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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my 10+ years playing league and 2 years playing overwatch I never heard someone refer to the current game as "server". People still have a vague image of what a server looks like and know that company hosted games typically don't respond to that image.
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).
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
> 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
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?
I started noticing this the past few weeks with the desktop app. Not sure if it's new, but it's sure a PITA to share a link from discord by first clicking it to open it (into browser) then copying the browser's URL. Even just pasting from one discord server to another server requires this extra nonsense.
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.
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”)
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.
What GP entirely misses is that Discord is not really to blame for any of that. They provided the features, but really it's up to the admins of a particular "server" (the API calls them "guilds") to have too many channels, and there's not really an incentive for a server admin to 'attention hack.'
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> * 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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
To IRC's credit, its lack of server-side history encouraged users to keep their own logs, and depending on the community those logs would show up online. I've had IRC channel log pages show up in web searches before, and be helpful.
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).
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.
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.