• celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    Fewer barriers to entry and faster responses from people using Reddit/Facebook/Discord. Forums are great for indexing and posterity, but they’re absolute dogshit for meaningful information exchange. Unless you know exactly what your problem is, to the point of barely needing help, you probably won’t be able to word your question in a way that experts can understand, and the assistance they provide generally comes with a lot of assumptions that you’re familiar with X, Y, and Z. I can’t tell you how many forum posts I’ve read over the decades that just sort of end without any resolution of the original problem. It’s all too easy to lose pertinent information in multi page threads (esp if the pages extend into the 10s and 100s), and new users, the ones most in need of assistance, are overwhelmed by experts overestimating the new user’s abilities. Discord on the other hand lets you instantly get feedback from experts and allows you to refine your question in real time.