Discord is terrible for assistance.
Search is ineffective, you have to actually fight the UI to go back to older messages, depending on the device there are still somehow cases in which you can’t go back to the beginning of a thread.
Oh, you’re trying to scroll down through old posts? Let me suddenly refresh the list for no reason and bring you back to the most recent ones. Everything past the third screen might as well not exist anymore.
And of course, there is the slight problem of every useful info written there being completely invisible to the rest of the internet.
You’re booming. Discord search is fine but you dont even need to search. Seeking assistance is easy > join post > get notified when someone answers you.
Compared to forums where you have to create and account post an introduction then deep dive on the forum to make sure your question hasnt been asked before then write up s big detailed post only for the mod to remove your post because it was in the wrong place.
The point is the first step in getting assistance is checking you’re not asking something that has been solved one hundred times before.
And you don’t even need to be registered to do that in a forum. in fact you don’t even need to know the forum exists, because search engines can find them for you.
You’re just counting on people having nothing else to do than help people by repeating the same basic stuff forever.
I used to be of the opinion that searching history for issues was the best thing. But ive seen how many issues it creates and think its not worth it. Software is constantly being updated and the post from 6months ago is likely a completely different issue even if it sounds similar to yours.
Having access to real time individualized support for free is actually awesome from a user perspective. For devs they are able to let the community handle a lot of the requests and oversee that terrible advice isnt being shared.
chunes@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What amazes me is how often there are a bunch of sweaty nerds in the chat willing to answer every lazy-ass question known to man almost immediately.