I'd say the negative parts of Discord mixed with the negative parts of classic forum/Q&A behaviors plus a heap of angst/martyrdom (good phrasing by a sibling).
In my experience on the discord.py server, I had recently come back to discord bots after a couple of years and wanted to try slash commands and was told: "slash is trash", discord.py will never support slash commands (lol), the gist on the issue is SO OBVIOUS and easy to find just google it (it wasn't), talking about forks and other bot libraries is against the rules (wtf?), and this was all served with mild verbal abuse. It was also served while at least 2 people were asking if they were allowed to ping Danny to express bizarre levels of affection and they somehow got more positive traction than me trying to understand why this advertised API feature wasn't available in what I thought was a highly popular/respected library. Looking around the other channels had me cringing a bit on conversations and shared media to put it lightly.
Sometimes going to a discord server feels like entering an online shooter voice lobby. If you try to be serious you just get talked past or berated by loud 15 year olds. If they even say something related to what you're trying to talk about, they're mindlessly parroting their idol and not thinking critically on their own. These servers often have a handful of active people forming their own little social club with hundreds or thousands of other members on the side never saying anything, probably not even lurking. This is something I've noticed a lot on Discord but I imagine extends to similar solutions in the same space. My experience on Slack has been less juvenile but also less populated and similarly useless.
Anyway so mix that experience with the "I'm quitting" gist (which is something I can write a few paragraphs on but really don't want to) and yeah I wouldn't want to work with these people if I were a boring corporation, and I don't want to think about them when I'm doing a fun side project for friends.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. Those certainly don't sound pleasant...
> the gist on the issue is SO OBVIOUS and easy to find just google
I also have a deep resentment against people telling me to just 'read the docs' (especially the LMGTFY links). It gives a really bad first experience like yours, even more so when you've already looked it up before asking. I understand the contributors being constrained, however it's very important not to be blatantly rude to people. Very tired of this attitude in FOSS in general (I never do it when people ask about my projects).
> These servers often have a handful of active people forming their own little social club
That lines up with my experiences in the Discord API server, too. It's very ostracising.
As an aside: the state of the Discord API server is quite something. It's not "offical" per se, but it basically is (even Discord link to it). Almost like they want the benefits of an "official" room while also keeping it at arms length. Perhaps it's due to the experiences you describe above.
Yeah some question of "hey did you try the docs, if so what were you missing?" or something would go a long way. In this case, the Python tooling had been previously good enough that I started slash work poking around in the IDE. When I couldn't find anything, I went into my bookmarks and what docs I had didn't have any kind of banner or other warning that the project had been abandoned. It was only when I went looking for a blog or some sort of news source from the project that I found myself looking at the repo readme. The only indication that the project was dead was a small blurb at the top of the readme which you could easily skim past if you were looking for something specific. I tried to raise this point to them that the status of the project is not obvious and requires reading a dramatic gist ("moles in discord") to understand and yeah that wasn't received well. This whole time I was handling myself like I would a team at work that I'm not familiar with, very professional and objective. I didn't leave in some flurry of insults either.
Regarding pseudo-official servers, I imagine Discord wants a beat and handle on the community but ultimately the way the business has to move and make decisions is not compatible with how these people behave in public.
I never really join library communities. I wanted to make a quick bot a few months ago, had some very old experience with discord.py but indeed wanted slash commands. Simply used discord-py-slash-command [0] library and had a bot in less than an hour that did what I needed.
In my experience on the discord.py server, I had recently come back to discord bots after a couple of years and wanted to try slash commands and was told: "slash is trash", discord.py will never support slash commands (lol), the gist on the issue is SO OBVIOUS and easy to find just google it (it wasn't), talking about forks and other bot libraries is against the rules (wtf?), and this was all served with mild verbal abuse. It was also served while at least 2 people were asking if they were allowed to ping Danny to express bizarre levels of affection and they somehow got more positive traction than me trying to understand why this advertised API feature wasn't available in what I thought was a highly popular/respected library. Looking around the other channels had me cringing a bit on conversations and shared media to put it lightly.
Sometimes going to a discord server feels like entering an online shooter voice lobby. If you try to be serious you just get talked past or berated by loud 15 year olds. If they even say something related to what you're trying to talk about, they're mindlessly parroting their idol and not thinking critically on their own. These servers often have a handful of active people forming their own little social club with hundreds or thousands of other members on the side never saying anything, probably not even lurking. This is something I've noticed a lot on Discord but I imagine extends to similar solutions in the same space. My experience on Slack has been less juvenile but also less populated and similarly useless.
Anyway so mix that experience with the "I'm quitting" gist (which is something I can write a few paragraphs on but really don't want to) and yeah I wouldn't want to work with these people if I were a boring corporation, and I don't want to think about them when I'm doing a fun side project for friends.