There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support. It is an awful experience for users/customers for the reasons this post cites.
It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer.
If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.
I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.
Instead of having information available publicly that can be found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a question that most likely already was answered before?
It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something like that up to date instead?
Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).
The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic.
There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach.
I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.
Give me an example of a search for a given tools documentation that doesn’t have the result on the first page. Google seo is bad but I think this is hyperbole because I use it to find documentation easily most every day.
Some of these resources are alright, but none of them are python.org or other primary source. As a python user and google expert, I know how to tweak my query to get better results, but if I was a novice I wouldn't.
On the other hand, if I went to the python community discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from a real human in seconds. (the python discord is particularly excellent, by the way)
But why would a novice care if it came from python.org, providing the information was accurate? I don't think you've found a good example of what the GP was asking for, at any rate. I've certainly had that experience recently, but it turns out it was something more obscure than I would have expected (relating to ensuring that gulp scripts don't return an error code when warnings occur - I'd searched for `gulp --warnoff` and none of the answers were anything to do with the gulp tool, but it turned out "--warnoff" wasn't a standard flag anyway, though there is a blog post about how to add support for such a flag).
It doesn't seem like python.org answers the question very well? As in the implied question of "What is python __init__?"
The returned sites do?
If I google "php __construct" I get php documentation as the first result.
Google knows when someone doesn't find the answer they're looking for from a result, I suspect the results you're seeing are the ones the majority of searchers for that query wanted.
> The instantiation operation (“calling” a class object) creates an empty object. Many classes like to create objects with instances customized to a specific initial state. Therefore a class may define a special method named __init__(), like this:
def __init__(self):
self.data = []
> When a class defines an __init__() method, class instantiation automatically invokes __init__() for the newly created class instance. So in this example, a new, initialized instance can be obtained by:
x = MyClass()
Seems like a good explanation to me? Maybe people are upset that it's buried a bit in the docs instead of having a tiny out of context statement about it?
Yes, I suspect people saw a wall of text and went back to look for a shorter answer.
I would guess google A/B tested those results till python.org fell off the front page.
More to the point, I don't think either google or the people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python __init__?".
Yea, I used to get annoyed when I saw results like this. But I appreciate them more and more. It's still easy to find what you're looking for with a quick Ctrl+F. But there inevitably comes a time when I want to understand a concept deeper, and I can come back to results like this for the longer explanation.
I know that it doesn't have to be either a long explanation or a quick and concise snippet of information, it can be both. But I find that a lot of docs will either have long explanations or short snippets (because time is finite and doing both is duplicating efforts), and in those cases, I prefer the long explanation.
Thats not what I mean by using a search engine to parse documentation. I would just type “python documentation” where the first link I get is the documentation. Then I would search within that documentation for “ __init__” which, when tested just now, took me about 30 seconds all in to get to the known good source of truth here. That’s pretty good I think.
It's still good for finding documentation if you know the domain it's hosted on, which for product documentation you should. Just add "site:documentation.com" to your search query.
> The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful.
100%. But different strokes for different folks, as well as at different times in the evaluation/discovery journey. Many devs don't want to talk to someone.
From the perspective of the product company, things are a bit different. If you are pre-product market fit, you probably want every interaction with a possible customer/user you can, so you can move towards understanding the problem space. Set up discord for that.
Once you find PMF, it's all about setting yourself up for scaling. We made a choice to scale back chat and focus on online, public forums, and it worked out well for us. If you want to talk to a human, you can absolutely engage with our sales team, or in other public spaces like Twitter.
That said, some projects are big enough or inspire enough people that the community can scale on discord. Haven't seen that often, but it happens.
> Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).
Agree for generic programming queries, but for product specific queries, I haven't noticed that. And product specific queries are what documentation and forum are designed to help with.
This isn't a new problem. I was doing some classic iPod research a while back, looking back on mid-00s hardware research. Some knowledge was present only in IRC chat logs, and some is surely lost to the sands of time. Similar story with PDA hacking.
The knowledge still needs to be transferred to wikis etc. so that it can be preserved long-term.
