Monday Monday open wide dev fans get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript CSS. No module barbecue tip get workflows Break dancing soft skill web development the hcs the karaisias the tastiest web development treats coming in hot Here is where's Barracuda boss and Scott El Taroloko Ooh Welcome to syntax in this Monday. Hey, St. Treet.
We're gonna be talking about community building online Some of the different software techniques and things you can do to either get started with the web community or join one potentially join one of the Two that you're going to be hearing about in this episode And we are going to be talking a lot about the pluses and minuses here little things to consider when thinking about a community on the web No, my name is Scott Twinsky I'm a full stack developer from Denver Colorado and with me as always is West Wallace Hey, I'm excited to talk about this because I don't feel like there's any like perfect solution out there yet and There's lots of options out there and they all have their as you said pluses and minuses But I don't think there's a silver bullet out there yet and I'm really hoping get help comes out with something pretty soon So we'll talk about that. Oh, yeah, you know what? I have a personally well, okay Well, we'll serve my opinion. I'll wait to share some of my opinions.
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Well, let's get into it. Maybe should start real quick with where we're at right now My community is on slack and I've been on there for I don't know maybe four four and a half years now And there's something like 30,000 people in there and I I feel the aches and pains of the slack because it's okay But there's like we said there's a lot of downsides to it And I've been like looking for something better and I was excited to hear that you recently switched to discord. Yeah Sorry, I ruined the lead there No, no, I prefer a nice little lead in you know It's funny because we had a tweet come in and it was sort of like hey I'm trying to sign up for your slack room But it's saying that you're all out of invites and I was just like this is so annoying The invite process to slack why can't they just add a form allow anybody to sign up to your room that is good for more than just a month There's something because the real answer is is because slack's not good for open communities, right? It's more like yeah team closed community focused and that's really who their their audiences And so I really was feeling the pains of not using slack what it was for what it was essentially made and used for And so I asked around and a lot of people were telling me discord discord discord Yeah, and I heard so many glowing endorsements from a lot of people I trust honestly I would name them all But there is too many to name just about every person that I you know really look for good advice from us Telling me that discord is the way to go so I did a basically a scorched earth and I just said script was move it Let's move the community.
I'm tired of it. You know, I knew the the people who are using the slack channel I did a nice little poll online and people said that they wanted to want to move and I took the shot and now we're on discord And let me tell you 24 hours later. I'm really loving it So we'll get into the plus and minus is a little bit But I'm on discord right now. We'll have the links to both of our communities I don't is yours open you have to purchase from your course no mine So mine is only it's invite only and it's only four people who have purchased a course and I so I I Have hired someone shout out to AJ He sort of holds down the fort in the slack channel and helps people with whatever issues They have but like it would be like out of control if I were to let even the freak like my JavaScript 30 has over 300,000 people have signed up for that so it would it would be too much to support to give away support for that And it would also just take away from the people who have paid for a course So I'm currently only having but I guess like the other side I just say is that like also the community helps each other a lot like it's not just me and AJ It's primarily the community members helping each other out because everybody's at a different point So I guess that that would help there as well But currently just though private only in slack we should also say that discord is kind of like slack But it's it was initially started with what like gaming and it's just faster and free Yeah, and how does it work do you like do you host your own server?
Like I often see like a lot of youtubers now say that oh, I'm a discord server now That just means that you have a wicker room. So yeah, yeah So unlike slack where you have a new account for every single team you stand up for which honestly is one of the worst things about Right, right. It's a billion accounts. You do the magic link thing and it's like you're a different login.
Yeah, I've like 40 Yeah, every conference I've ever been to yeah, it's annoying So this you maintain one account and then you can sign up for as many different channels. I guess they're brooms I don't know what they're called so I guess they're just called servers right you sign up for as many servers as you you want So I'm in a few different servers right now like I'm in the official view one. I'm in the official spelt one I'm in one for react people. I'm in one to watch hockey games So a few different ones and yeah, so in those regards It's a little bit different, but it feels very much like they took slack and they were like alright What does slack do well and what the slack do badly for you know larger open communities rather than closed teams, right?
