Glad we got this resolved and it was all working properly, the site does need to do more to make it clearer when viewing a private message while signed in added it to the backlog sorry about that!
Welcome to the Answer Overflow community! I agree it'd be good to have a quicker way to setup multiple channels - to be honest it's kind of far in the backlog as it's pretty rare a server has many, but the UX could be improved there
If you have any other feedback, please send it to me on Discord so I make sure I see it - thanks!
> Do name your application with something unique. Including one of the terms, "Stack" or "Exchange" or "Overflow" in your product name is generally okay.
It's a different enough product that I feel comfortable with it - Stack Overflow is only for programming while Answer Overflow is for all topics. Along with that Overflow is a pretty generic word and if you wanted to get super technical with it, the context I'm using the word in is "I have so many answers they're overflowing" while theirs is a reference to a programming term.
We'll see and I'm not a lawyer but given that their trademark guidelines allow it, I feel comfortable
That part specifically refers to things built on the Stack Overflow API. And "generally okay" is of course hardly a guarantee. "Overflow" as a word is fine, obviously, but it does sit in the same "get answers" space – I can name my restaurant "Best Apple", but I'll have more problems if I named some piece of electronics "Best Apple".
It's your site, you can do what you want with it and you're free to ignore my comment – that's fine! But personally, I wouldn't have named it Answer Overflow.
- The API grants you essentially a sublicense to the data, since Answer Overflow is a bot going through the official API and following the ToS properly, that should cover it for any potential issues
- Answer Overflow gets consent from users to use their messages https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...
> Subject to your compliance with the Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable license to access and use the APIs and Documentation we make available to you solely as necessary to integrate with, develop, and operate your Application
When you post on Discord, you grant them a transferable license to your content and that's one of the ways they use it
Disclaimer that it's probably more complicated than that and I'm a software engineer not a lawyer
This might sound a little bit picky, but from a cursory look around the project, it feels a bit too corporate and platform-ey for my tastes. I'm only interested in two things: generating (ideally static, and seo-friendly) web pages out of a discord forum channel and selfhosting it so we can archive the data ourselves (and won't be bound to content policies of answeroverflow.com). All of the extra bells and whistles with the bot auto-managing channels, analytics, AI and whatever else superfluous and make me sweat a little, as I'll have to comb through the documentation to make sure everything is set up correctly. It's also really a shame to read that selfhosting will be a "Pro" feature. I'll give props for considering users wanting to opt-out, however, and it does at least seem rather simple to set up.
Where did you see self hosting is a pro feature? My bad if the website gives that impression. It will be free, the whole codebase is MIT licensed.
For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well for indexing content so now the focus is “what else can we do to improve community support as a whole?”
As for self hosting, if you submit a PR for supporting it I’d be happy to get that merged but it’s not really a priority at the moment. The codebase is setup to be pretty easy to make a self hosted version though.
Haha, that's fair. I'll consider trying to set it up myself and see how it goes.
I got the idea that it was a pro feature out of the roadmap list on the website, where it's listed as "coming soon", and "pro" is only mentioned when you click on the waitlist join link. If it means custom domains, it might be better off being listed as "custom domains" or something similar. That's how it's called on google apps and such. It also doesn't help that the roadmap on the website doesn't match the one on the github page, I thought the roadmap features on the github page might be pro features as well.
Most Discord communities aren't meant to be indexed I agree! Thanks for linking that article it was interesting to read
There's lots that have support channels though for programming libraries, for games, etc and having all of that content locked away can be really damaging.
One of the interesting things I've noticed is when a community for a more niche game / programming library joins Answer Overflow, they often shoot up to being top performers on the site which is great to see.
Along with that, not all channels are indexed, mainly just help channels. What's nice with this is it keeps that cozy feeling of a private place to talk, while helping more people find a community they will enjoy and keeping information accessible.
Long term, I'd like to implement forms of anti-abuse tools for communities to use so they can understand what the types of people who join their server from Answer Overflow are like. For example, if it turns out that 90% of the people who join are abusive, then it'd make sense for them to turn off indexing.
You could possibly make the argument that for the long term health of some communities, having indexed content helps to keep the community active
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Glad to see this is something you care about preserving.
Good to see you're careful to only share particular channels.
