It’s great for communicating among individuals and in group chats, but I think it ultimately fails as a platform between creators and fans even though it seems like every creator or product team has one these days.
Let’s say you’re a server admin and you push updates to an #announcements channel. If people want to then discuss those updates, they have to go to a completely different channel. Unless there’s one specifically for talking about announcements, that conversation is going to be mixed in with a bunch of other stuff. Sure, we have sub-threads now, but not all servers allow those to be created by anyone. They also disappear after being inactive for a while, so anyone looking in the future won’t know if there was an important piece of information that’s been lost.
Now let’s say you’re a regular server member and you’ve been away from a channel for a while. If you’re like me and you find it hard to follow a conversation in reverse, you need to first scroll up before you read anything. (Discord does help with this by putting you 50 messages behind, but that’s often not enough, and with no post ranking system, it’s hard to know which discussions are the most interesting without reading every single one.) Then maybe you find a question from someone that never got answered and you want to help them out. You could reply to them, but if it’s been long enough they might not see it and you’d be interrupting whatever conversation is happening at the bottom. So then you think you might try messaging them directly, but most servers don’t allow that for safety reasons which is understandable.
It just seems that at every turn, Discord can’t replicate the usefulness that traditional forums have. In a forum, everything is organized, focused, won’t disappear, you can read everything in chronological order, and when you reply to someone it doesn’t feel like you’re interrupting people.
What do you all think? Am I just bad at using Discord?
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Discord hasn’t ever been trying to do what forums do; it’s an evolution of text and voice chat rooms. Discord is for synchronous, live communication, while forums are asynchronous. Information gets lost in synchronous platforms because there’s an inherent assumption that the value of that information is highest in the moment when people are communicating real-time. Getting the 50 message chat history isn’t supposed to be about catching up on what everyone was talking about last week, it’s intended to get you caught up in the conversation that’s happening now. Twitter is the same way. It’s not particularly easy to browse older conversations by design.
It’s possible the format just isn’t for you, but there are a couple things that could help. I think the most important part is finding the right size of community. I personally prefer servers in the range of 50-100 active people. I joined up with one as a part of the Reddit exodus and it quickly grew to 1,000+. Too chaotic for my taste, but I know people who love very active servers like that. Threads are designed to help with the reply problem. A large server that doesn’t permit threads is probably not one you want to be a part of unless it has a mod team that’s very on top of things.
Good channel and role organization is also important, but unfortunately a lot of the good tools are third-party. Because not everyone has the same tools, it can be challenging to find a server that’s well-organized. For example, there a tool that allows people to highlight a specific message, listing a history of selected messages in a non-chat channel. If a server is good at using it, that sort of thing might help you catch up. Another thing we could see soon (if it’s not happening already) is generative AI posting daily summaries of conversations.
It took me a while to get comfortable enough to contribute at will in my favorite Discord servers and not feel like I was interrupting. Cultures vary greatly by server, but no matter the server, there has to be some degree of willingness to jump in.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply! I guess it does boil down to a difference in how people like to consume content. I prefer being able to get a digest or summary of interesting things to read and don’t care so much about what’s brand new. Using AI for this could work well and I’m sure we’ll see that pretty soon.
And certainly you’re right about needing a willingness to jump in. I always feel like whatever I have to say is less important than what others are doing which scares me out of posting. That’s why I like places like Lemmy where I can make a post and if people see it that’s cool, but it’s not in everyone’s face and easy to ignore.
I really liked it when it first popped up as what felt like a skype replacement. Now though, it’s awful. To be honest though it’s not at discords fault, mostly. It’s due to how every online community is wanting to use discord for their communities. They treat it like a forum, even though it can’t truly act like one. Discord is good for having servers for different friend groups, but for the giant, in the three digit populated servers, nah. Too much going on in there unless I’m terminally online.
No, it’s objectively bad. The conversations are jumbled and disjointed. If there’s a lot of different conversations in the same channel it’s hard to follow one thread. Voice communication is gone once it’s happened and so it’s not available for anyone else to learn from. Even the text based conversations aren’t searchable from the web search engines so it’s hard to find information for someone not intimately involved in a project.
First time I’ve heard that Discord would be a social media platform.
I don’t think they try to be a social media platform, but it is definitely a bad substitute for forums and I dislike anyone who tries to use Discord as a forum alternative.
Yeah, the usability of Discord peaks at about a dozen people per server. Good for roleplaying though
I have found that every extra “community” server I join ends up getting muted and forgotten until I eventually leave it. I think Discord having a really low barrier to entry (free, insta-hosted servers) is why it is chosen nowadays.
But yes, I find it works best as a sort of advanced IRC replacement for my gaming group.
Am I just bad at using Discord?
Yes. It takes a little getting used to.
The creator/fan dynamic is not really its strong point - other platforms do that better. The best servers I’m in are small communities of niche hobbyists.
Yeah I fully agree. Not to mention their app is badly optimized and it uses up to 40% of my CPU. If my CPU is a six core (i5-10400) then I don’t want to see what happens with dualcores…
I mean, people could just make an announcements channel that allows public messaging, that’s not like a legal requirement of servers to make those restricted to posting, but they could totally make an announcement discussion channel, and even make a thread within the channel for each announcement post. Threads don’t actually disappear, I don’t believe, they go away from the immediate discord sidebar, but you can go to any channel and press the threads button at the top and see all previous threads intact.
And replying to someone’s old message with context is totally possible. You can quote reply and @ them so they’re notified and they can also tap your quote message to be taken back to the original message, helping them to remember context.
I don’t really see discord as best at being a social media overall, but it is a decent community platform. I think the fact that reading older content is extremely difficult is true, and sort of a symptom of Discord’s design, but that’s the only real con I can think of.
And traditional forums don’t theoretically disappear, but pretty much all of the self hosted ones I used to frequent back in the day are dead and gone, unless you count the way back machine. Actually, I’m curious, is there any software that allows you to back up at least the text contents of a discord server?