So I guess let's get into it with like some of the first topics here that were the first categories right for building communities You largely have a few different options right you have at least chat options Which are largely the two big ones would be slack and discord or the really the two biggest chat ones obviously There's IRC which has been around for ages and ages But I don't know who's really actively joining a lot of IRC rooms and now at the moment, right? They've sort of been superseded by these new fancier chat applications I was on a bunch of RC channels back in the day and I had a lot of bouncer Which would keep you logged in like if you wanted if you as soon as you closed your laptop You would be logged out and you wouldn't be able to see the like chat history from before so yeah IRC is cool, but that ship has sailed Yeah, what what service did you use to to use IRC like did you use an app or yeah? I used an app called linkiness mm-hmm and Yeah, that was it was pretty cool And then I ran my own bouncer on like a digital ocean server interesting which is funny Like I initially got into like writing bots in JavaScript for IRC. That was really fun to do I learned a lot of API's doing that there's so many cool things about IRC I also let into my first encounter with community members who are rude to you Learning Django and I was like hey, what's up with this?
This a doc. Yeah, I followed the official getting started documentation and like step two just let out doesn't work They're like oh yeah, that's out of date. Okay. Well, that's good for getting started, you know So good good good good point gets you know status for that from you trying to learn this thing So they were not very nice to me.
Let's go ahead and talk about the next one though Which is a forum based obviously we're gonna get into the pros and cons needs a little bit more definitely But forum based would be more indexable right there are findable by Google. They're better to be searched They're maybe slower communication. It's on this rapid fire chats just sort of rapid fire real-time communication And the big option there right now is really discourse discourse is sort of the new take on forums I should also say there's another big sort of big option their spectrum I'm not particularly a huge fan of spectrum, but obviously nothing against them I just don't think it's right for the type of community that I'm trying to build There's also old school type of forums like BB forum whatever stuff which in 2020 I don't know and then things like Facebook groups, okay Let's talk about the pros and cons of slack and discord in the chat options because as we mentioned the forum based their indexable They're searchable whatever and then chat options are faster real-time, but they're not indexable But in depth with slack and discord in my mind the pros of slack are just that it's an excellent product is well-made It has a lot of features the chat features These stuff there is really super good the embeds all that stuff is really good the cons would be cons would be for me something That's a pro yeah, threads. I hate threads.
I hate to I hate threads so much. I'm glad you said that it's so Frigging the UI is like I can if I'm in one thread great And I like the I guess the flip side did not using threads also sucks because if you have two conversations going on at once It's just jumbled but like the UI sucks for threads and you get lost and if there's a thread from like two days ago There's no way else yet I realize there's a button on slack, but I never go back and check it I have the hardest time finding like when I have a little number that says oh you miss a message I have the hardest time finding where that message is I'm missing I don't know if it's just me I'm missing something in the interface, but either way Yeah threads are not a feature for me like people say yeah, but discord doesn't have threads. Yeah, good. Thank you And then the last you know the other con for me is really the sign up is a giant paint in the but it is just Couldn't be any any more obtuse with the amount of logins you need to have yeah How impossible it would be to have any sort of open sign up?
Yes, I get that there's things like slack and you can throw that up I was like now, but yeah, that's that's largely it for me I'm managing a slack well I have like what 30 35,000 people at my slack and managing nothing is hard because like the UI freezes because there's 35,000 people in it And there's like these people that like got the invite but then like never activated it But then six months later tried activated they get into this weird like state where I can't Like you look for the invite and it's not there But then you try to invite them and it's like this person has already been invited and like there's like all these bugs around Managing people and I think that's just because it's not what it's for right? It's meant to be for companies of hundreds of people not not thousands, but yeah, it's frustrating But the actual like community I really like slack because it's you get that immediate immediacy people have it open That's that's one thing is I don't want to move to something else where people don't have the app open It's just like custom thing people will let go to it when they're doing the tutorial But then look close it down and if I want to be able to to access people who've taken a specific course or send a message to somebody Who had a problem and it's it's two days later something like that or sometimes I'll get an email and I'll say Oh, I can let me check if they're on slack and the good thing about slack is that people are on it and people have it open Right and you're able to get in there really quickly Yeah, that is a one of the actually is one of the big things that I noticed when I was doing a pros and cons People would say well, I already have slack open for all of my team So I'm yeah slack that's going to be the one that I think we should stick on and that definitely is a thing But to me like is that a good reason to stick on something that is inferior? Maybe sure I don't know I have I think since joined enough discord communities in the past few months that I feel like I have Discord open as much as slack now because I use it for enough of different different communities and different, you know Ways of chatting that to me it's become sort of that same sort of system So I understand it's not the same for everybody and a lot of people haven't used discord before and I feel really kind of weird With it and you don't want to alienate anyone in your community I didn't you know, it seems like I made that that jump pretty rashly But to be honest it's something I've been contemplating for a really really really long time So the next one like we said is discord there's open signups you can have private rooms the permission system is infinitely better You can set varying different levels of roles and permissions to give people different access and whatever I found there's some really cool stuff where you can stream within discord so you can stream yourself type, you know Doing VS code live coding stuff within discord itself. That's me is all very exciting like that We're slack on that one sure they video chat, but it's not really made for broadcasting kind of stuff There's also a lot of like just sort of general next gen slack features It's like they took a lot of the ideas that you have in slack and up them up a little bit like your channels Right your channels are now organized into different groupings and it seems way more organized in the per-level permissions for each channel It seems a little bit more well thought out.
