[HN Gopher] Against Discord Channels
___________________________________________________________________
Against Discord Channels
Author : bb010g
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-11-06 08:19 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (becca.ooo)
(TXT) w3m dump (becca.ooo)
| dimgl wrote:
| I actually disagree with this. I have a Telegram group where I
| talk amongst friends and I constantly find myself not caring
| about certain topics that I wish were in their own channel. With
| Discord I don't have to worry about that. I only discuss what I
| like to discuss in the relevant channels and if someone decides
| they wanna check it out, they can too. You can also set
| notifications per channel and completely mute the topics you
| don't care about.
|
| I think this is more of a problem with organization. Too many
| channels can introduce some redundancy. For me this is especially
| relevant in the Unreal Slackers Discord. There are so many
| channels and some of the topics overlap, so sometimes I have a
| hard time picking which channel to message.
| keithnz wrote:
| I'm on a number of tech discords, and an Atheist discord, and we
| use discord for work.... to me, the channels seem good. Usually
| there are generic channels, and then specific ones, some channels
| end up dead, but kind of doesn't matter. Mostly I find it pretty
| effective for finding conversations I want to be part of.
| vkoskiv wrote:
| > discord servers are usually social spaces; I'm more interested
| in the people in them than the particular topics they're talking
| about.
|
| I'm more interested in the topics. That's why I went to that
| discord server and that channel. To go read about that topic.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I have a lot of negative vibes about discord, it feels like
| this generation sucked up all the grandiose web ideas and tried
| to retrofit them onto html5 IRC. So many servers are so strict
| about no talking something somewhere, so serious, so ban
| happy.. as if their life is an encyclopedia to create convo by
| convo, all making their little wikipedia page.
|
| Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.
| Fnoord wrote:
| IRC had networks and channels like that as well. A good rule
| of thumb is: the bigger the social group, the stricter the
| rules.
|
| My worry about Discord is the same worry as Android (though I
| am early adopter of both): its free as in beer, but we pay
| with our privacy. Sure, Ventrilo sucked as well given it was
| very strict and you could not run it on your own server plus
| high latency but low memory footprint. But we also had things
| like TeamSpeak and Mumble. These were alright, except it
| wasn't standardized, so you might need a different client per
| community. Its the standardization which abstracts the user
| experience, akin to people going to a site via Google or
| where the internet is Facebook.
| fny wrote:
| Do you remember how popular AIM was? This is their proboards
| and AIM wrapped in one. Plus it's easy to use, customizable,
| and incredibly interoperable.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Is it interoperable when you don't have an account with the
| Discord company?
| agumonkey wrote:
| proboards ?
|
| I don't really mind about customization and ease (i mean
| it's just a chat). Again I feel like they're overdoing and
| overbelieving in the current paradigm. All this to have
| nitro emojis and short lived things.
| Jach wrote:
| Power-tripping mods aren't anything new.
|
| My main beef with Discord servers turning into this decade's
| forums is a lot of useful info is locked up and not
| discoverable by search engines.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Can you use a bot to extract conversations into external
| website?
| jeffchien wrote:
| Not sure about tech, but for pop culture like games, I
| blame that partially on Wikia/Fandom. I would not wish the
| horror of scrolling through Wikia websites on a phone upon
| my worst enemies. It's a lot easier to write and view
| useful information in Discord.
| nullwarp wrote:
| > My main beef with Discord servers turning into this
| decade's forums is a lot of useful info is locked up and
| not discoverable by search engines.
|
| This to me is by far the worst part of Discord. I'm in a
| few game mod specific Discord's and there is tons of info
| in them, but it's so hard to find and get to it might as
| well not even exist.
| city41 wrote:
| I reluctantly accepted a Discord server for my project as
| my users demanded it. Now the people who help out on the
| project do so in Discord and I hate it. I have to
| constantly copy the info into a Github issue or discussion
| otherwise it's pretty much impossible to find again as it
| scrolls up. There's also a ton of noise in between the
| contributing comments. I think I'm going to push back and
| leave the Discord server and tell people to please use
| Github instead for contributions.
| loo wrote:
| You probably have more people contributing on Discord
| than you'd have just on Github. Maybe 2, 3 or more times
| as many.
|
| Discord tends to be social in a way Github is not, with
| lower friction to contribute. And perhaps even a better
| asynchronous model.
|
| I don't discount your frustrations. Maybe a bot that can
| create GH issues from Discord would help. With rights to
| use it spread liberally around the community.
|
| Tell people you need help getting data into Github, give
| them a bot so they don't have to context switch, and
| they'll probably surprise you.
| city41 wrote:
| You're probably right on the increased contributions.
| It's definitely a case of pros and cons. I'll look into
| bots, that's a good idea.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| To me, Github is a code repository and Discord is
| synchronous chat. I personally find both Github and
| Discord to be much harder platforms to extract
| information and ask questions than wikis, fourms and
| subreddits.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Now the people who help out on the project do so in
| Discord and I hate it. I have to constantly copy the info
| into a Github issue or discussion otherwise it's pretty
| much impossible to find again as it scrolls up. There's
| also a ton of noise in between the contributing comments.
|
| This is one of the reasons I prefer Zulip to Discord. You
| get more organization by default, with all conversations
| happening in threads with subjects, and a tendency to
| create new threads for new topics. I can actually _find_
| information in conversations long afterwards, and cross-
| link to useful Zulip threads from GitHub or elsewhere.
| theelous3 wrote:
| just copy a link to the discussion and add a pr template
| that grants a blanket read only invite
| agumonkey wrote:
| People keep saying this but even on my worst IRC days I've
| never encountered that much petty-kingdom feeling. Maybe
| freenode was its own bubble I don't know. On IRC there's
| this vibe that you don't own anything. You just joined a
| room first, or someone gave you mod capabilities but it was
| very freeform in nature.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I invite you to read this article:
| https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-
| otte.... I suspect that the ban-happy communities you're
| seeing is the result of the otters being dominant on those
| particular servers, and trying to keep the server focused.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Maybe find different servers? I have never been banned from
| anything on discord.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| You're describing my experience with IRC in maybe 2001 and
| what discouraged me from returning.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Well well, interesting. My theory is sinking :)
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| That's kind of a solved issue. Every message board had a bunch
| of subforums for offtopic discussions. Besides a few popular or
| tangentially-relevant threads it usually was a boring slow-burn
| or just chaos.
| causi wrote:
| Seconding that. There is no lack of servers and channels
| dedicated to general discussion. Stop trying to turn my topic
| channel into your Facebook page.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I run a small social Discord with about 15 people, probably 10
| active.
|
| Looking at our discord: General, Destiny, Minecraft, Minecraft
| server A, Minecraft server B.