The problem is that users type in "how to do X" into Google. End users often enough don't even know the website of your application, I know so many people who literally go to Netflix by typing in "Netflix" in the bar and click the first link.
But Google has dumbed down so hard that scammers using generic keywords outcompete everyone including yourself (or outright clone/farm SO/Wikipedia/whatever), which is why many people add "stackoverflow" or "reddit" to the search terms, and the latter broke a few weeks ago when many subs went private.
The most annoying thing is, Google could shut down a lot of these scammers if they would invest in a couple hundred people to look at the most frequent questions and rate the top 20 sites - everyone caught to be a blatant spammer gets the boot, and everyone selling fake dick enlargement pills or whatever gets the police with the full support of the billions of dollars of Google. But they seem to have completely stopped all effort into their core product...
I suspect they've figured out that whole search engine business model thing has been deprecated for months in its current form. Their product has been shitty in specific areas for several years now.
Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union has lead to a competitive advantage being not just lost, but far surpassed. As nature intended.
The majority of the time they aren’t thinking about the customer, they’re (selfishly, or naively?) thinking about themselves and how they can crowd source their support versus providing real personal solutions.
> I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.
Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the shots, then that would make-sense.
I don't think there's necessarily a problem with a company operating a Discord server for purposes of community engagement or marketing. But that's an entirely different thing than using Discord as a support platform.
Honestly, I’d take it over other archaic forms of documentation that came before. These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord solves:
Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website.
Paying for documentation.
Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls.
Documentation on just a website.
No documentation.
Random forums I have to sign up for that are separate from the help desk sign up that are separate from the actual services signup.
Not be able to search across others issues and to solve problems without needing to ask.
Using HN to get assistance.
Using Twitter to get assistance.
Hoping my email doesn’t get lost or stuck in spam either way.
Having notifications so I can respond.
Not having to sit on some website in some chat window.
Not having to use some crappy web form that won’t take my screenshot because it’s 2MB instead of only being at most 1MB.
Not being able to add attachments at all.
Being able to have a real time conversation with someone.
Still having a search function.
Have something that works well on mobile and desktop. (Oh, but websites work well on both… OH no they don’t have to. People can easily screw that up and make websites that work horribly on difference devices).
All of these things can be solved, but they aren’t.
And keep in mind, the context of the discussion here isn’t documentation that ONLY exists on Discord. Rather, documentation that exists on web AND also stuff that exists on Discord. So, stuff that has yet to make it to the website.
> These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord solves: 1) Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website. 2) Paying for documentation. 3) Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls.
Huh?
Who has ever had to log into something to view documentation? Discord seems to be the only example!
Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it, pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any way.
As for the last one, well, getting you on to a Discord and into their marketing drip feed is a lot cheaper than having a sales call.
MSDN sold a service where they mailed you physical CDs. Once they had the documentation on their website it was all free. (A subscription would get you licenses for QAing on different versions of Windows / additional other stuff, but the help files were free)
It's certainly less common now, but prior to 2015 it was common for "legacy" vendors (y'know... the paranoid and posessive types, like ProgressDB...) - or just those embarassed about the state of their products compared to the rest of the industry: they'll hide their KB articles, bug-reports and workarounds, and more besides) behind a registration-wall, or even worse: only grant you access if you have a current support contract with them.
At least their SQL documentation is public - I remember (at least a decade ago) that only Postgres, MySQL, and MSSQL made their documentation public, while info on IBM DB2 and Oracle was scarce.
The whole point is that they don't have to answer. They hope someone else from the community will before they get to it.
It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the communication at all yourself. Win!
We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software. Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We even have an internal slack channel where we capture questions that have been asked on other media (including private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it to post on the forums. This helps future questioners.
Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.
I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.
> Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless
It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.
We were considering using https://www.linen.dev/ for our own slack group for this reason - it surfaces information from these chat groups and makes it available via search. Anyone here tried them out?
There's always going to be people who don't read your documentation and just post on your form but I think it's a pretty big fallacy to say for that reason it's useless for us to create and publish good documentation. You'd need data on customers that look through your documentation and never post to make that assertion.
One of the reasons everyone hates writing documentation is precisely because nobody reads them.
