How to be right in the wrongest way possible.
Ah yes, let’s move everything to a place where it’s impossible to follow conversations or retrieve past information
I’m not advocating for people using discord in this way because it’s awful, isn’t indexed through web browsers and it’s far from a long-term way of hosting these discussions. However discord isn’t hard to use, searching past information is pretty easy and conversations are just like anywhere else so from my point of view it looks like people here are just hating on it because enough people are misusing the platform.
isn’t indexed through web browsers
* search indexers (but probably even that one is wrong)
Anyways: This is the exact problem we all have with it.
They even started putting in a forum system further cementing the problem…
I feel old. So many open source projects use discord these days. It’s kinda absurd putting documentation and support in a platform not indexed by search engines.
Using discord is fine; as long as you use it for what it does best.
You want docco that exists outside discord? Don’t put it in there. We have enough wisdom to know the difference, or we shouldn’t be making these decisions. (See ‘systemd bloat’)
What’s a soydev?
IDK either but I’m guessing it’s a play on “soyboy”, so basically just calling the devs that engage in this behavior wusses and losers.
I thought it was a racist slur for Asian devs…never heard the term soyboy before, but would have assumed racist slur as well.
never seen it used in such context
I mean like i said, I have never even seen it used before, in any context, so this is only my initial impression of the name.
You use “soy” as a negative appendix to something, soy is Asian in origin (I think?), which is why I perceived it initially as a racist slur.
nah, it’s more related to the soyjak meme, ie consumerist, yet smarter than thou npc
I hate how soy has been used by bigots as an insult. Soy products are bloody delicious!
I agree and am aware of the connotations of such terms, didn’t really mean to get associated with bigots like this.
Agreed, it’s stupid as an insult.
I like it, makes sense lol
I’m imagining devs that use MS word as revision control.
usually a code monkey that does not rally care about quality of their code nor having a sane workflow (which includes searchable, accessible documentation that does not require me to use some bloated spyware like Discord) and often jumps any passing hype train without considering whether it’s actually a good fit for their needs.They’d rather use and make a bloated electron app than touch anything TUI-based, lest they burn themselves. A person who would slap 9001 dependencies for bells and whistles no one cares about instead of following UNIX Philo, suckless, YAGNI, KISS, principle of least astonishment etc. Some might claim it’s mostly applicable to people who just code to pay the bills but I object. Anyone who would make something unnecesarily choppy just because it works relatively smooth on their Mac M2 Ultra w/ 5 GB/s link can count as such.
The reason I remarked that it’s not only applicable to professional development can be summarized by extrapolating what Marcus Baker wrote in 97 things every programmer should know, chapter I AM NOT THE SLIGHTEST BIT INTERESTED IN YOUR PROGRAM. to things like contributing to a FOSS project or using it as a library. I don’t ever want to give up on something just because grepping and deduction or tutorial hell is the only feasible alternative to having to ask on Discord. It is also simply in the maintainer’s best interest to write stuff down in an openly accessible place instead of doing repetitive tech support chores.
I am surrounded by problems and have a to-do list as long as my arm. The only reason I am at your website right now is because I have heard an unlikely rumor that every one of my problems will be eliminated by your software. You’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical.
If eyeball-tracking studies are correct, I’ve already read the title and I’m scanning for blue underlined text marked Download now. As an aside, if I arrived at this page with a Linux browser from a UK IP, chances are I would like the Linux version from a European mirror, so please don’t ask. Assuming the file dialog opens straight away, I consign the thing to my download folder and carry on reading.
We all constantly perform cost-benefit analysis of everything we do. If your project drops below my threshold for even a second, I will ditch it and go on to something else. Instant gratification is best.
The first hurdle is install. Don’t think that’s much of a problem? Go to your download folder now and have a look around. Full of .tar and .zip files, right? What percentage of those have you unpacked? How many have you installed? If you are like me, only a third are doing more than acting as hard drive filler.
I may want doorstep convenience, but I don’t want you entering my house uninvited. Before typing install, I would like to know exactly where you are putting stuff. It’s my computer, and I like to keep it tidy when I can. I also want to be able to remove your program the instant I am disenchanted with it. If I suspect that’s impossible, I won’t install it in the first place. My machine is stable right now, and I want to keep it that way.