|
| No one's too fussy about what goes where, but it's just useful to
| have channels as the context.
| TheFreim wrote:
| The mistake people make when they grow discord channels is
| trying to preemptively create channels for situations where
| they don't yet have the volume to utilize. Creating channels
| should almost always be reactionary, not proactive, in my
| opinion.
| badwolf wrote:
| I run a local social group discord with ~1k people. This was
| something I learned pretty quickly. Folks will ask for some
| channel, and then it sits there collecting dust and
| tumbleweeds. Really it comes down to server owners/mods being
| good curators of the group.
| markshepard wrote:
| The way we use airsend (https://www.airsend.io) as team space
| (group the channels to team) and separate channels for high
| activity topics/projects. We don't need to hop different servers
| (discord) to get the information and context. For instance, we
| have an austin astronomy channel in airsend (just one channel.
| Instead of creating multiple channels). Encourages high fidelity,
| contextual information in the same channel space (chat,
| voice/video calls, files, actions and wiki). Airsend solves quite
| a few valid discord criticisms described here.
| iamevn wrote:
| What I have found works for the couple discords I'm in with
| friends is a general discussion channel that 90% of activity is
| in, maybe a channel to post links/images relevant to voice chat
| if that comes up enough to clog up the general channel, and then
| a handful of random channels for things that have consistent
| discussion and which not everyone is interested in. Everything
| but the main channel can be assumed to be muted for everyone.
|
| It's important to not be at all strict about what channel
| discussion for whatever topic actually happens in, it's easier
| for people who don't want to see a topic to just scroll past on
| the occasional times when people post in the wrong channel.
|
| I think it's not so much about cordoning things off but instead
| about not having people needing to scroll past a bunch of stuff
| they don't care about. The thread feature is neat and while I've
| mainly used it to post a bunch of images without spamming a
| channel, I could definitely see it being useful as a first step
| if we're not sure if something really needs its own real channel.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Is the general discussion channel the main channel that is not
| muted? Where 90% of activity is happening? Or something
| different?
| 4ad wrote:
| Channels are bad enough (for the reason explained in the post),
| but slack _threads_ (also available now on discord) are another
| level of evil.
| delusional wrote:
| > but we must be careful to organize with a purpose, especially
| when we're organizing social spaces and the discussions within
| them.
|
| That's an interesting take which I'm going to try and use to
| examine how I organize my life. Maybe the labels I attach to
| actives to interests is somehow limiting my interaction with
| them, or the world in general.
| julianlam wrote:
| > * discord just doesn't scale well, because it lacks good
| threading and discussion-organizing features and that's okay, for
| the most part, because it's an instant messaging app, not a
| customer support forum, not a wiki, not a documentation
| repository, not a zulip, etc.
|
| Sure, but tell that to all of the gaming forums that got sunset
| in favour of discord because discord "is the place gamers go", or
| because they don't want to invest in content moderation.
|
| Think of the years of lost accessible content, gone forever, now
| locked behind a walled garden that only ever treats content as
| ephemeral discussion that goes stale as soon as it is uttered.
|
| I declare a conflict of interest in this post: I make forum
| software :)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I miss forums. Even used to run one myself. And I think they
| will come back, because they are better able to support slower,
| more thoughtful discussions.
|
| But I also think there's a reason the pendulum swung away from
| them. For a social space, that aspect of permanence is a
| double-edged sword. It also means that your embarrassing
| moments are preserved for all posterity, and probably even
| Googleable. That creates some baseline anxiety in some people
| who are aware of that phenomenon, and I suspect that that is a
| part of the reason why flamewars were more common back in the
| day.
|
| But, perhaps more insidiously, that permanence can become an
| engine of gatekeeping. It was so frustrating to watch the old
| guard on the forum I read unwittingly chase away newcomers with
| their endless links to old discussions. They thought they were
| being helpful. What they were trying to say is, "Here's some
| content that might interest you." But what was being heard was,
| "We don't need to talk about this thing you want to talk about
| because we've talked about it 4 times already."
|
| And so a new generation of people naturally gravitated toward
| places where those sorts of things don't - can't - happen.
| drawqrtz wrote:
| While I agree with many of the points I think it's hard to
| generalize like channel = bad. It does make sense to have topic
| based channels for more specialized topics and some for more
| generalized socialising. It is a fine line though and better less
| channels than too many.
| Graffur wrote:
| I don't get Discord at all. It's like a bad chat room. From my
| experience, either the chat moves too fast to be useful or no-one
| replies which is also not useful. It feels spammy, has lots of
| notifications and overlays that I don't care about.
| agd wrote:
| As a gamer, Discord is great for small/medium social
| communities where chat is meant to be ephemeral and fleeting,
| and where voice is important. This is what Discord was designed
| for and it works great.
|
| The problem is that Discord is increasingly being adopted by
| communities where voice isn't used and where ephemeral chat
| isn't helpful. E.g. All these crypto discord communities where
| it's impossible to find out what's going on unless you check
| the channel 24/7. A traditional forum would work much better
| for most of these cases.
|
| The fact that Discord are trying to grow aggressively pre-IPO
| isn't helping.
| borepop wrote:
| Agreed. I've tried several times to use Discord and find the
| entire experience to be a clunky, spammy mess. The interface is
| awful.
| gren236 wrote:
| My friends and me use Discord channels as virtual "rooms".
| Therfore, we can imagine our server as a home full of people and
| traverse between rooms to find people you are interested to talk
| with at the moment. Works even better for voice channels.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| You should be against discord to begin with. Channels are just a
| part of it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I agree, and think there can be a balance. Channels have their
| place but should be very high-level. Instead of channels for
| specific topics, they should be more like ye olde web forum
| sections (ex. general, funny, news, regional, help).
|
| This is why I've given up on Slack and Discord servers for
| technical communities. They all have individual channels for
| every conceivable topic, and are painful to read as a result.
| Perhaps such sectioning off would make sense if a server had
| extremely high traffic, but I've found this to rarely be the
| case. It could be just another instance of premature
| optimization.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This was painful to read.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| > but do you really want to draw borders around a fixed and
| unmoving set of allowed topics
|
| Much more so than most people using IM, it seems!
|
| If you can't really search and index relevant bits of information
| due to the nature of the system, at least it should be properly
| localized. Lose that and it becomes noise.
|
| > and in that case, more channels is just more places to click
| before i can find the discussion
|
| ...and otherwise it's more scrolling in fewer places?
