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.
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