9mo ago

did user engagement drop significantly in programming forums?

There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.

Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?

53 comments

Communities moving to 'chat' based platforms instead of traditional discussion boards is something I've observed a lot in the last few years. Which certainly feel like a step backwards in my view. It keeps happening though, so I must he in the minority opinion on this.
- The quickest way to have me lose all interest in any new, potentially neat, tech is having to visit their discord for anything from documentation to discussion.
  
  Join our Discord!
  No, don't trouble yourselves, I'll just use something else.
  
  Idk, I used to get my questions about Mirror for Unity answered on Discord either directly or by doing a search and never had a problem with it. I'd never say never.
  (Tbf, they do use GitHub and such but the Discord is quite active as well.)
- Yeah I will never understand why discord has replaced both forums and subreddits, the form factor doesn't fit the discussion style.
- Especially Discord is bad, because it cannot be indexed by web search engines. And the entire structure is not really good for long term, compared to dedicated posts in forums.
  
  It can be (linen.dev is one such solution). But the server owners have to set it up obviously, and often they don't. But it's not an issue if they cared to.
  
  I agree, but I think it's easier for the community owners to get user to join their discord channel with one click, than having users to sign up for a forum, create an account, confirm the email, post in the right subforum and also deal with spam and forum maintenance. It's seen as less hassle for admins and users
- I think it's a result of trying to get support right now so you don't get stuck waiting for someone to up vote your question or having other questions push your thread further down.
  I've been a victim of this myself and going to Discord seems to be better getting someone to actually help you, especially for niche questions.
  I'm not saying I like it but I certainly get it.
  
  Also for people its often an embarrassment to ask certain questions, because they think its a stupid question. In a forum, everyone can see it and comeback years later (which is a good thing btw, but for some embarrassing). A chat is forgets much quicker and better.
  I think asking niche questions in a forum is very helpful too, otherwise you will only find common questions. Actually the niche questions answered and maybe corrected over time is very useful in forums. Because in a chat often niche questions requires the right person to be in the right group at the right time.
Duplicated question, I'm closing the topic.
I feel like a lot of open source projects redirect to a discord or private discussion system like slack (even worse).
And it doesn’t help at all because it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side. You can also be banned for no reason. Searching those platforms is horrendous, I don’t want to search a badly indexed system and then ask a question because I can’t find the answer to a problem, and be told it has been discussed 30 times.
Give me a bloody wiki or old fashioned phpbb forum.
- it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side.
  On a whim? Also, Google will be disabling it's caching feature soon.
  
  Lucky google isn’t the only search engine then
We're all jobless and don't want to talk about it.
- ... or forced to take-on un-related work and afraid of discouraging newbies.
There are several projects on GitHub I use that are sometimes hard to find answers for questions. They have closed the Discussions on their GitHub page, and if you ask a question by opening an issue they close it and say “go join our discord server”.
It’s frustrating. You can’t search online for any issues. When you join the discord server, you can search and find lots of questions, but there are very few answers.
- Have you considered creating a ticket called "Can't ask questions without joining discord"?
  Do you think it would have more answers if it were on GitHub discussions?
  
  It would just get closed. They are strict about GitHub issues ONLY being for actual issues/bugs you find with that project. Anything else is either closed as not being an issue
90% of the time if I ask for help on forums the answer will be one of three things:
Completely absent
Just google it scrub lmao (nevermind the fact that search has gone to shit)
Doesn't actually answer the question
- Don’t forget these responses
  why do you want to do X?? Why don’t you do it Y way (that doesn’t actually solve the problem)
  
  Sometimes this is useful, though. Other times it's infuriating 😅
  
  XY Problems are much more common from the person asking the question though...
- In the early days it seems pike Stack Overflow tried to regulate engagement from trolls. They encouraged support for dumb/newbie questions and discouraged obnoxious behaviors.
  I’m guessing that’s just a losing battle. I don’t think there’s much hope of keeping a good moderator for free. It’s a tough, thankless job. Troll/poor moderators are free.
The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.
- generative AI "helps" with this too
  why deal with stackoverflow when you can brainstorm with a chatbot that replies instantly
  
  And doesn't insult you, and gives you an answer far more tailored to your issue.
  
  And to the end user who doesn't know what they're doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them "further".
  I say this because if you're following forums, chances are you're following guides, which means you don't understand what it is you're doing. Which is fine, I typically don't either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.
  But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.
  Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn't need to understand.
does anyone have programming forums to recommend? besides reddit
- I thought the point of this instance was to try and start a decent one here.
- The Cavern Of Cobol is an active place at the Something Awful forums, I've found it a great resource.
It's no reddit in terms of quantity but honesty I've had higher quality topics and discussions here than there. Lemmy/kbin might not have taken off in the mainstream to offer a variety of subjects but when it comes to tech and software I think it's covered well enough and people are generally nicer about it. The main problem is lack of (remotely) good seach function, I dont think the threads are getting indexed by google and the on-site search is atrocious.
I don't know of any discord programming communities, I wish forums were still a thing but the only live one I know of is the jellyfin one after they moved from reddit. Other than that it's here or the various subreddits
As the kind of noob type to ask dumb questions, I talk out a lot of issues with larger LLM's now. What I can not, I ask here.
I feel like the forums logins thing is too antiquated. I wish they would all be on the fediverse and compatible with Lemmy. I would love the depth and scope of many forums as niche communities with their own trees of subjects and discussions.
- Even this is forum-like though. It's a forum of people talking about a topic that interests them. It just happens to be distributed.
  
  Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.
  To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator's ADHD with a forum's depth and utility.
  
  Can't bump an old question
I feel that /r/programming lost a lot of volume and intensity following the API protest drama. This community seemed like a beneficiary. Even anecdotally though, I sit in a couple of language discord servers and engagement seems lower than it was a couple of years ago.
Your account info says you joined Lemmy a couple of years ago. Could that have something to do with it? Could be that there are simply fewer of us here than wherever you were before.
Also, if Reddit is one of your haunts, keep in mind that a lot of communities there partially dispersed a little over a year ago, and not everyone has reappeared in the same place (or at all).
Tangentially, there's a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at !meta@programming.dev. Lemmy's upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.
- Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't talking about programming.dev. i thought that's obvious because p.dev isn't that old
  
  I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.

53 comments