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| This really feels like a renaissance of the issues people had
| with nascent web forums at the time, where one of the most
| insidious and subtle killers was overzealous creation of
| subforums would actually serve to stifle discussion.
|
| Everything old is new again, I guess?
| nerdponx wrote:
| This, exactly. I'm astounded that people think it's some kind
| of attention-hacking conspiracy.
| indymike wrote:
| Mega-thread vs. subforum, the debate still rages.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I'm thinking of one particular discord server where there was a
| small group of interested contributors. Then the creator split
| it into dozens of subchannel categories that I suppose they
| thought made sense. It was overwhelming and felt like too much
| work just to figure out where you needed to chat. Most of the
| channels saw no activity at all, and interest in the server
| died.
|
| What you do instead is start with one channel about the topic
| of interest. If people start talking so much about "alternative
| topic b" that it interferes with the main topic, then (and only
| then) do you splinter it off to its own channel.
|
| People can then mute that channel and boost the signal that
| they came there for. But it has to come from a genuine need.
|
| My other pet peeve is when people get gung-ho over moving a
| currently active discussion to the "correct" channel. More
| times than not, it's too much trouble and just kills a
| discussion that would have otherwise been interesting and
| fruitful.
| eqmvii wrote:
| I fought this battle and lost many times. More sub forums just
| means fewer eyeballs on any given topic...
| infinitezest wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Discord in terms of the tools that it has and
| even the implementation in a lot of cases. I really like the fact
| that it marries text, voice, and video in a way that is fairly
| seamless. I say this putting all complaints about performance and
| occasional unreliability to the side.
|
| Of course I would much prefer an open source and decentralized
| solution whenever possible. I'd really like to see Matrix/Element
| take off but at the moment it doesn't feel as polished.
| jokoon wrote:
| Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10
| subchannels. It quickly becomes impossible to follow up. It seems
| it's by design, it's another attempt of attention hacking.
|
| Not to mention discords also has weird subchannels like "movies"
| or other specific subject, inviting people to atomize their
| conversations, conversations that already exists elsewhere.
|
| The actual worst thing about discord, is that you cannot have a
| list of favorite channels. You spend time to mute mute mute
| channels and servers. It's almost designed to encourage users to
| just explore and read conversations they have no interest in.
|
| Discord "servers" are not even servers in the classic meaning of
| the word. When software starts changing the language, you know
| something is wrong.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think it's because a discord server is trying to model a
| group of friends rather than a topic. The point of the movies
| subchannel is not just discussing movies. It's about
| socializing with your friends by discussing movies.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10
| subchannels. It quickly becomes impossible to follow up. It
| seems it's by design, it's another attempt of attention
| hacking.
|
| The most effective Discords I'm in have 1-5 channels.
|
| They're also effective because everyone is there for a reason:
| Either to keep in touch with a specific group of people, or to
| discuss a specific topic.
|
| There seems to be an entirely different class of Discord where
| people are trying to create an entire community. These balloon
| into monstrosities with 10-100 different channels ranging from
| on-topic to off-topic. I have no interest in keeping up with
| all of the different channels or people coming and going.
|
| In the worst case I've seen, an initially helpful Slack was
| split into over 500 different channels for every possible
| topic. Every time someone tried to start a conversation,
| several people would jump in to tell the person "there's a
| channel for that". The person would join the channel, see that
| there were only 4 people in it, and give up. I left when it
| felt like 50% of the discussions were about policing which
| topics could be discussed in which channel.
|
| In the larger discords, the conversations seem to be dominated
| by a small fraction of chronically online users who involve
| themselves in every conversation. It's very clearly a
| replacement for social interaction at that point. A lot of
| these seem to spring up in conjunction with people building
| e-mail lists and trying to amass Twitter followers.
| junon wrote:
| Right click a sever, click Mute Server. Never had any issues
| with this. I don't particularly like discord but I don't buy
| this argument.
| Kiro wrote:
| > Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10
| subchannels
|
| Yes, we did exactly that back in the day by running our own IRC
| server. I don't see what the problem is, nor do I understand
| the arguments in this article. Very uncompelling imo.
| theelous3 wrote:
| While I don't disagree with the spirit of most of this, some
| exceptions.
|
| 1. Server is used in the "classic" meaning of the word as it
| relates to online gaming. It's an old use of the term that
| probably predates about half the userbase on hn.
|
| 2. I doubt it's intentional. I don't think a lack of features
| is cause for an attention hacking conspiracy. Yes, all of those
| features you mentioned are desirable - but you can get halfway
| there by not having a movies channel to begin with.
|
| Discord has never been a particularly good bit of software.
| That's all there is to it.
| jrm4 wrote:
| For Discord, "server" is a relatable and convenient lie;
| based on IRC, of course -- I'm simultaneously impressed at
| how good Discord is, it kills pretty much everything else in
| its space, but also am hugely concerned about how centralized
| it is.
|
| I want to say it's "disappointing" how they use "server," but
| it was probably a necessary fiction.
| thrashh wrote:
| Based off IRC?
|
| Did you mean TeamSpeak/Ventrilo? Discord was a direct
| replacement for voice servers used in gaming communities.
| Not IRC.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Discord is indeed "not particularly good". It is an Electron
| app, for starts. But overall, I didn't find better elsewhere.
| I find it works better than Slack and Teams, it has both
| usable text and voice, with a persistant history, which makes
| more usable than open alternatives like IRC or Mumble, or
| even the pervious gamer oriented voice apps like Ventrilo or
| TeamSpeak. Microsoft had MSN messenger, then Skype that
| weren't that bad, but they messed up.
|
| So, not perfect, but good enough.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Telegram has all of the above + native desktop clients
| (built on top of Qt).
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Except it doesn't have people. shame.
| ushakov wrote:
| and no money to sustain itself
| lrvick wrote:
| Try Matrix. Open source, decentralized, and end to end
| encryption for privacy.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by the "classic" meaning of
| "server". Typically that list of servers in online games was
| actually a list of different physical locations you could
| connect to. Each one was a different server, a different
| physical computer. Some were hosted by the company that made
| the game, and some were hosted by the community.
| theelous3 wrote:
| The general meaning of "server" as it relates to the world
| of gaming is; an instance of the application that more than
| one person can exist within at the same time.
|
| It doesn't matter how temporally limited it is, it doesn't
| matter if it's on dedicated hardware or not, or how many
| "servers" are sharing that hardware. It doesn't even have
| to be on a different machine.
|
| > Typically that list of servers in online games was
| actually a list of different physical locations you could
| connect to.
|
| And? If you saw me hosting two cs lobbies from the same
| box, would you stop calling them servers?
| MereInterest wrote:
| The key was that it didn't matter which hardware was
| hosting the game. You connect to that server, which may
| be from similar locations, or may be hosted by the
| community. Calling it as a "server" had the implication
| that it wasn't necessarily the game publisher that was
| running the server.
| fragmede wrote:
| Yes but did we stop calling them servers when publishers
| stopped letting us run our own; accessible outside of
| their matchmaking process?