It does seem like they took the ideas specifically ripped it off And then we're like alright What we do make this a little bit more fun and a little bit more open some of the content would be that less people have it Maybe I guess but that was something we talked about with slap, but nowadays it is becoming more and more popular It is maybe a little bit more busy in the interface. I don't know if it really is it looks nice One of the things that I don't like is that by default well, I simultaneously like and don't like this but the default you're subscribed to all of the channels So when I create a level of tutorials one you are automatically subscribed you fitness and gaming and music and sports and parenting and whatever And it's not like you have to go hunt those out So it's good that you don't have to go hunt and find them to know that they even exist But it's sort of annoying if you aren't really interested in getting updates to some of those and you are seeing them What about pricing so one thing was lack is that it's a they charge you based on active people So I'm just looking at my stats now There's 42,000 people in mind but only 1800 of those are active right in the last week only 1800 people have actually used that use the chat Room that those other people are just they took a course and they haven't haven't jumped back into it just for whatever reason So even at that though, that's $16,000 a month if I were to pay for it Wow, so like what about discord? Yeah, so there's this really interesting In my mind, it's like a community focused pricing. So sure you can you can pay a bunch in unlike extra features But that's really what it is.
It's just extra features for the server So I don't know I haven't spent enough time with us to really know how searching far back goes But it doesn't look like any of these extra features are really based around how many messages are saved So I still need to figure out like and slack is all about how many messages back in history you have and things like that And those actual things but this there's like different levels to your server level one perks include an additional 50 server emojis 120 128 kbs audio audio quality an animated server icon custom server invite background 7 20 60 FPS go live streams And then there's a level two and a level three and the cool thing is is that members of your community who are subscribing to Discord already can gift your server what are called? What are these called boosts they can gift your server boosts and it will boost your server adding to these features So for instance, I had two really amazing community members give my server two boosts already and it opened up the level one perks for me And a level of tutorial hasn't paid anything for that now We are going to be boosting this for ourselves just to open up some of these features for everybody But it seems like a really interesting pay model. Yeah, it's hundred bucks a year and it doesn't seem like it's limited by how many people are on it, right? I'm not paying anything for it.
Oh, you mean for level I'm looking like if you want everything everything the most you could spend is a hundred bucks a year sure or ten bucks a month That's amazing. Like that's great. Like you could do that I'm still diving in and to be entirely honest I'm still very much of a noob of this thing, but in my time on it managing this already I'm just really really into it. I'm very excited about it So cool.
We have a syntax room there too if you want to jump on and talk about syntax. There's a syntax room within the level up discord I will share that in the show notes. All right Let's talk about forum based ones because these are really interesting options A lot of people ask me about why didn't you go with a forum based solution? They're searchable.
