Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

Discord is not the ideal choice for the Q&A forum of your next failed side-project. Seriously, please stop.

Why it sucks

  1. Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages. Sure, they introduced threads, but they still leave much to be desired, especially because of:

  2. TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk. Discord’s search is something made by the devil to check the patience of us, mere programmers. You might search for a message you sent weeks ago and come up empty-handed because you missed a couple of words or some other infuriatingly stupid reason…

  3. The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions. You have to embark on a quest: find their Discord link by first searching for the project name on SearX (or Goog-🤮), finding the right link, then making sure you’re logged in to Discord on your browser or app, join the server (after reading (or not?) and agreeing to the rules and choosing the roles needed to see the god damn channel), hunt down the elusive help keyword in the left side of the screen, and then spend an eternity searching for your issue or just asking it again. Meanwhile not finding the solution and ending up bun installing a new blazingly fast new JS library…

  4. Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug? Who can guarantee it’ll be around tomorrow? Something like Stack Overflow can and is scrapped every day, but Discord isn’t.

Better Alternatives

  1. Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse. They’re designed for structured discussions and won’t leave your posts lost in the abyss. Good SEO for users of your software to find what they need fast.

  2. Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit, Lemmy, or Kbin can be excellent places to seek help.

  3. Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system, specially if your project is open source, since it’s where everyone will be when looking for your project anyways and has good enough SEO for most daily searches.

Remember, Discord is great & all but as a Q&A forum, it’s like using a spatula to fix your spaceship. Think twice (or as many times as you need to realize that it’s a bad idea), and choose wisely (just not Discord)!