I moved on a long, long time ago, but many people remain. There&#x27;s a community there that just keeps going, despite the original purpose being long gone. I don&#x27;t think that would happen with Discord.

&gt; Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch.<p>Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who used to read Eurogamer’s forums probably read &#x2F;r&#x2F;games nowadays, and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.

I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.org&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s a real shame. The most thoughtful discussions usually take place on forums. Chat has this feel to it where it&#x27;s better to reply fast and short instead of taking a bit longer but providing an elaborate reply.<p>I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like vBulleting or phpBB have had it&#x27;s fair share of security issues. Let alone the costs for a small community forum.<p>However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the different topics that are discussed in the same channel.

I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums and they&#x27;re much easier to search and access if you&#x27;re not a member.<p>But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.

I bought a product that had moved their support to Discord. Their Discord requires that you verify your phone number. I tried to do so but Discord told me my number, which I&#x27;ve had for 22 years, is not valid. I contacted support and their solution was:<p>&quot;Just find a friend who hasn&#x27;t used discord and use their number&quot;.<p>Why do people trust this company with anything important?

Scariest thing is Discord isn&#x27;t accessible without an account. And it WILL close down within a decade. And with that all that information will be gone.

A good example is CyclingTips[1]. They are using Slack for years but lots of people never went because it&#x27;s messy.<p>A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and there is already a thousand members and three times that of posts.<p>I&#x27;m so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with a &quot;fast and easy tool&quot;, and then improve this by setting up your own platform to welcome everyone.<p>I use Discord everyday but I agree, it&#x27;s not THE tool that fits every need. Especially if we&#x27;re talking long term engagement and knowledge repository.<p>[1] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingtips.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingtips.com&#x2F;</a> [2] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.cyclingtips.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.cyclingtips.com&#x2F;about</a>

Long time IRC user here. I didn&#x27;t mind using discord for some communities but it seems as though they now require phone verification which I certainly will not provided them. I feel as though one should be able to use it similarly to IRC and not be tied to one account for one phone number.<p>I haven&#x27;t been able to find a temp phone number to use for this purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports SMS but alas, that didn&#x27;t work.

Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I don&#x27;t use either and being disconnected from information about my government because of that is really shitty.

I so much agree with this. That&#x27;s why our team is starting to use Discourse for Teams instead of email and Microsoft Teams.<p>Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should have a title. That&#x27;s how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but also Zulip work. That&#x27;s what I miss the most in Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.<p>Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying like a chat system.

I run a small, free browser-based persistent strategy RPG. We&#x27;ve had a forum for about a decade, and for a time, it was extremely popular.<p>A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the game, and people started joining immediately.<p>It&#x27;s been nearly a year now since there was more than a single forum post per month.<p>If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they are—or where they <i>want</i> to be. I&#x27;m not at all thrilled with the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper monetization, but I <i>am</i> thrilled with how much people love interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don&#x27;t have a realistic alternative to offer them.

I wonder if we&#x27;re headed for a future in which knowledge is far less accessible than it was in previous years. With communities moving to these closed&#x2F;proprietary platforms (Discord, Slack) which aren&#x27;t fit for purpose (making knowledge accessible and easily searchable), I suspect it&#x27;ll have a negative affect on the ability of individuals to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge.

Forums started dying off when social media started rising. I liked them better than what we have now, too, but... it is a little odd to attack Discord for the downfall of forums.

Yeah I dislike that everything is moving on to there. I dont like having to share one account with all the random servers I join. I dont like all the bots and the gauntlets to enter servers. I dont like the format for most of what it seems to be used for. I dont like the centralization and the general corporate overlord vibe they have.

I’m going to be downvoted for this, but I love discord for communities. GitHub issues for tracking long-standing bugs or feature requests, and discord for more granular, spontaneous support queries is great. The new Threads feature is nice, the amount of control and automation with channels and bots opens up endless possibilities. Not to mention the search is powerful and blazing fast. Forums feel sluggish and dated in comparison. I spend an hour or more providing support in the Svelte discord, and I love it.