They're indexable all that stuff that you'd want yeah within maybe some things and this is a maybe a tougher one Because I just don't I feel like a forum based situation is more difficult to moderate that stuff is there people start a new thread when they don't need to a chat It's just so communicative or whatever. There's less work that I have to do to assign somebody to moderate it Yeah, there's a lot of work in moderating a forum and also you you don't get that immediacy every time I'm put with a forum I'm just like should I really post this or should I just wrap it? You know like is this worthy of posting and that's what that's what spectrum I think was trying to solve the fact that tech forums and tech chat Both are missing something because I do get back messages on my slack don't ask me how I got that but You like it sucks It's not like google searchable and I would love to have those things show up in google results because like who wouldn't want the search engine juice of 40,000 people posting some things like that right and spectrum was it was kind of doing that So they were like kind of forum meets chat and they were working really hard at that and it looks or it doesn't look like it happened GitHub awesome and it seems like the development has sort of stopped and I've asked the developers behind it I'm like what are you doing at github because I so badly need the perfect solution to my problem and they say we can't tell you I bet I bet you know I was working on the holy grail of chat meets GitHub issues meets forum software. I hope so let me tell you though I really hope Nothing against anybody who worked on spectrum because it's an excellent product for what it does But I really do not want to have a spectrum for a community I just don't like it like again.
Nothing against anybody. It's just not for me the notifications are a total mess I get a good email from spectrum no matter how many times I told them I don't want you to send me an email I will still get an email from spectrum I had to put them on my spam list because it's just like it was totally impossible to end of the spam coming from spectrum And also I just didn't find it very navigatable. It's really hard to find. Yeah, I think they're sort of the general chat I just found it very difficult to parse and find it whatever it feels too impersonal impersonal yes Feels too impersonal while not necessarily like there's the less immediacy that you get from a forum but at the same time None of the I don't know I just don't like it.
I'm sorry So here at case in point I very heavily use next and Apollo on slack I was in there all the time chatting people meeting people and how many times have I posted to next and Apollo since they moved to spectrum never I don't know why but it's just it's just something's missing there And I'm not there and maybe it's because I don't have the chat open or maybe it's because I feel like there's nobody here right now That will actually be able to help me. So maybe I'll just post it on twitter instead It doesn't feel like a community it feels like hey, this is like a crappy or get-out issue where it's not tied to actual code Yeah, that's just my thoughts again and nothing against this is an excellent product But it's just not for me and there's also like the old school forums option which you know All that that software's probably pretty jank at this point You'd have to imagine it's an easy way to get hacked because there's probably like a billion people looking to exploit that Yeah, there's some I don't know if that's necessarily true It's it's still actively being developed and I'm sure which one pretty issues Well, like I think probably the one that you're talking about is like what PHP BB or V Bulletin Yeah, PHP BB is still actively being developed because their website does not look like it. Oh really? I'm so sorry PHP BB.
Oh, no, this look like yeah, there's there's some nice ones in there's no BB That's that's being developed But like again though the reasons why we don't want to form is because of it doesn't have that immediacy that chat does Yeah, so again, I guess they're still actively being developed. I take back what I say. I'm still not gonna use it Yeah, next thing is the facebook groups which you know, facebook groups can get absolutely massive There are some hugely massive facebook groups I'm not gonna use it because they're exclusive to facebook users and in my experience facebook is becoming a bit of a ghost town and Just there are large groups, but it is it's not inclusive enough for me, right? You gotta have a facebook to get in there and yeah, that that comes with a lot of stuff It's facebook.
You just have to say that I'm part of a couple like there's really good WordPress groups on there I'm part of a couple for LTE modems and things like that and anytime you have a very obscure question about this very obscure modem Somebody will answer you within 20 minutes and it's amazing because like that the mediacy is there And you can see like the actual people behind it, but after I don't know after three or four replies Everything gets lost because you're just in these tiny little replies There's no formatting for code or anything like that and it's not indexable on google which sucks So like it's effectively gone so that's the benefit. Yeah, that's a benefit of a forum Right plus like I don't want to put myself on facebook Like the last thing I want to do is be spending any more time on facebook than I have to so yeah I sort of mourn when these amazing groups are facebook groups because of how much amazing information Like if you if you think about like if you search for something about like a car or anything like that You'll often find posts from like a forum from 15 years ago with some photo bucket images by the way Which got next yeah, and I was like how amazing is that this has been preserved? Totally like you think facebook is gonna preserve the post I made last week about them modem No way that's that's effectively thrown in the garbage and and will anybody be able to find it too? Yeah, not even in the spirit of the internet.