| maxsilver wrote:
| The "gaming classic" meaning of "server" is a dedicated
| hosted instance of a software. It's from
| late-90s/early-2000s era LAN party lingo, stuff like,
| "let's get a game of Quake going, start up a server" or
| similar.
|
| A single "server" (one physical computing machine) could
| have hundreds of "servers" (instances of the server-side of
| the game software) running on it. One physical tower PC
| could have "10 Quake Servers", "2 HL2-DM servers", "a Team
| Fortress 2 server", "a Unreal Tournament server" and such
| on it.
|
| Discord originally seemed to be using that era of lan-party
| style language for it's naming conventions. A Discord
| "server" is just an instanced section of the server-side of
| the Discord software, and not specifically related to any
| real-world physical machine.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| The thing about game servers though is that you could run
| them yourself and typically choose where to do so. On
| your PC during a LAN party? Sure. On an always-on VPS?
| Sure. But wherever it was, you were always able to run it
| yourself, even if you ultimately might have paid someone
| else to run it. You're just running a server program.
|
| By contrast, only Discord-the-company can run Discord
| servers.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| There are "private servers" made by people other than the
| developers for games that don't release server
| executables or source code. So the remote side being
| named a "server" is independent of whether it is
| available to run(for gamers).
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Yes, but those are typically for games like MMOs where
| the servers are responsible for a large number of
| players. Those are never presented to the user as "your
| server," they're "the game's servers."
|
| Contrast with Discord where there's something of an
| illusion of ownership; people will refer to them as "my
| Discord server."
|
| EDIT: Incidentally, if you're actually running a private
| server for an MMO, I would indeed call that "your
| server."
| fragmede wrote:
| Sure but that hasn't been true since, like, 2003. Many
| games these days (especially popular console games) have
| no such option (despite the existence of a PC port). Only
| the company can "run" "servers" that the built-in (aka
| GameSpy is dead) matchmaking will see. Gone are the days
| that you can feed an IP address and port into a game and
| connect to a friend's instance. There are exceptions that
| prove the rule (Hi Factorio!) but they're rarer and
| rarer, especially if you want a dedicated (no graphics)
| server running. Still, technology has advanced to the
| point that we can run Quake2 in-browser via
| JavaScript+wasm (and I don't mean via a plug-in!), so the
| old ways aren't totally dead.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Sure, but in recent games you also wouldn't talk about
| having "your own server" or joining "a server" - you're
| joining a match or a world or similar. You might refer to
| "the game's servers" if they happen to be down or
| overloaded or something, but it's less common these days
| to talk about a specific server.
|
| The exception, of course, being games for which it is
| actually still possible to run your own servers.
| Minecraft comes to mind.
| MereInterest wrote:
| But it also implies (1) that the server programs are
| independent, and (2) that _I_ could run my own server
| independent of the developer. A Discord "server" is an
| unknown number of programs/services that interact with
| each other while presenting a unified interface. It is
| also entirely in the control of the developer, and I
| cannot run a private server.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Discord has never been a particularly good bit of software
|
| I really don't see how you can say that. How?
| andai wrote:
| You know, I'm glad you asked! I've been looking forward to
| writing these down.
|
| Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts
| restarting the call to work. The calls often die midway
| _without telling you,_ until you realize you 're just
| talking into the void. Tried on multiple devices (including
| mobile), same result.
|
| When I hear a message come in, _I have no way of knowing
| where it came from._ There is an inbox button, but the
| message at the top is not the one that made the sound, and
| the list appears to have some kind of infinite scroll (so
| it isn 't at the bottom either! Or maybe it is but I'm in
| too many servers?). I actually did find a trick for
| identifying what channel a message was in, assuming it's
| part of a busy conversation -- clear the inbox and wait for
| the _next_ one. (If it 's just one message, that doesn't
| work.)
|
| It also logs me out _every single time I visit,_ often just
| hours apart, which I can only assume is intentional, to try
| and get me to download their electron spyware instead of
| using the web version? At least I hope it 's a dark pattern
| and not incompetence, because I'd prefer to believe I live
| in a world where competence is misdirected, than one where
| it is absent.
| junon wrote:
| > Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts
| restarting the call to work
|
| I've never had this happen. If there's anything to praise
| about Discord is that they have one of the best at-scale
| AV chat systems on the planet in my experience, and I've
| used a lot of them.
|
| > appears to have some kind of infinite scroll
|
| No idea what you're talking about. The only thing in
| Discord with infinite scroll is a channel chat frame,
| which isn't where you look for notifications.
|
| > It also logs me out every single time I visit, often
| just hours apart, which I can only assume is intentional
|
| I've literally never had this problem nor have I heard of
| anyone having this problem. Sounds like a browser issue.
| [deleted]
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts
| restarting the call to work. The calls often die midway
| without telling you, until you realize you're just
| talking into the void. Tried on multiple devices
| (including mobile), same result.
|
| YMMV
|
| We specifically switched one group to Discord just
| because the voice/video chat works every single time.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I've never had any of those issues on the desktop or
| phone app, and they're not spyware by any but the most
| overreaching definition.
| andai wrote:
| Ahh, apparently the part where it scans every process you
| have open can be disabled in privacy, it's checked
| locally against a known list of games and the data is
| never uploaded [0]. (But it still quits if you try to
| block the connection?) Still, the very principle is not
| something I am comfortable with. [1]
|
| [0] Why is Discord recording our open programs and
| uploading them? - https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/com
| ments/43lqyb/why_is_d...
|
| [1] Wacom Tablets track every app you open -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247292
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Discord is a social media gaming program, it tracks what
| games you're playing so it can prompt your friends to
| join you in the game. It's not an Office Slack
| replacement which is also spyware, it's a gaming chat
| which grew out into being used by FOSS projects partly
| because it's so good cross-platform and partly because of
| IRC's gradual decline. You can see it happening in the
| always-on user list on the side which shows people are
| "Playing $Game" in their status. It also changes your
| status, visible in the client, I think.
|
| Wacom tablets are a local computer input device. They
| have no business tracking or uploading anything in normal
| use, and you have no expectation or way to notice that
| it's happening.
|
| All of your chat is sent to, and archived by, Discord,
| forever. That's annoying but server-central-not-
| encrypted-chat is their product. If I found all of my
| Discord chat messsages were being copied and uploaded to
| Wacom and archived forever, by a Wacom driver/app, I'd be
| incensed.
| junon wrote:
| Then don't use Discord. It's a gaming chat that is
| intended to be used while gaming as a primary goal of
| their service.
