Another traveler of the wireways.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.

    Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.

    Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.


  • Some speculation on my part:

    1. There are other higher priority items for the developers.
    2. It’s open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
    3. Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.

    Despite what @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don’t want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.

    You can of course still find many Discord servers that don’t, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it’s not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.