So yeah facebook car Yeah, it is a bit that is the thing that you don't think about it It's really just that those google juice that comes from that stuff It really really can help another option there is reddit reddit is a good option Um because you get the forum type thing there is really good indexing But reticus can become a bit of a toxic hellhole. Um, so yeah, that's a whole thing too Yeah, I spent I spent a decent amount of time on reddit at least in um certain reddit that are moderated Well, for instance shan swix swix Yeah, he moderates the react. Yes one and he does a great job and therefore because he does a great job And because he set up that community to be so nice it feels different than a lot of other reddit communities can sometimes feel where everybody just Flames each other until infinity. Yeah, I I think if you create your own community on reddit You're not necessarily gonna be inviting in the angry people.
Yes, certainly just boot them It's all about moderation. Yeah, I nabbed the rwes boss Which you should probably grab our level up tuts just in case someone were to grab it and like i've been thinking like that I kind of like reddit like I often find myself searching for something and i'll just append reddit on the end Oh likewise. Yeah, get a lot of good. What does that mean that appending it?
By appending it means like give me real true people's Insights right like don't give me some like form software where it's like just a reply from the people who own it saying like please contact us or something Like that like real people are on reddit. So I don't I'm definitely still considering using a reddit But I don't think that it is it though. So we'll see yeah, I in the chat on reddit sucks I don't know anybody who's using that but yeah because it exists, but it's not very good the chat sucks Yeah, it's funny like I think like discord is the chat of reddit like I think like read it probably missed a huge opportunity there Yeah, where like they could have been the red or maybe they would even buy them at some point, you know Yeah, right. Yeah, right that would have been the perfect I think connection there because that's where I've mostly heard about discord more than anywhere else is Feel reddit.
I think yeah, it's funny how people have to go off of reddit to get more immediacy Yeah, right which is like reddit if you you refresh the new incoming post there's always something new that's pretty immediate But yeah, it's it's not quite at the level of immediacy that you get from something like this So yeah, very interesting I think there's some other options too that you could consider communities such as like a comment systems and anything like youtube comment systems in YouTube could largely be seen as a community But it's largely sort of like a one-way community somebody's like yelling at you via video and then everybody else is just sort of chatting at the bottom Flaming each other and being awful and that doesn't really feel like a community to me I think that some people would say that is and maybe the people who are excellent at attending in video in that kind of way Could do it really well But as somebody who's spent a lot of time on youtube, I just don't I don't see that as necessarily being a community That seems like a dictator in a bunch of underlings or something Yeah, one more thing I should say is one kind of thing I'm working on right now is notes like community source notes for each video So it's like often sometimes They'll be like a little mistake in the video and someone will jump into the chat and they'll be like three people immediately like oh The fix is this and then I have to go back and update the video But like like what if the notes were immediately underneath the video that said like oh if you accidentally type this or this is wrong Or just like little things that you get tripped up in a video There's notes will immediately below it So that's something that it's almost not I'm really excited about it because like also I'm I often watch stuff or like a youtube video and I'll hit a bump and then I'll just go in the comments and write what the solution was Right like that's the first thing you go for so like it would be cool to have community notes as well So they're like markdown based they'll be on github so people can edit them if they want to add something themselves So I'm excited about that. Yeah, and we uh we added comments to level up tutorials for pros and they should be I it's the thing I wrestle with whether or not that should be available to everybody But again, that's what we largely do is if community source notes if people notice something that they ran into a bug with a version And then we added the ability to pin the comments I mean it's our own comment system largely written by eric sartorius on our team and because of that we can add any feature We want to it. We want to add pinning. Okay pinning's in there it is.
You know, that's great It gives you that sort of freedom, but again, it's a little bit more of a slog to get it going So that said I'm on discord currently I don't I was on slack forever and ever and ever and so I don't intend on seeing the community move at any given point in the near future here So don't feel like I'm gonna be moving it if you want to check out chat about uh syntax episodes We have all sorts of stuff on here. Um, this is sorry a general little advertisement for my slack community But we have like code helps. Yes, that's JavaScript react media or whatever Uh design help design inspiration musicians parenting sports gaming fitness all that fun stuff. So if that sounds like you Well, I think it's description.
I just wanted to chat a little bit about these communities. My head's definitely been in the space majorly Well, all right. I think that's it. Thanks for tuning in and we will catch you on Wednesday.
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