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.
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.
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.
So, not perfect, but good enough.
I really don't see how you can say that. How?
I want to say it's "disappointing" how they use "server," but it was probably a necessary fiction.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FYI, There is a setting, per server and globally, to allow DMs or require preauthorization by friend-request.
It's like saying everyone on IRC should instead host a PhpBB instance for their communities.
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.
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.
Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
Having to use a bouncer or go to a website was a pain, though, and lack of redaction is a very mixed bag. With Discord's or Matrix's server-side history, you can see old messages by default, but users or attackers could also delete some of those messages (silently on Discord), and on Discord a deleted account becomes anonymous in the message history (unless their name happens to be transcribed, not mentioned).
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.
Everything old is new again, I guess?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
This is only an issue because we've normalised telling everyone the internet what you look like, what your name is and other info about yourself.
In the ye olden forum days there was just "hemi_dude420" who know every fucking thing about a certain brand of car. You had no idea where he lived, what he did, what his name was or whether he was a he at all. And we didn't care.
Nowadays people want to build their personal brand and insist on plastering their face, name and contact info everywhere.
> “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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
