this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Can someone explain to me why some communities do their communication using something like Matrix? I'm a member of some open source/ tech channels on Matrix that I am somewhat interested in or need suppport from. Every time I check my app I have line 1k unread messages. Like, does anyone have the time to read all that? Besides trying to find if a question I have has already been answered is pretty cumbersome.
That doesn't mean I don't think Matrix is great, but it just doesn't seem like the best fit for that application
It's the same with discord.
Too many communities use discord (or matrix) instead of a real, searchable forum with topics and threads.
Discord is cancer for having any meaningful discussions in larger communities. I don't understand the appeal outside of casual chatting or asking a quick question that might get noticed and responded to during busy chat floods.
My master's program uses slack over the built in forums and it enrages me to no end. If I need help I need to put the course channel and search for the week I'm on and hope useful info didn't make a typo. So terrible.
Discord is absolutely TERRIBLE as a support forum, yet still that's what it gets used for.
Apple released Sonoma 14.1 today, which, as it turns out, doesn't play nicely with OpenCore Legacy Patcher. So loads of people tried to install it on their unsupported Macs, only to find it failing to boot. Myself included.
If OCLP's support was a regular ol' forum, they could have put a sticky at the top warning people that something was off and to await a fix. But Discord ain't a forum, so the post the admins put in the Announcements section was almost completely ignored by the hundreds of users who flooded the support boards asking why their Mac was bricked.
Any useful information was lost in the noise of folks panicking. Because Discord is wholly unsuited to being used as a support forum. But still people insist on using it that way.
I largely agree with you, but does the Discord forum channel not do what you ask? Aside from that, personally I have had greater degrees of success finding weird random issues and their solutions through Discord, most likely because it's just "easier" for people to say they have a problem on the platform. 50% of the time they never bother responding to assistance/provide useful details, but at least they're somewhat searchable.
Few layers to this
The reason to use a discord/matrix is the same reason to use social media. You aren't going to read and engage with every single message. You are going to pop back in, respond to something that seems interesting, and then go on with your life.
From a support perspective? It is no different than message boards. You have a few knowledgeable (possibly paid) individuals and then you rely on The Community to help debug a lot of it.
Yeah I guess, but because it's so linear all the discussions are running through each other and messy. So if someone asked a question I'm interested in I then have to read a whole lot of messages to see if maybe someone said something relevant about it.
Also, the messages are not indexed by search engines, which has its advantages, but for a tech/ support channel it doesn't make much sense.
I don't use matrix specifically (basically everything I have seen that uses it comes across as "shady", at best) but discord very much has a search functionality in each chat channel. Same with slack.
But also: What magical wonderland of tech support do you live in where people read context and don't just make the same suggestion hundreds of times in a row?