Tell HN: Discord is obviating my need to use StackOverflow
Everyone's talking about ChatGPT eating SO's lunch these days, but I've found Discord servers are vastly more responsive and more correct than any AI tool. I can usually ask a question on Discord and get a response within 30 seconds as many people start responding. Sometimes they ask clarifying questions and generally speaking that will be enough for them to answer. If I asked the same question on SO, I would have to wait days, months, or even years for an answer. This is what happened to some of the questions I've seen there, with many questions also not having any answers at all.
The problem, of course, is indexability for search engines; SO is very indexable, and Discord is opaque. People therefore keep asking the same questions over and over again on the Discord server.
For those curious as to what Discord servers I'm in (grouped into folders, comments in parentheses):
Web Dev:
- Rome Tools (makers of an all-in-one JS toolchain, written in Rust)
- Deno
- Next.js
- vanilla-extract (great compile-time CSS-in-JS library)
- Astro.js
- Reactiflux (best Discord server for general React related questions)
- TypeScript
- GraphQL
- GraphQL Dart (for Flutter projects)
- Foam (open source Roam alternative in VSCode)
- ZeroToMastery (took a few of their courses before)
Design:
- Three.js
- Poimandres (makers of react-three-fiber, jotai, zustand, etc)
- Framer (for framer-motion)
- Bruno Simon (maker of the ThreeJS Journey course)
- Kevin Powell (YouTuber with advanced CSS tutorials, usually replicating some design seen online)
- Rive (animation tool built in Flutter)
- Friends of Figma (official Figma Discord server)
Flutter:
- Riverpod ecosystem (similar to Poimandres, makers of many useful Flutter packages)
- /r/FlutterDev
- Rivaan Ranawat (YouTuber with advanced Flutter tutorials)
- Shorebird (new company by ex-tech-lead of Flutter, but lots of Flutter team members to talk to)
Rust:
- The Rust Programming Language (official server)
- Rust Programming Language
- Actix Web (backend API framework)
- Zero To Production In Rust (great book about how to make your own backend API in Rust, with Actix Web)
- Prisma Client Rust + rspc (using Prisma to generate type-safe Rust bindings to the database)
DevOps:
- coolLabs (makers of https://coolify.io, the best open source Heroku replacement in my opinion)
- Docker
- Supabase
Miscellaneous Programming:
- ReasonML
- iOS Programming
- Teach Yourself CS (https://teachyourselfcs.com, a structured way of learning computer science)
AI:
- TVP & MVP community (video interpolation, especially animated)
- NMKD Software (video interpolation and Stable Diffusion client)
- Stable Foundation (official Stable Diffusion server)
- Unstable Diffusion
- SAIL
Miscellaneous:
- /r/Productivity
- /r/Startups
- Furlough (good community for talking about startups, high signal to noise)
- StockDrops (for finding GPUs / consoles when they are available)
- Dream Cafe (lucid dreaming)
- Polyphasic Sleeping
I mean, that's good for you, but horrible for the world. For all of SO's flaws, it's all public information that is indexable and sharable.
As sibling comments mentioned (and you!), finding the answer in discord is lossy for everyone, but more immediate for you. It's a problem of incentives.
Think about it this way.
When a majority of folks tire of answering questions on discord, askers will abandon it because they won't get answers. (I predict this will happen as people's patience isn't infinite.)
If folks abandon SO, there's still a ton of value condensed in existing answers.
I think there's absolutely a fortune to be made in AI condensing discord answers into relevant FAQs and surfacing so they are searchable to the web.
If you had that, you have SO all over again; you just need to get access to the discord servers and you can run the exact same playbook:
great dev focused content for near free -> devs attention -> ads/jobs/spinoff tools
I know it's bad, absolutely, as I mentioned in my point about indexability. But when I'm trying to get work done, as you stated, it's immediate for me and that's why it's still useful.
Good tips for me, I guess Discord is a must for my future programming journey, thanks for share.
Btw, someone already found a way to index Discord conversations to let Google index the text, so the searcher outside of Discord can also see those solutions, this is very important for the long term and for environment I guess lol, at least they posted on Hacker news before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32703995 https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/GiF-linen-dev-make-your... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31558180
No idea if there are other solutions though. If you found more good projects, just post in this thread to help the whole community.
Do you mind sharing your age and years of development experience?
Reminds me of a galaxy-brain strategy:
1. Post question on Reddit.
2. Use alt account to reply with obviously wrong answer.
3. Wait for corrections to flood in.
Cunningham's Law: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
I always wonder why so many AI startups and technical tools have an official Discord channel. How on earth did that trend take off?
I remember good times reading bash.org’s QDB. A discord/IRC/chat log is a comfortable way of consuming information! Collect answers from discord and publish them in a style similar to QDB and that’s 80-95% of the issue you describe solved. Probably don’t even need to reformat the logs, just posting them raw will work.
I do not think Discord company would like that information to be scraped. I think they will try to prevent scraping as much as they can.
The people that would have been replying to questions in SO have moved on to Discord and the format is lossy but more immediate. The overhead of all of SO's concepts like reputation are probably what's led to it's decreasing market share in the answers-to-tech-questions market.
I'm old enough to remember newsgroups, where you could post on the perl group a question, and people could reply to the thread. Text, quick, and one location.
Then perl and other groups moved to websites, then migrated to forums all over.
Now discord, still in different servers.
Any good discord servers for ruby on rails?
Can you share the TypeScript server?
Here you are:
https://discord.com/invite/uEQcuj8
https://github.com/typescript-community
The title is just TypeScript Community, in case the Discord link expires, for posterity.