HACKER Q&A
📣 consumer451

It's "software 3.0" time, why is community knowledge hidden in Discord?


My preferred longer title:

> Why would any product owner want to hide their community knowledge base in the un-crawlable product known as Discord?

As a user, I want to use search, or ask an LLM "how do I _ in product?"

As a product owner, I want users to find all the community Q&A, very easily.

Can anyone help me understand why product owners hide their community knowledge base in Discord?

- Discord plus: amazing app, people chat, community grows

- Discord minus: Search engines learn nothing from "how do I _ in product" and all the community answers

- Discord minus: All LLMs learn nothing from "how do I _ in product" and all the community answers

I believe that there is a Discord bot that publishes to a website or something, however it appears to be underutilized.

Am I crazy, or is everyone messing this up?

  👤 herbst Accepted Answer ✓
Discord support is IMO the biggest red flag for any software project right now.

If you have to hide your support or are to lazy to offer support without walled garden it just appears fishy

Edit'// Worst are those who require phone verified discord accounts to even ask a question.

👤 MongooseStudios
Because it takes minutes to set up a Discord server and everyone expects them now. Setting up a good old fashioned forum would take more effort.
👤 consumer451
Thanks to chatgpt deep research, I have now found that this has been covered previously [0]. However, what is the solution?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

👤 salawat
Some people simply don't value being scraped. They don't want their interface to the world to be managed by AI company scrapers of Google/Bing.

Contrary to popular belief; not everyone wants a de facto business relationship with Google.