If your program is GUI based, then I want to do something simple and see a result. Wizards don’t help, because they do stuff that I don’t understand. Chances are, I want to read a file or write one. I don’t want to create projects, import directories, or tell you my email address. If all is working, on to the tutorial.
If your software is a library, then I carry on reading your web page looking for a quick start guide. I want the equivalent of “Hello world” in a five-line nobrainer with exactly the output described by your website. No big XML files or templates to fill out, just a single script. Remember, I have also downloaded your rival’s framework. You know, the one who always claims to be so much better than yours in the forums? If all is working, on to the tutorial.
There is a tutorial, isn’t there? One that talks to me in language I can understand?
And if the tutorial mentions my problem, I’ll cheer up. Now that I’m reading about the things I can do, it starts to get interesting, fun even. I’ll lean back and sip my tea—did I mention I was from the UK?—and I’ll play with your examples and learn to use your creation. If it solves my problem, I’ll send you a thank-you email. I’ll send you bug reports when it crashes, and suggestions for features, too. I’ll even tell all my friends how your software is the best, even though I never did try your rival’s. And all because you took such care over my first tentative steps.
How could I ever have doubted you?
I agree with the meme, but “soy dev” makes me think this was written unironically by an incels 4channer.
sorry, I used to watch a lot of Luke Smith, I used this term somewhat ironically for lack of a better word
I decided to Google that name to understand. First blog I clicked on has a paragraph that starts:
I think it’s especially absurd to place your trust in Mozilla FurryFox and their team of stereotypical SJWs and soydevs …
In 2020 this person was substituting coherent points with trite schoolyard namecalling from over a decade before. So that dude’s not only an incoherent idiot but also dangerous. Man.
ok mr. cum
For real, what idea was that actually meant to convey? OP seems confused about having been indoctrinated with cult language
(OP I’ve been there, good on you for reflecting on it, but there’s more unpacking to do)
I think a discord server can be a useful tool, but a proper doc for things is also important. Definitely sucks when I want to look something up or troubleshoot an issue and have to search through discord threads for words vaguely related to my issue and find half a conversation spaced between year old memes and 3 entirely separate issues.
Slack is the best documentation tool I’ve ever used.
Unironically though people asking questions, then further explanation, then posting when they figure it out is pretty optimal compared to above average documentation
Our only hope would be feeding the whole instance to an LLM and hope it gives correct answers
I project I keep up on uses Discord for chat, help, and announcements, but…
They maintain a full website for documentation, and use github for bug reports, issue tracking, project discussion, other project management.
I like discord being a part of the community, but I can cant imagine people making it the project management, or documentation tool.
I get people’s argument for results not coming up from the #help discord channel when searching Google, but I’m fine with how active the help channel is, and how searchable discord is in this case.
I’m gonna just leave this here: https://www.answeroverflow.com/
Could not replicate the information I had gotten earlier on Discord for some specific project. Also, even if it did it would probably still be only an API change away from not working.
When you consider “my problem is solved this time” as documentation then a discord discussion can be considered good documentation. But If you want documentation as reference for everyone and don’t wan’t to repeat process/procedures every time some one needs it. It’s the worst platform for it. And For documentation we never want the first.
In this context email lists were the best of the best documentation ever.
I hate how devs use Discord for documentation. All the info on there is fleeting.
If you have a problem, you can’t just look up the solution. You have to ask in the Discord channel, hope someone is friendly enough to repeat the solution. And if someone else has the same issue, they have to do it all over again.
Know what data source isn’t fleeting? Forums.
While discord isnt great for dpcumentation, you dont have to ask and hope for a response. Well modded servers have forums in the server.
I hate how devs use Discord for documentation. All the info on there is fleeting.
Guilty as charged, but in our defence we mirror most of the info from/to GitHub best we can. Also you can make the information somewhat less fleeting by pinning comments to a channel, using forum channels, or creating channels where users only have read access. Of course this doesn’t prevent the data from going away if Discord does, but to be fair the same can be said about almost all other services as well. GitHub servers get ransomwared and they don’t pay? Yeah your changes until their last uncorrupted backup are gone now unless you had backups of your own.
