Technology

I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy's comment nesting is excellent. It's very easy to follow conversations.

You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍

I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.

The funny thing about this is that it's just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today's high-res displays).

Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I'll bet there's forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.

For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.

Discord didn't replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it's easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it's worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to 'spam' and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

It's like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there...Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it's not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location...Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be

Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.

I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.