|
| There are a wide variety of reasons to be critical of
| discord (many of them having little to do directly with
| Discord in particular) but the way they go about process
| scanning is unintrusive and pretty typical of similar
| apps, such as Steam, which is actually way more intrusive
| in some cases due to VAC.
| Kiro wrote:
| > Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts
| restarting the call to work.
|
| Sorry but that must be something on your end. Never heard
| anyone with that problem and I'm very very active on
| Discord.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > It also logs me out every single time I visit, often
| just hours apart, which I can only assume is intentional,
| to try and get me to download their electron spyware
|
| Also any discord invite link redirects to discord://
| which of course breaks if you don't have the app
| installed. There's literally zero reasons for that
| behavior as replacing discord:// with discord.com just
| works
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If you replaced the discord protocol with the website
| address, wouldn't that stop it from opening in the client
| for everyone who has the client installed?
| junon wrote:
| I've never had this be a problem.
| Banana699 wrote:
| Not OP, but this rant is too good to miss.
|
| 1- Memory hungry and laggy: 1st one is expected from an
| electron app, but VS code is an electron app (and fairly
| memory hungry) but also works like a charm once startup is
| done.
|
| 2- Network hungry: I literally don't know what it's doing
| with the bandwidth, when zoom and google meets both work
| fine for 50+ people (as far as I saw it) with only the
| occasional cough, why the f* is that 4-person meeting
| lagging and cutting off audio out of nowhere every 3
| minutes ?
|
| 3- General awefulness and user-hostility:
|
| - Updates are always the first thing to do at app startup,
| "f* you user, you don't get to see the UI before I'm
| done!". I have even heard from a friend on windows that the
| app launches at _computer startup_ to fetch updates, even
| after the app 's "launch at startup" was disabled from the
| task manager !, thankfully this never happened with me
| (also windows, but older). What is that weird fetish anyway
| ? the app was working before the updates perfectly fine,
| you would rather block the UI thread for a non-critical
| update ? hijack computer startup (an incredibly annoying
| and slow process especially if the OS is on hard drive) to
| fetch the update that adds that extra dumb colored widget
| to the UI ?
|
| - Discoverability, maybe I'm missing the point a bit since
| discord is about privat groups, but is the search feature
| literally useless ? I swear it has a bunch of hard-coded
| channels for advertisment and replies to any other search
| with "not found". Privacy is compatible with this, you can
| make people ask to join things they find interesting and
| wait for approval from admins, I don't see why you have to
| implement whatsapp's invite-only groups - which makes sense
| only in the context of an addressing scheme based on phone
| numbers as they are inherently invite-only and can't be
| collected and indexed - in a web app. Maybe this is a
| fundamental limitation of IRC somehow ? it just sucks, it's
| the reason I don't use it as anything other than an
| inferior version of a zoom/whatsapp hybrid.
| quartesixte wrote:
| The subset of servers I am in inherently do not want to
| be easily discovered. And I'm in some large servers
| (total members > 25,000). You have to either be in a
| related server, find it from a related subreddit/youtube
| channel/tiktok profile/etc., or be directly invited.
|
| Anecdatally, this seems generally to be a cultural divide
| among demographics where restricting access is not good
| enough for privacy--the mere knowledge of its existence
| is the first barrier (see: teenagers and "finstagrams")
| tobias3 wrote:
| Someone who actually used this and made the transition should
| correct me:
|
| I bet the usage of "server" came from the TeamSpeak world where
| you had to self-host it on your own (dedicated) server.
|
| Of course giving away the hosting for free is going to attract
| users and one doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
| junon wrote:
| Discord is pretty directly based on Slack. Slack had all of
| this first and while the app looks like Slack a bit today it
| _really_ looked like slack a few years ago.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Slack definitely didn't have group voice and video first. I
| think it's more accurate to describe Discord as a mashup of
| TeamSpeak, Slack and Skype.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| My understanding is that "server" was never an official
| discord term -- "Guild" is the official term but the
| community has used "server" so it just stuck.
| loo wrote:
| I know the 'server' term smells bad to anyone who knows better.
|
| But to me, the encouragement to explore / read conversations
| you may have no interest in is a good thing. Just like forums.
|
| The alternative experience on IRC can be stifling. People
| really do atomize their conversations there. And often avoid
| chatting from fear of stepping on someone's disinterested toes,
| or going even slightly off topic.
|
| At least on Discord, ~everyone in a server is present in all of
| the channels.
|
| So relocating a topic isn't "switch to a room with hardly
| anyone in it". It's more like a category move on a forum.
|
| Getting people to join in a new channel on IRC is like pulling
| calcified teeth!
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I can't even log into Discord anymore because they changed their
| authentication method so that you have to provide a phone number.
| But they don't allow IP phone numbers so if you've got a carrier
| like Republic Wireless they disallow you since it's considered an
| IP phone. When I complained about this they basically said change
| carriers. Not interested in doing that and I'm thinking not
| getting into Discord has it's advantages.
| lmm wrote:
| I support channels but agree with a lot of these points. Channels
| are indeed more like a working group than a subject area, and
| should be fluid and temporary things. A lot of servers have too
| many channels. But they are useful when you have a bunch of
| loosely related, overlapping areas that are close enough that you
| don't want separate servers, but distinct enough that you don't
| want them all in one place.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| some more discussion _2 days ago_ :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832
| quartesixte wrote:
| Channels become absolutely necessary once servers hit very large
| user counts. Even "low" large numbers at around 1000 users total
| with 200 actives at any given time result in chaos if there is
| only one text channel. Now imagine a server of 40,000 with many
| more actives (fandom servers will easily hit those numbers).
|
| > "My server is too big to not have channels -- you can't
| usefully stuff a thousand people into a single channel
| productively. (As evidence, look at Twitch streams!)"
|
| GP even admits it themselves.
|
| But >discord just doesn't scale well, because it lacks good
| threading and discussion-organizing features
|
| It's not supposed to. It's an ephemeral chatting app, not a
| forum.
|
| One best practice that I've seen that helps turn a particular
| channel into a forum is to slow-mode the channel with a long
| cooldown. Make the cool-down about 60secs and the nature of
| discussion very quickly changes.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Telegram is an example, see Durov's group when Durov makes an
| announcement, conversation is almost imposible to follow.
| newbamboo wrote:
| I'm sad for those who use discord. It represents all that has
| gone wrong in tech. And fools don't even know better.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I don't know why Discord has replaced a good forum in a lot of
| communities. A subreddit is free too and better for discussion.
| Most people say "Join my Discord to learn more about X" but
| really that information is just pinned at the top of an
| announcements channel. Everything else about that Discord is
| useless for most people. It just serves as a way for the owner to
| @everyone and push a notification out.
|
| My Discord server is just a place for me and a few friends to
| post random stuff and voice chat. That's what it's good for.