So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted" writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering the same question again and again and again and again and again.
If nobody reads documentation, it means they don't trust it.
Trust is something that documentation for a project has to earn over time.
People will assume the documentation is incomplete and out-of-date, because that's the default for most things.
If it's comprehensive and stays up-to-date with new changes, the project community will eventually come to realize they and start trusting it. But it takes time to build up that track record!
I don't think that they don't trust documentation. I think that they don't want to invest half or a full day reading the docs and learning every facet of the tool. They are in hurry and if they can find the right answer, discord, ChatGPT, whatever, that would do.
I read all the Unix man page of every command line program I used but there were only a few of them. There are a zillion of tools now, I can't spend days reading their docs: I won't be able to deliver to my customers and get paid. Googling how to do X magically works well enough.
Discord is the very last resort, only if desperate. I tend to keep very far away from tools that have discord as their primary documentation. There are always alternatives.
I think we also tend to teach people to not read documentation (or spend time learning anything, really).
Maybe there is some kind of negative reinforcement, too. The way it feels to me is: "I won't write documentation, because users don't read it -> Oh great, I will use ChatGPT to support my users -> The users don't know how to read documentation (or anything other than a 500-letters answer to a chat question) because they do everything with ChatGPT-like prompts -> I won't write documentation, because users don't read it".
Same for many things: most people tend to complain about CMake, but almost every time, I quickly realize that they don't know how to use CMake. Either they complain about it and never used it, or they complain and use it wrong. Therefore many devs try to build alternatives that will solve that problem by "being better than CMake". Turns out I have seen Meson projects that were a big mess, it's not just a CMake thing. On the other hand, people who learn how to use Autotool/CMake/Meson usually manage to make it quite maintainable.
Here the negative reinforcement would be: "People don't learn how to use the tools properly -> They make a mess -> They complain about the tool -> Someone makes a "better tool" -> People don't learn the new tool and make a mess -> repeat.
I truly believe that we could solve many problems by teaching people how to learn, instead of building technology that helps them being productive without learning.
CMake has a bit of a documentation problem, though. Firstly because the tool really was pretty bad at the start and the correct way to use it is the new way, but all the examples people run into in the wild are generally using it wrong, and this becomes self-perpetuating. The second issue is that the main documentation is actually really light on examples, it's just a fairly dry (and not always helpful) description of each part of it. I know there's some pretty good books but that isn't the kind of resource a lot of people are going to use when learning a tool, especially a tool they regard as secondary to their actual goal.
I totally agree that copy-pasting examples from random websites is a bad idea, because there is a very high likelihood that those examples use it wrong.
Regarding the CMake documentation, though, I have been relying on it forever (that's pretty much how I learned CMake), and I personally find it pretty good. That is where I believe there may be some kind of cultural change: I am fine reading the manual (`$ man <command>`) and RFCs and documentation like the CMake one. It feels like "the modern way" is to find an example that does what you need and mimic it (hence the success of stuff like Copilot).
I just feel like my way is more powerful: I can both leverage official documentation (and RFCs, etc) and examples, and I can actually use them together (e.g. read the example, see new stuff there, and go read the official docs about those new things). IMHO, only being able to rely on examples that do almost exactly what one needs is a bit of a loss; people should learn to read actual manuals.
People read the documentation and fails to understand it. Writing good clear documentation that successfully guides your users or customers to gain the most value from your product is incredibly hard.
It's fine to have Discord, or something similar, for when you users come to you with a problem, but then you need to consider if you have to go back at update the documentation. Early in my career hanging out on mailinglists was much more popular, frequently you'd ask a question and the maintainers of whatever software you where using would take the answer and put them into the regular FAQ or documentation. Now we replaced Discord with mailinglists and that might be sensible, the feedback loop just should not be excluded. Discord is terrible place to store knowledge.
If it's hard to write documentation that people will comprehend, doesn't that make it equally hard to write near real-time chat messages that people will understand?
even if people ask the same question rather than looking for docs, it's still a huge timesaver to direct them to the documentation rather than re-explaining from scratch everytime. Plus, after having been shown the docs they _might_ now be aware that they exist and self-serve the next time
Plus it's an opportunity to fix the documentation. You will figure out quickly if a section of it is too confusing. It would also help you to realize if it's not easily discoverable.