Show HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbclip.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbclip.com</a><p>I don&#x27;t think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and most frequent conversations to the web.<p>The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.

Discord is amazing for getting fast answers to questions, but terrible at accumulating knowledge.<p>For example, several times I&#x27;ve joined a server to ask a question about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a few minutes.<p>The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future could benefit from my Q&#x2F;A session by finding it on a search engine.<p>The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I post in a random server, I want anonymity.

I have the same problem with Gitter.im or slack for FOSS projects - quite a few communities have switched from being fórum based (and therefore the conversations are logged and indexable by search engines), to being ephemeral conversations in Slack channels.<p>You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral platforms, but most large communities provide some form of indexable log of the conversations

While I agree with the article that they are not the same, people using one thing may not be interested in the other, or at least not be aware of it.<p>I&#x27;ve used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before that, and forums alongside it.<p>Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues more ephemeral (or fun).<p>A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would go to IRC.<p>These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any discussion on proprietary software&#x2F;data integrity&#x2F;ownership etc).<p>As a product, I really love Discord. I don&#x27;t want everything to end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of which is discoverability and persistence.<p>Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat, in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better served elsewhere.

I hate discord. Every time I jump on to get help or engage in a semi-intellectual conversation, you end up talking to the same “regulars” on the server and often times you end up with a lot of misinformation. I end up leaving because there’s also a lot of gate keeping going on.

I agree. Very unlikely that I will find a meaningful discussion on discord, about a subject or problem when I&#x27;m searching for it on Google&#x2F;DDG&#x2F;etc.<p>If i cannot find it, I won&#x27;t be able to participate.<p>A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord&#x27;s support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1].<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.discord.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;community&#x2F;topics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.discord.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;community&#x2F;topics</a>

Did people not learn a lesson about closed communities from Facebook? At somepoint Discord will want to agressively monetise the numbers of people using its platform, and a lot of the convenience it currently provides will find its way behind a direct or indirect payment mechanism.

Honestly, it feels like the best use of time would be to <i>aggressively</i> port as much Discord functionality as possible to, e.g. Matrix.<p>You can count me in as an old head who loves (because it works SO WELL) and hates (because it&#x27;s so locked down) Discord.

Reddit works fine as a forum. Just make a subreddit and start posting :)

Is discord indexed by Google? I don&#x27;t think it is. If this is the direction we&#x27;re going anyways then at least having the ability to find discord messages from a search would be beneficial. I know that in recent years my primary interaction with forums has been as a result of searching for things either videogame or Linux related. Losing that info into an unindexed service is indeed a loss

If you&#x27;re a manager of a forum and are considering doing this, I would encourage you to look at discourse.org. It&#x27;s mobile friendly, looks great and easy to install. They have a one-click DO setup, which requires only a little technical knowhow and is extremely affordable.<p>I&#x27;ve managed a community—Product Notes—for several years on the platform and it has been fantastic.

Is there an open source old.reddit-alike forum available anywhere? I find Reddit much easier to read and digest than Discourse.

Forums are awful UX - really bad, it&#x27;s why all this other stuff exists.<p>I don&#x27;t like discord either and don&#x27;t like the model of megacorps sucking up all our communication and locking it away while creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control.<p>I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads.<p>I&#x27;m also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of solving this in a way that doesn&#x27;t centralize ownership while also enabling a UI that doesn&#x27;t suck.<p>Asking people to use forums will not succeed.<p>As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree - but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.

My company has started moving people to Teams and Yammer and its the most annoying thing ever. Nothing is available anymore as all the links are dead because everything is moved. Finding information now is a chore because a search for the right question returns multiple results rather than a page that once contained all the FAQs individually. Getting feedback means wading through the noise of multiple posts of &quot;thanks&quot; for some reason. Its all very annoying and I yearn for the days of forum posts and wikis.

I almost never use discord, not that I want to avoid it, but because my daily use of software doesn&#x27;t require it.<p>Gaming, I usually use Steam&#x27;s built-in voice chat and&#x2F;or rooms, and search for community forums within the game&#x27;s page without hassle.<p>For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don&#x27;t have the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the group calls and screen share.<p>When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions or create an issue.