I have more thoughts on marketing this and also on guidelines for server administrators implementing search indexing. For marketing, most importantly, it could be good to make it clear you're focused on selective sharing only of channels which it would be a public good to make indexable. For administrator guidelines, most importantly, I think there should be several measures to ensure that users are aware of and agree to having their communications in particular channels publicly indexed.
I ran this by GPT-4 for some more context and detail. [1]
I think with measures like this we may be able to realize the good of indexing without going too far to driving away the safety of the walled garden aspect of Discord.
As an aside, for users of existing Discords, I encourage you to learn to use the search features built into Discord. Discord itself indexes servers and the search has good filtering functionality. I suspect if you already know which Discord server has the information you're looking for, you'll have a better experience with the internal search than trying to lean on Google.
If you want to do better than the internal search, perhaps creating a vector store of the channel and setting up an AI chat application in front of it would be a solution.
I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.
>Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Discord started as a way for gamers to chat with one another. Initially the developers even wanted to sell games directly from the platform [1].
I think it would be incorrect to position Discord as a privacy-oriented platform when the desktop client needs to be run in a sandbox because there's no real way to disable data collection.
Discord came about because all the instant messaging services (eg: AIM, MSN) had recently died, Skype was hot flaming gasoline garbage, Teamspeak and Ventrilo were tedious and expensive (for gamers), and otherwise there were no other means of reliable, easy, free, convenient means of voice communications.
Mumble was the best free voice communications app and briefly took over after Teamspeak fell out of popularity.
Discord was really the best place to hang out with your friends outside of games. Social media was too distant and Steam friends didnt do enough. The old IRC chatroom / Discord format with voice comms and screen sharing is THE way to relate to friends online now.
Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.
Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.
Every big, lasting company has a product portfolio: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft... A single product will leave you vulnerable to disruption, and the aforementioned problem.
Correct. However, I feel the specific companies you mention didn't aim for hyper-growth, and had space to diversify their product portfolio. Discord, much like Reddit, is a one-trick pony. The weird thing to me is, Reddit feels like it should've been in the Google/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft bucket - yet somehow, through all these years, it failed to diversify.
I'm not sure Discord knew what it wanted to be. Private for your friends, but not end-to-end encrypted. Chat for streamers with rooms, but not a streaming platform. (They tried. Twitch also tried to make a Discord-like desktop app.)
Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)
My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.
It wasn't meant to be "private" in the e2e sense. It was just meant to be a modern reimagining of Ventrilo/TeamSpeak, which were group chat programs for gamers. The video call stuff came after (since it was strange to not have video if you were already voice chatting in the year 201X). They want to branch outside of servicing online gaming communities but that was their origin, and you can still see how that culture affects their product design today. A good way of understanding the product is to just ask "would online gaming communities use this?".
Not everything should be preserved forever. It's actually really nice to be able to talk online and not have it form a permanent record that can be instantly referenced by anyone.
Correct. However, some things should be preserved forever and accessible. It's really nice to be able to put a piece of scientific jargon, or a text of an error message, into a search box, and get back links and references to material you can peruse at your own pace and discretion - as opposed to having to join a closed community and keep asking people, hoping someone who knows the answer and is willing to help spots the message before it disappears in the flood of ongoing conversations, and monitoring said flood so that you catch the answer in time to ask follow-up questions, etc.
Point being: different needs require different tools. Current trend is doing everything in closed, ephemeral groups.
Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.
> Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has [always] existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.
- Answer Overflow works on a consent basis for displaying messages (https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...), while Linen does all the messages in a community. The consent system Answer Overflow has helps a lot with respecting user privacy while also getting content indexed.
- Linen appears to be building out a competitor to Slack & Discord while Answer Overflow is focused on building on top of those platforms, so we've got very different roadmaps. From what I can gather from the Linen roadmap, they're implementing things like voice chat, private channels, etc. Whereas with Answer Overflow some of the things I'm focused on is answer automation, tracking outdated answers, analytics for where to improve your docs etc
- Answer Overflow is pretty much only focused on Discord servers, it wouldn't be too hard to support both Slack and Discord but what's nice about focusing on Discord for now is it helps with our goal of being the best indexing tool specifically for Discord
If you're interested in the alternative of an indexing app, you might like https://www.answeroverflow.com/! It's also open source if you want something to contribute to (for the record i'm the developer of it)