Most servers have a bot that people use to store and retrieve common answers so contributors don't have to type it out every time.
Now you could be like clearly that should just be in the web documentation but people still show up and ask even when it is and RTFM isn't exactly nice.
I guess that's true. I also guess one should consider the fact that you could (as long as things don't change) "waste" your time writing the documentation once, and saved time accumulates, while "saving" your time today not writing documentation will accumulate time spent on answering questions over and over.
Saved time today VS saved time tomorrow, the constant question for startups :)
I find this prevalent attitude actually harmful. It is kinda weird thing to think that the tools we use should not need any learning or training, that anyone should just be able to pick them up and be productive.
Of course I understand it is reflective of the current situation where naturally it is not worth seeking expertise when software gets at minumum a redesign every six months if not thrown out completely. But I'd really question is that actually good situation to be in?
in my experience, discord is more likely to demand a phone number after you 'claim' an account by adding an email address. and don't even think about not getting phonewalled if you use a commercial VPN.
For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to moderate, it's basically almost no effort.
To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it just does.
> To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community,
Survivorship bias? You're counting all the people who want to use discord as support for using discord, but since you[1] have no other avenues for the non-discord people you don't know how many users you've lost simply because you've silenced them.
IOW, you're[2] looking at the 5 people who express support for discord but ignoring the 500 who hate it enough to not use your support at all.
I think, if you're a business using discord for user support, you should should be wondering, if you've got 100k users, why are only 1k people in your discord?
[1] Not you personally; for all I know you have multiple channels, which include discord. The places who normally use discord only have one channel for users to use.
Let me give you some more info. I started first with a forum on my own website (bbpress). I also had a twitter and facebook account where I posted updates. Still have YouTube.
I'm 44, so for me a forum is ideal, Discord is way too intensive.
Then one of my members started a discord years ago and a lot of members went there. I switched everyone to an official one, and one member volunteered to moderate.
I would say most questions come from Discord, then YouTube comments, then email. My own forum wasn't as popular so I closed it due to lots of spam that I had to manage.
I also pushed hard for Reddit but never took off (I liked reddit more)
One thing to mention that is probably important: this is in gaming sphere with lots of kids, teenagers and young adults. Also used in schools by teachers.
As much as I hate discord for anything other than strictly gaming and fun, if your user demographic is primarily kids, teenagers and young adults I think Discord is fine. They're already on it anyway and you have to meet users where they're at. If I were to ever choose discord it'd be in this kind of situation.
Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people, but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving community that feels good to you.
So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is only people who are already happy Discord users." But that should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move toward the broader audience and that will include addressing concerns like in the article.
You don't need user interviews, you just see where they are going.
Are they discussing this on twitter or reddit? Are they making YouTube videos? Did one of them start a Discord with lots of people there? Once you see what works, make an official one.
Funnily enough Discord was the only one I didn't start myself. I liked something async with proper Google searching better.
So even when I tried, I wasn't able to steer them.
The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can “do it all” in terms of how people want to communicate.
It supports voice, video, and text.
It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.
It supports web, desktop, and mobile.
I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.
Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.
The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information' incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the chat app part of a support channel, it is not even a passable replacement for a website, or a wiki.
Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.
Maybe some users of Discord want the satisfaction of answering a question raised by another community member, but don't want the answer to be publicly indexable and searchable forever? In this case, Discord is working perfectly.
Good for them. While they are getting whatever social satisfaction they care about (which is fine, if you're an enthusiast, you can seek out whatever validation for your volunteer effort you want - I don't judge)...
I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten.
I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.
Another thing I dislike about Discord is how it deals with notifications. The default notification settings are absolutely bonkers. Everything is unread, all the time, everything is important, everything has red badges every-damn-where. Then whenever you join a new "server", first thing you have to do is right-click and select "suppress @everyone and @here" and "suppress role mentions". But even if you do that, the messages with @everyone @here @role STILL get the yellow highlight like they mention you personally. Broadcast mentions are the stupidest thing ever. They should've never been invented because people can't be trusted to not abuse them.