I have tried Discord a dozen times and could never stand it for more than 10 minutes. It&#x27;s an utterly obnoxious format.<p>How about a nice conversation tree? Usenet!

I really like when some random program or service I am trying to use has a Discord, cus I can just go on, ask my dumb questions and immediately get help in realtime from a human who knows about this stuff.<p>As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single response, and so on.

Some of these forum owners <i>want</i> chat instead of forums. Forums just used to be one of the only ways to facilitate chat in a practical way.<p>I think that the author of this article didn&#x27;t really consider what the communities&#x27; and companies&#x27; needs are, and is more interested in criticizing them for &quot;making the Internet worse.&quot; For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not about what the owners of the forums or their users want:<p>&gt; Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum.<p>It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum.<p>There <i>are</i> going to be communities and companies that want forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They&#x27;re great for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of knowledge. They&#x27;re great for certain types of discussions. At the same time, not every community is out there looking to do that kind of thing. A lot of them just want to <i>socialize</i> live, and that&#x27;s where services like Discord shine.

I second this article&#x27;s sentiment. Back in the 2000s I spent a lot of time on forums and Wikia. I can still find lots of posts and conversations I had way back over a decade ago (on the forums that haven&#x27;t shut down) and looking things up is easy. Even for forums you&#x27;re not a part of, it&#x27;s easy to benefit from their knowledge with an online search. In contrast, anything within discord is stuck within discord, and not only do you need an account to participate but it introduces a single point of failure: discord. If the company gets shut down or gets bought out and changed, everything&#x27;s gone. If a server runs into issues with discord management&#x2F;leadership, it&#x27;s gone. Not to mention the slower pace of forums and chat nature of discord lead to completely different kinds of conversations and discussion.<p>Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and forums would hold real discussion. We&#x27;ll see if that approach survives.

<i>insert old man yells at cloud meme</i> (just having a laugh)<p>My least favorite part about forums is having to create a new account for every single forum I want to access.<p>Sure, password managers make it easy to have hundreds of different accounts on different sites, but I just don’t want to do that because it makes everything feel clunky and disconnected.<p>Sure, most have Google&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;GitHub logins available, but some don’t which only makes me think “wait did I use Google or Twitter to sign into this forum last time?”.<p>Discord has three things I like: a single account, infinite chat history, and the ability to star&#x2F;favorite messages that are relevant to me for future reference. Those are all I really need to consider it a useful platform for forum-like discourse.<p>Speaking of that, some forum software like Discourse (and it’s mobile app, Discourse Hub) and Forem make it easier to consolidate tons of disparate forums, but any time I’m on an old phpBB or vBulletin site I usually don’t even bother making an account.

Tangentially, what would it take for forums to get a resurgence? Pseudo-centralization &#x2F; connection through forum-software? Clearly a lot of users prefer the long-form format.<p>My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people&#x27;s attention rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator, it&#x27;s a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and content every instant.

It&#x27;s not just forums, recently I looked around for information on an incremental game only to be told that there is no wiki or anything like that but to &quot;join the discord&quot;.<p>WHY?! would I ever use a chat software to look up static information on a game? I know that information may or may change between releases but the release isn&#x27;t daily or even close to that, so using a platform where I might have to read through or at least skim over hundreds of messages in conversation&#x2F;support channels to find the right crumb of information is just insane to me. Also having to get an account and&#x2F;or installing additional software for serving information which could just as well have been done with a fandom&#x2F;wikia page and no unnecessary barriers is just <i>utterly stupid</i>.

I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics that persist and can be searched. On discord it’s all one long conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to find that it’s pretty much gone.

Not gonna happen unless someone makes forum software with better UX than Discord&#x27;s, that is also as easy or easier to maintain &#x2F; administer<p>So, not gonna happen. Discord has won forums for the foreseeable and is well on its way to FAANG tier dominance, impregnability, &amp; scale

&quot;Forums create a record, an archive we can search through&quot;<p>This article touches on the biggest frustration point of communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.

My biggest problem with the transition to Discord and FB groups is the lack of search engine indexing.<p>There is SO much valuable information locked in the communities that is near impossible to search for even WITHIN their platform.