|
| Plus, the more Discords you join, the more you get spammed by
| hacked accounts running down the user list. That's another reason
| why I won't join a Discord for every single thing I'm interested
| in. I've never gotten spammed from subscribing to a subreddit or
| joining a forum.
| julianlam wrote:
| My belief is that forum stakeholders do not want to invest in
| content moderation.
|
| Spam posts need to be deleted, content needs to be checked,
| people need to treat each other well.
|
| Contrast to discord, where if you find a spammer, just ban his
| ass. The spam message (or bad content) will already have
| scrolled out of view of most users ...
|
| So it's just cost cutting from up above.
| watwut wrote:
| Most forum stakeholders and moderators do OT for free, in
| their own time. Calling them lazy is absurd. Lazy people
| don't bother running subreddits, discord servers and so on.
| julianlam wrote:
| The moderators sure aren't lazy, I meant the stakeholders
| one step removed.
|
| They see the costs associated with content moderation as
| too steep given the intangible benefits of running said
| forum, and cut the entire thing altogether.
|
| I'll revise my earlier post.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I don't know why Discord has replaced a good forum in a lot
| of communities.
|
| Low friction. Doesn't require any knowledge to get up and
| running so anyone can do it. Doesn't require keeping forum
| software up to date and all that jazz. Single account makes it
| trivial to join new communities, no need to set up yet another
| forum account.
|
| Drag and drop uploads of images, videos etc makes it trivial to
| share content. Want a quick voice chat? No problem, just hop
| into one of the voice channels.
|
| Reddit might have replaced the chat aspect, but they turned
| actively user hostile so not a fun place to be. And no trivial
| way to voice chat with people.
|
| Discord ain't perfect, but there's absolutely a reason why it's
| so popular. Yes it started with gaming but it works so well for
| many other communities.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| You summed up the reason. Recently i opened a Discord and
| Discourse forum to complement a community, both have
| different uses cases. Launching a discord server is hassle
| free with no cost, if you want to upgrade to more features
| just pay Nitro. Discourse you need the know how of installing
| it yourself or pay $100 month from Discourse.org.
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| Forums seemed dead before discord was a thing. I think Reddit
| and Facebook groups killed them off, and discord is what popped
| up after the fact.
| junon wrote:
| Reddit is a pretty blatantly terrible, overreaching, and user
| hostile website. It's not great for realtime communication and
| serves an entirely different purpose.
|
| It's like saying everyone on IRC should instead host a PhpBB
| instance for their communities.
| Kiro wrote:
| It has replaced it because it's better. I'm tired of people
| claiming everyone else is crazy just because reality doesn't
| conform with their own opinion.
| TillE wrote:
| HN hates Twitter and Discord for some pretty odd or niche
| reasons. Meanwhile, they're incredibly popular with
| mainstream users.
|
| I have plenty of minor issues with Discord's usability, but
| it's such a great service which allows me to dip my toes into
| dozens of different communities with basically zero friction.
| Arcuru wrote:
| It depends on the use case, and a lot of people use it wrong.
|
| Discord is a good choice for a community hangout, to use for
| ephemeral discussions.
|
| It is a poor choice for a support forum, because past
| responses are not searchable by the open web.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I guess because reddit tends to gravitate towards big
| subrreddits that have been taken by their mods 10+ years ago
| and there is no space for newcomers. The Discord rush looks
| like a land grab race that will rot very fast as soon as the
| race is over.
| Jcowell wrote:
| That and Reddit isn't real time communication. Discord
| provides better real time communication that Forms don't
| always provide. Not every thread has active refresh the same
| way Discord channels do.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Discord is not real time communication, it's notification-
| based, asynchronous communication a bit faster than reddit,
| but mostly not like IRC.
| tdy_err wrote:
| > Plus, the more Discords you join, the more you get spammed by
| hacked accounts running down the user list
|
| FYI, There is a setting, per server and globally, to allow DMs
| or require preauthorization by friend-request.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Most Discord channels are created with specific topics in mind,
| and a few very generalized ones thrown around for everything
| else.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| > but do you really want to draw borders around a fixed and
| unmoving set of allowed topics? second-order effect: having a
| #games channel and not a #movies channel discourages discussion
| of movies because there's not a "proper place" for it
|
| First, many discord channels are based around a topic, not a
| person, so sub-topics come naturally.
|
| Second, there usually is a request channel that allows one to
| voice a need for a new channel, and there's role system that can
| permit any designated persons to harmlessly create channels.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| I agree. usually also see off-topic channels for anything not
| related to the primary topic of the 'server', to talk to the
| people about random stuff rather than about the topic.
| burnished wrote:
| I don't think the points raised in this article are strong enough
| to merit the title, but it all feels like reasonable and valid
| criticism, the sort of thing to season your perspective with.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| I hate discord. It is centralized. It's UI is terrible. It is
| buggy with terrible performance issues. Unfortunately I am forced
| to use it.
| 4ad wrote:
| Same, except I am also forced to use Slack, which is worse.
| Kiro wrote:
| Cool. I love it.
| loo wrote:
| It has better performance and UI than Element, for my money.
| loo wrote:
| I've been pleased with the DragonRuby Game Toolkit 'server',
| which has 12 channels in a category called 'Open Spaces' named
| after various video game characters.
|
| The community uses them freely and naturally. It gives a means to
| talk about a niche / ad-hoc stuff without stepping on anyone's
| toes.
|
| If you have a project going, you can effectively claim one of the
| unused channels for a while by simply posting in it.
|
| Because everyone is present without explicitly joining, the
| conversations are more discoverable and inviting, without having
| to nag anyone to do anything.
| civilized wrote:
| Okay, I guess, but this post missed the point of channels from
| the beginning. What if two different groups of people want to
| have a conversation about two different topics at the same time?
| Shouldn't there be a way for these conversations to proceed
| without being interleaved? Shouldn't they be topic-based so that
| it's obvious where each conversation should take place? How do
| you address these needs without channels?
| exciteabletom wrote:
| The post says: "discord just doesn't scale well, because it
| lacks good threading"
|
| However, they recently added threads[1] where users can start
| small temporary channels for discussions.
|
| [1]
| https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Thr...
| civilized wrote:
| A chat app with "good" threading wouldn't be a chat app
| anymore. It'd look like either a forum or a Reddit/HN comment
| section, depending on how much nesting you want.
|
| Threading is fundamentally at odds with the idea of a group
| conversation. It relentlessly splinters the conversation into
| subchains because you have to reply to someone in particular
| rather than talking to the group in general.
|
| Slack already has threads essentially identical to those in
| this Discord proposal. And people already complain about how
| this relatively basic form of threading makes conversations
| impossible to follow. Channels are no longer linear
| conversations, but have side pockets that have to be checked
| to make sense of the whole.