The reason why we use Discord in the first place though is network effect. The amount of reports and questions we get on Discord is simply no comparison to GitHub. It’s more simply because more users already have Discord than do GitHub leading to a lesser barrier of entry (account creation/program installation), especially for gaming related projects like ours. Of course this creates some added bureaucracy for keeping track of important reports from Discord. It’s kind of manageable to do manually, but I have been looking into ways of having a bot transfer messages/threads to GitHub by simply replying with an
!issue 4321command or something. Sadly I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t get half the reports we do on Matrix/IRC/XMPP/whatever, same diff if we were to switch from GitHub to GitLab basically.Lastly, a server owner (or someone given the rights by them) can get an API key that enables them to dump the full server logs to disk. So if you really want your Discord server content to be indexed by search engines the possibility to just host a copy of your logs as a static website is technically there (we admittedly don’t do this yet, not sure if there are existing projects for this).
Know what data source isn’t fleeting? Forums.
Guess you never were a member of a forum with private sub-forums that went out of maintenance? That info is just as gone as our Discord logs if the company croaks tomorrow. And the public part is only available if it was mirrored to web.archive.org or something, which isn’t guaranteed either.
In summary, yes Discord isn’t the shit, it’s just shit, but the people are there. If the mountain won’t come to you, then you must go to the mountain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are not alone in this.
Prior to discord I’d get maybe a bug report/month. After, about 1/day.
Simply put, the barrier to entry is huge.
However, documentation on Discord (other than simple end-user instructions/links to git readmes) is sort of stupid.
Absolutely, what we have on the Discord in the way of documentation is a straight forward install guide with one screenshot and a download link (of the GitHub release) and a FAQ channel, which is basically just links to the GitHub for a good part of the answers. We also automatically mirror our changelog there. But that’s it, and it’s all on GitHub as well.
What gets sadly lost on GitHub sometimes is “emerging events” like a new release of ours or the game we mod breaking something, where we will get yelled at on the Discord immediately and might have a hotfix release out before anybody even managed to create a proper GitHub issue.
Edit: Oh and temporary workarounds. If we figured something out on the Discord it doesn’t get posted to Github necessarily even if there is already an issue. Hence why I’m looking into having a bot for that instead of literally having to copy and paste a message.
I’m old enough to remember years of people complaining about overzealousness in closing threads as duplicate on forums, even when the issue might have been somewhat specific but the user could have just been unable to correctly recognize all factors at play with their issue (things like firewall, dependency versions and their configuration, environmental variables, hardware etc.) or the issue was actually caused by new bugs or API/ABI changes.
But at least there was some redundancy reduction and things were usually well categorized and tagged and many places actually implemented some pretty decent fuzzy search for similar existing issues. Instead we’ve ended up in both users and maintainers really wasting their time on something already resolved much more often.
If you don’t have time/are too stubborn for that, good luck skimming through tutorials to extract the info you need and pasting/adapting others’ code all while hoping there were no breaking changes since the snippets you want to use were published. At which point you might as well go ahead and browse type definitions and function signatures if you’re lucky to use something written in a self-documenting style.
Wargaming deleted their forums and fully switched to Discord for all discussion. It’s frustrating seeing a bunch of search results for my questions and half of them lead to nowhere
It’s not a good documentation thing by any metric, but can’t you just search? Discord has a search button!
Having tried it, search is horrible. You have to look up the help to even know how to filter the search to a specific channel, by default it searches the whole server. I never managed to find anything, I had to ask again instead…
- Ctrl+F
- Clicking the search box literally shows you all the filters and their descriptions
It shows you all the filters except the one for the channel…
It shows it. You either glanced over it or didn’t scroll down, plus Ctrl+F is a common shortcut anyway.
I’m an aged university student, and I spend most of the first day of any group project trying to convince people why NOT to use Discord or Instagram for all our comms.
It’s infuriating, but sometimes I feel like I’m yelling at a cloud.
Ugh. This is why there is a, you know, CONVERSATION tab on PRs.
And for the old school folks willing to pay, there’s Discourse.
Never heard about projects using Discord for docs (sounds terrible and useless, tbh), but now I’m afraid of it.