I haven&#x27;t found discord replacing forums but Facebook groups certainly have and it really hampers searching and finding information and stuff just seems to vanish.

We have both, it works fine, and both platforms have their own goal.<p>I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I know there&#x27;s no public search history anywhere (gitter does have that iirc?).<p>There&#x27;s a LOT of information and history in old forums and even old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably useless, but it&#x27;s that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.

If only Zulip were search-engine-indexable it would be the perfect middleground. Unfortunately it&#x27;s still a ways away from being implemented I think.

It&#x27;s weird reading an article about damage to the internet in-between two aggressive advertisements that I can&#x27;t seem to get off my screen.

Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn&#x27;t Reddit be a much better option?<p>Forums + chat + voting + flairs.<p>Automoderation for low quality stuff.<p>Builtin anti-spam, reporting, etc.<p>Pinning hot topics ...<p>Search is ok not great but you could build better search on top if it&#x27;s critical.<p>Alt accounts are encouraged and relatively lightweight.<p>... and you can still have a Discord?<p>I get it, it&#x27;s just another big platform but feature wise it&#x27;s way better for forum migration...

I routinely run a combination of Slack and Discourse for my online communities. I can move interesting Slack threads into Discourse for longer-term and more-thoughtful discussion.<p>The immediacy of chat has its place, but so does the semi-permanence of something like Discourse or Groups.io or a good, old-fashioned mailing list.

I feel the same way about Facebook groups. I&#x27;d much rather create a throwaway account registered with my domain (whateverforum@mydomain.com) for every forum than create and use a Facebook or Discord account to engage with multiple communities. I don&#x27;t want or need a centralized &quot;social&quot; account.

This is destroying the internet in the same way we raze neighborhoods to build skyscrapers. Yes, we destroying something real and valuable, and it sucks, but it&#x27;s the inevitable march forward of human progress. Why shouldn&#x27;t digital redevelopment work the same way as physical?

Who does this? I haven’t seen that happen even once. They are completely orthogonal? Both have their uses.<p>What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving to <i>discourse</i> and that I see happen in tons of places. But closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat&#x2F;voice-chat?

I&#x27;m swimming the other way and trying to create hosted software for plain old forums (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discoflip.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discoflip.com</a>). I started it to scratch my own itch and then opened it up. Honestly, not getting much traction.

Discourse or NodeBB is the real future

I would love to have pre-spam Usenet back, or threaded forums like they used to make them before everyone used the BB-style flat forums. But I can understand companies not wanting to bother with this kind of software, moderation, data retention and privacy laws etc. ...

Discord is not end to end encrypted, so Discord can see, mine, and sell off your private DM chat contents.<p>Don&#x27;t type anything into discord you wouldn&#x27;t print out and mail to Microsoft Legal. (And don&#x27;t install the client, it is spyware.)

One downside not mentioned is the accessibility aspect. Screenreaders are great at reading basic HTML like forums. Discord? Significantly more work and trouble. Last I checked, VoiceOver completely skips emojis in Discord messages.

As a middle ground I&#x27;d at least love to see some way to expose Discord&#x27;s pinned messages to the web for anonymous viewing. It seems like they&#x27;re acting as the de facto &quot;forum post&quot; of yore.

I asked a very similar question on HN about this a few months back related to software support forums going to discord and slack. Total pain for finding answers to issues and problems

Why not a Discourse forum, which has a mailing list mode and a forum view? Plus, Discourse is open source.

Discord is where communities go to die.

Does anyone have any insights into the upper scalability of either of these solutions?

Discord has its uses, but forums should be moving to Reddit.

or facebook groups. :(

I don&#x27;t know how people can read anything in Discord. It&#x27;s a chat app, not a good medium to expose any information for people to be able to check when needed.<p>And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it&#x27;s a hellhole.

Made an account just to post this.<p>Internet forums are the senate chamber<p>Discord and the like are the private chamber of whispers.<p>Caesar was murdered in the chamber, but you can guess where Brutus and Co conspired, and it wasn&#x27;t the chamber.