|
| This is why channels ultimately make more sense if what you
| want is the ability to have group conversation while keeping
| the possibility of a few going on simultaneously.
|
| (I admit I'm suddenly intrigued by the possibility of a "live
| forum". It would be identical to a traditional web forum, but
| each post would generate its own instant message space.)
| jimkleiber wrote:
| > (I admit I'm suddenly intrigued by the possibility of a
| "live forum". It would be identical to a traditional web
| forum, but each post would generate its own instant message
| space.)
|
| Guilded kinda has this, as they have different channels
| types, one of which is a forum channel. I actually love
| that feature and yet have noticed over the last half year
| or so, the Guilded team doesn't seem to be developing and
| fixing what seem to me to be dealbreakers. However, it has
| shown to me just how much I would appreciate something like
| Discord or Slack but with the ability to make forum-type
| posts. Maybe the next evolution of these apps will have
| this. I find myself lost in normal group chats on WhatsApp,
| Discord just seems to be even more of those linear chats
| with what I believe is a worse interface than WhatsApp and
| Telegram. Guilded's forum channel makes it much easier to
| pick and choose which part of the convo I'll follow.
| civilized wrote:
| It's very interesting to think about how the data
| structure and API of the app interacts with its social
| function. How you organize the messages, what ways you
| can reply to people, what options you give to who. It
| feels like we've only begun to explore the possibilities.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Exactly, and just how much those little
| design/infrastructural decisions impacts how we interact
| with each other. For example, how does no notifications
| on HN impact the speed with which people reply? I know I
| read your comment on my phone and despise replying on my
| phone, so luckily checked HN on my computer later and am
| replying now. Little things like that, I'm grateful you
| pointed it out.
| civilized wrote:
| I know what you mean but I do a surprisingly large amount
| of mobile HN commenting anyway, lol.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| haha mad respect to you
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| It's a continuum. You want content to go from idea(chat),
| to discussion(forum), to documentation(wiki). Most people
| should only have to read the wiki, if they have already
| read the wiki, they can drop down to the forums, and if
| they have read the forums and have an idea of their own
| they can do so within the chat. The problem is that pretty
| much no service has all three. Discord does fairly well
| because they do chat, and with their pins feature do a
| really bad job of being a wiki. So 1.5 is better than most
| services 1. StackOverflow is the only service I know that
| has all 3(Answers are wikis, the discussion underneath is a
| forum, then if there's enough messages they kick you into a
| chat).
|
| I kinda see this as what happened to TV after we got DVR's
| and Netflix, where we went from episodic stores to
| serialized stories. That magnified the amount of nuance
| that TV shows were able to work through. As a result you
| get shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Squid Game - all
| shows that were fundamentally impossible before you knew
| that people who were watching episode 5 also watched
| episodes 1-4. Because no one can be sure that you have read
| all of the previous wiki content, forums are currently
| episodic in nature. They move very slowly. They need to
| repeat themselves many times. The bigger the forum, the
| slower it moves.
|
| One of the worst features of Discord is that when you
| splinter conversations into different channels it becomes
| impossibly difficult to keep up with them. You need to
| click once for each channel you are tracking. Forums had
| this same issue. Reddit brilliantly solved this problem
| with their "an upvote pushes threads into the future, then
| we sort by most recent", but no other service(HN might? I'm
| not sure.) uses it to this day. I'm not sure why.
|
| What I need on Discord is the ability to have multi-
| Discords like multi-Reddits where I see every message in a
| single interface, and clicking that message would allow me
| to send a message to that channel. So every message would
| look like this:
|
| Server > Channel > Thread : Hi
|
| AnotherServer > SomeChannel > GeneralThread : Some message
|
| The big problem with chat is it quickly becomes useless as
| more people join the conversation, for example see Twitch
| chat, it scrolls so quickly you get an almost instant
| Eternal September effect of low quality content that
| reinforces itself. Even Reddit/HN falls over when you get
| over 1000 comments on a post. What you need is automatic
| sharding of users, an upvote system that would then push
| those certain users "up a level", and depending on the
| amount of users chatting in a channel there would be
| several levels of hierarchy involved. People who chat
| within your shard would then instantly reach you, but only
| high quality posts from other shards would reach you, but
| it would appear like a forum post, or be refined into a
| wiki.
|
| I have a lot more thoughts on this topic, but I'll leave it
| here.
| civilized wrote:
| I think you're onto something. Quite a few things
| actually. Social media has a lot of untapped potential if
| we engineer better products. A continuum of related
| products will help. And for all their problems, voting
| systems can be very helpful in the right context.
| WalterGR wrote:
| 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832
| lewisflude wrote:
| As someone who uses discord for a variety of fun, professional
| and hobby-related projects I think the real answer is it depends.
| I've seen multiple servers where extra channels/topics can
| actually encourage people to talk more vs having a general
| channel. It also makes it easier to catch up on things if you
| aren't checking a channel every day. I actually see this as a
| feature of discord, not a problem.
|
| That being said, I have also seen multiple servers with dead
| channels that should probably be merged or pruned. Some people go
| crazy and make a bucket for stuff that just doesn't get talked
| about. I know it can suck to see a small community spread thing.
|
| I do dislike how centralised discord is, and would prefer an open
| source competitor had gotten traction. But for me, the community
| _is_ the value, not the technology. Discoverability is huge.
|
| Source: Admin of a Discord with 4k people, lightly active mod on
| several discords with 2k people and generally active user of the
| platform.
| animesh wrote:
| I love the ADHD notice. I would love to steal it at least in the
| spirit.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I think the complaints here have to do with poor management of
| channels, not their existence per se. In the discord I have with
| some friends (~60 members, with about 20 making 90% of posts), a
| lot of the channels arose because a handful of people with a
| specific interest were clogging up a general-interest channel
| with hundreds of posts that were not interesting to most people.
| If you are not interested in survivor, you try to skim through
| those hundreds of posts, and you miss the discussion of, say,
| other tv shows that you are interested in. Now I, who don't care
| about survivor, can choose to ignore it, or occasionally skim it
| for jokes, without worrying that I'm missing a topic that I'd be
| interested in. Certainly we have some channels that are rarely
| used, and could probably be pruned, but we also don't
| gratuitously create channels for topics that we don't have a
| demonstrated need for. Worth noting that we don't police the
| categorization much, so sometimes topics spill over, and that is
| fine.
