did user engagement drop significantly in programming forums?

GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to Programming@programming.dev – 185 points –

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?

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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.

Lol I can't remember if it was sync or Lemmy that tried to get me on their discord server recently. I go to join, and it asked for some kind of ID verification. Like dude, I didn't have to do this for your actual app. As you might guess, I did not join the server.

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick... I don't want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for "suspicious activity"

At this point I just search the project name when it happens... I'm usually there to evaluate a project, and if that's not enough I just drop it

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.)

How does searching discord work? I was under the impression that entire chat logs weren't permanent and that older exchanges would be routinely deleted.

I've searched chat logs that are ancient as all hell. Not sure what lead you to think they purge history. Maybe it's only on the largest servers?

They do if the chat gets banned. Which eventually some dingas will do something that will get a community banned. Quite a bit of emulation docs got removed a couple of times this year because people cant take the hint not to talk about how they got their roms and emulators.

It actually was half way decent til recently, then they just broke the search function for idk reasons. Discord doesn't purge chat to my knowledge.

I don't think Discord deletes chat logs. I have no idea how it works but I think restricting chat history based on tiers was more of a Slack thing. But maybe I'm wrong and they have permanent boosters who unlock all those perks?

Discord doesn't delete chat logs AFAIK, however one of the permissions prevents you from reading things from before you joined a server/channel