What _is_ up with v2.110?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 12, 2025 3:45:15 AM MDT Sergey via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 March 2025 at 08:21:01 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 11 March 2025 at 22:14:16 UTC, Sergey wrote:
> >> On Friday, 7 March 2025 at 11:16:45 UTC, matheus wrote:
> > "Discord is a bad standard"
>
> Any technical reasons?
> Because "Discord" is also convenient, because used not only for D
> channel, but for other cool project channels..

Discord is basically a chat application. Chat applications work well for
fast, temporary communication. They're terrible for anything that you want
to stick around and be read or searched for later. They're also generally
terrible at anything that involves threading. You're basically getting one
stream of messages back and forth rather than a more organized, threaded
discussion of responses.

The newsgroup / forum / mailing list does a much better job of providing
something that actually sticks around and can be searched through. It also
has threading so that discussions can be broken up into replies to specific
posts rather than smashing everything into a single stream of messages back
and forth. The newsgroup also works better when longer replies are needed.

The main downside over discord (or any form of chat application) is that
there's a much larger delay between responses. If you're looking for a quick
response, and folks are paying attention to discord, you might get a
response pretty quickly, but the newsgroup / forum / mailing is not set up
in a way that really makes it easy to see immediately when a message shows
up - and the technology being used inherently adds delay into the process as
the messages are propagated to the newsgroup from the forum or mailing list
"wrappers" around the newsgroup - and then back from the newsgroup to those
"wrappers" to see the message through whatever UI endpoint the user has
chosen to use (meaning that a fast message generally takes a few minutes to
propagate). And maybe it's that delay that causes some folks to prefer
discord - or maybe it's just something about how some of the younger folks
think and operate that I don't understand (not that I'm old, but I'm not
twenty-something anymore, and clearly, there's been a change in how some of
the younger folks deal with communication online as social media has grown).

Ultimately, whatever the pros and cons, we're kind of stuck having more than
just the newsgroup / forum / mailing list as a major point of communication,
because lots of folks just don't like posting here for whatever reason, and
some of those folks are willing to use discord. But there's clearly a real
cost to it, because it means that all of that stuff that gets discussed on
discord is lost. It just doesn't work to search through discord messages to
find much, and no matter how good or bad discord's search is, you're not
going to get those messages when you search with a search engine like
Google. On the other hand, the messages from the newsgroup _do_ end up in
such searches. So, instead of someone searching for an answer to a question
and finding it on the newsgroup, increasingly, they won't find anything,
because the question was asked on discord - and will probably be asked again
and again on discord, because the answer effectively went into a blackhole
each time. The person who asked it got their answer, but the next person who
comes along with a similar question won't see that answer. With the
newsgroup, it's not hard to find posts from 10 or 15 years ago, but if that
communication had happened through discord, you'd have a hard time finding
it if it had happened last week.

It's kind of like the difference between a phone call and an e-mail. Discord
messages don't get the added benefit that comes from hearing someone's tone,
and the messages stick around a bit longer than someone's voice, but like a
conversation over the phone, discord messages are quick and effectively gone
once said, whereas e-mail is slower, but it sticks around where it can be
searched through and reread later.

Discord makes sense for when you've got some buddies shooting the breeze,
but it's clearly inferior for technical discussions, because it's designed
to be transitory. If that's what folks insist on using, then we need to
accommodate that on some level if we want that communication to be taking
place, but I don't see how there's any argument that it's better from a
technical perspective aside from the fact that the communication is
typically much faster.

- Jonathan M Davis