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| I've noticed that channels tend to be used as a sort of garbage
| bin, such as the popular 'memes' channels. If any of your friends
| are insistent on spamming them constantly, you can just direct
| them to the waste channels to ignore them easier.
| Macha wrote:
| The point of these extra channels for me is that there are topics
| that can easily take up a lot of space and drown out more general
| interest topics. For example, on my friend's server, we have one
| group of 3-4 people very interested in Magic the Gathering, and
| 3-4 people very interested in Genshin Impact, who can easily have
| 1000 messages on the topic over the course of a work day.
|
| The idea of people in the topic and in this thread is that people
| will enjoy the variety and read that and maybe get interested in
| Genshin or MTG, I guess, and therefore that channel should be
| rammed into the main space to keep it active and maintain
| interest.
|
| But what actually happens is people look at the log when they get
| a chance to read, see 100s of Genshin posts and go "Oh, not
| interested, don't want to follow back to find the start to see if
| anything else was discussed first", and so any discussion before
| or interleaved with these highly active topics get lost and the
| people interested in neither Genshin or MTG have little reason to
| participate in the server at that point. So the extra channels is
| not to form a hierarchy of topics for the sake of topics, but to
| give the more varied topics breathing room in the presence of the
| highly active topics.
| dan_pixelflow wrote:
| User of Discord for years here, Discord certified moderator and
| community admin for a content creator you might know (330k+
| members).
|
| There's a feature relatively new to Discord that'll help your
| issue with topic channels, and it's called Threads[1] - similar
| to, like, Slack's threads in the sense they're essentially mini
| custom channels for a specific topic of your choice.
|
| As someone who has to decide what channels to make for a
| demographic of relatively young people (mostly 13-20), we just
| listen to what those people want. If there's enough suggestions
| for a channel, and there's no safeguarding issues that mods have
| brought up (not encouraging sending personal information -
| something like an #introductions channel can encourage people to
| send their age and location, for example) then we'll probably add
| it. This is because channels suggested by the community will
| reflect what the community want - we've never had a #technology
| channel suggested because we're a community of people who are
| fans of a content creator who plays Minecraft and is in a band,
| not a community of a content creator who makes videos about
| robots.
|
| The Discord hate in these comments seems to be a range of simply
| 'Discord bad' to 'Discord isn't scrapeable by Google' - neither
| was IRC! Discord is IRC for the 21st century, and for large
| communities it is better: better moderation tools, better
| onboarding, better server management and it's so much easier for
| people to join: just go to a link in your browser. No need for a
| client if you don't want it.
|
| A lot of people's experience with Discord depends on what
| community they're in. If you're in communities that are toxic,
| then you probably won't like it. If you're in communities that
| are welcoming, you'll probably like it. If you're in a large
| community and don't like how fast the discussion can be, then you
| probably won't like it. If you're in a very small community with
| just 5 people but you're after urgent help on something, that
| might take a while. I've been all of the possible sides of the
| platform and I love it.
|
| Discord also makes me happy for what the platform itself is doing
| for moderation, whether that's against the amount of phishing
| taking place on the platform by adding platform-wide link filters
| for phishing links, to supporting[2] and educating[3] community
| moderators by curating articles and guides[2] to help out. I
| don't think there's any other social platform that actively talks
| to and supports its users like this.
|
| This turned in a love-piece for Discord, yes, but for me it's the
| most important website I've ever visited. I've met so many great
| people and done so many cool things. I hope you can also find a
| website where you can do that too, whether that's Discord or
| otherwise.
|
| [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/4403205878423-...
|
| [2] https://discord.com/blog/announcing-the-discord-moderator-
| ac...
|
| [3] https://discord.com/moderation
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Yeah, I'm getting a lot of "old man yells at cloud" vibes from
| the discussion here. Most of the criticism makes no sense or is
| contradictory. Discord is searchable; discord is archivable by
| a bot; discord threads and channels are optional; IRC is no
| different; communities can be run in whatever way their owners
| want. The platform is pretty stable and does voice and video
| better than just about anyone else.
|
| Though I think we can all agree the server bar UI is absolute
| garbage unusable by anyone in more than a dozen communities and
| needs to be punted into the solar core.
|
| (To be clear, I do loathe communities with a hundred little
| channels, most of which I never even look at, and I do mute
| aggressively, so there are definitely client-side features
| missing in that regard, but I'm not blaming the community
| moderators for their absence.)
| anonymousab wrote:
| >Discord is searchable
|
| Searching for canonical historical content in a chat app,
| where it may be spread over many discussions, channels,
| pinned messages and nested threads, is a miserable experience
| compared to full page updatable forum threads.
| foven wrote:
| I hope discord pays you to write fluff pieces like this.
|
| In practice, threads are effectively the same as channels with
| the benefit that if people stop talking after x minutes it
| self-deletes/archives/disappears, but ultimately works the same
| where discussion gets channeled into smaller and smaller
| circles - policing of "this should go here", "there's a thread
| for that", "just make a thread" etc.
|
| In fact it is even worse than channels because by default
| threads are not visible. They get hidden behind a button to
| even view them, and they naturally do not alert you to when a
| new thread is being created. It adds another layer of
| inaccessibility to channels that filters down the amount of
| people you will actually be engaging with at any one time.
|
| I agree discord is great for being easy to use and access, but
| ultimately it falls apart above say a couple hundred members.
| At 330k members really you are better off just opening a forum,
| it's an insane amount of people that really I think you do
| struggle to develop any sense of community and I'm almost
| positive that there is very little meaningful interaction
| between your epic content creator and his fans in this discord
| server.
|
| And let's be honest, discord moderators are a joke. The
| majority of the time people who choose or seek to be
| moderators, particularly in the manner you mention through a
| moderator "exam", are individuals that are grasping for a small
| sense of power to lord over people. Moderation isn't rocket
| science. I'm rather skeptical that it hasn't polluted your view
| given the way you vaguely name-drop moderating for a large
| community, a job that is completely thankless and likely unpaid
| except for in the clout you might gain by name dropping.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| It's people flocking to yet another thing that doesn't have its
| users best interests at heart. That's the core of the problem.
| No product has endured that hasn't turned against its users.
| Products created with capital incentives eventually compete
| against their users' interests.
|
| Many of us here have seen these tides over a long enough period
| to know what's coming. Young people haven't seen more than a
| cycle to protect themselves so they buy in to what's easiest.
| It's a short-term outlook.
|
| Google Talk could have ruled the world of communication built
| on a real decentralized protocol but it wasn't profitable.
| Things that aren't profitable get shit-canned or worked over
| until they are profitable. Once they are profitable market
| incentives demand they become more profitable and then yet more
| profitable endlessly.
|
| If human beings just stopped for one second and asked where's
| the money in this? What's the play? Well, we'd make smarter
| decisions all around.
|
| Nothing more than five inches in front of our faces at all
| times.
|
| I do wish we changed the incentives so we could build enduring
| protocols aligned with user interests.
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