Then the message input field tries to be way too smart and is way too dumb at the same time. They've somehow broken macOS's native text replacements, iirc the thing eats some characters if your message starts with them, BUT — if you just type someone's @username and don't select the completion that pops up, the mention wouldn't work.
The UI to add reactions to messages is comically bad. It shows your recent emojis, then 5 kilometers of the custom emojis from all the servers you're on (that you can't use anyway because you don't have the subscription), and only then the rest of the unicode emojis.
Then there are all the incredibly obnoxious popups, banners and tooltips that promote the paid subscription. And the "what's new" popup. That's also obnoxious. Like, maybe, just maybe, if I'm not paying you, and have been using your service on the free tier for several years now, you should consider me a lost cause and stop raping my eyeballs with your stupid upsells in the hopes of converting me into a paying customer?
Also, my files are way too often "too powerful" with no option to have the server compress them to its liking — it's rare that I need to send a bit-perfect copy of an image or a video.
I'll be building a modern multi-protocol desktop IM client as my next project sometime in the future. Discord will definitely be at the top of the list of services to support.
Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one). Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting all their content on some third party centralized service? I don’t get it.
Aren’t all Discord “servers” controlled by one company? And why did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?
Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication", it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that matches the way we want to communicate".
Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.
Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.
> Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion.
Just want to point out that they fixed this, it's possible to create Topics once the channel's community reaches 200 users.
Though this probably isn't what most users want for a support channel. Having one place to go is simpler then a community with a dozen company meme channels that you have no interest in seeing.
> Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
It goes to hell if you make the mistake of enabling E2EE for channels since the key exchange bogs it down and only a few clients support encrypted message search. Otherwise, yeah the Element clients have pretty bad UX especially when comparing to Telegram. Some other clients like Nheko improve on it but don't cover the full set of features, so while I'm a user of Matrix I find it hard to continue to recommend Matrix over chat ecosystems with better usability.
Zulip is the best for this IMO. You can even export conversations so they are indexable and viewable without login.
But Discord has the advantage that people already have an account and all the so called servers are within the same GUI. (This convenience also makes it a walled garden)
Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is just a bunch of hacks put together. For example
- Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related,
- No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0])
Ah, the joys of open source: where "nobody has implemented 'mark all as read' on a space yet" is extrapolated to "half-baked and just a bunch of hacks".
Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951 (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in unix.
(Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.
Watch discord have it's reddit moment where they raise prices and people aren't willing to pay, but they are locked in due to hosting huge communities in it.
Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g. GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence, which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier) outrage.
You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?"
Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.
Yeah, community-driven support + documentation sucks. That's how Ory just lost me as a customer. Couldn't even get a reply from the DX dude, wanted to pay for onboarding.
A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground, documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's how it should work.
Hey there,
I'm the "DX dude" so you were probably messaging me in the Ory Community Slack.
Very sorry about a missing response, that should not have happened! I usually take time to answer each and everyone in the community within 24 hours so apologies that I missed your message.
Ory does offer onboarding for commercial clients, for that you can set up a call in 1 click here: https://www.ory.sh/contact/ - we can kick off a guided onboarding session on the same day if you want to move fast.
If you have startup and no docs + complicated product -> discord is super easy first step. It also has a nice loop: if you see a question over and over, move it to faq, if its still repeated perhaps add better labeling/hints to your forms, if it still persists, damn maybe rethink your offering/product(or accept CS as vital part).
In the end I don't want to deal with meta stuff. I want a nice seamless product period. Discord while awkward is a good first thing that you should absolutely have - you can bootstrap it in 10 mins. (Depending on your customers ofcourse, if you are selling insurance to old folks, for obvious reasons it's not good)
Discourse is just as bad. A forum should not require the use of javascript. A forum shouldn't silently remove parts of the DOM that are off screen. A forum should allow me to load an entire thread (or however many posts it decides a page is) in my browser, and use the native browser search function to find things.
It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer.
If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.