Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately.
Love it or hate it, let's not pretend it's like IRC, Slack or any of its competitors.
If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.
This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.
I hadn’t used Discord in the past and was really surprised to keep seeing promos for Boosts and stuff.
It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried.
But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.
It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section:
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...
There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio.
0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114376...
That said, it doesn't make sense for me for huge communities. I definitely think it's the best for small/medium groups but once chat starts moving a too fast to follow, what is the point? Trying to follow older discussions is also super hard compared to a forum.
It's also not a good knowledge repository. One thing that we used our forum for reliably was storing our personal tactics, common assignments, what addons we require etc in a central place. Trying to do it in a chat channel was like pulling teeth and we couldn't assign multiple people to edit the content.
Its locked to the community server toggle though (god knows why with how much that is complained about), and it doesn’t solve the walled garden problem.
When we moved from TS to discord the first noticeable change was audio quality and the fact that we "owned" the space - it no longer was a single audio channel on some community-run server. The links and media previews were also a nice novelty; nothing new anymore around social media at that point but it felt like this should be a standard feature. And years later this indeed become a standard feature around the Internet.
It is only now after the pandemic that the competition has established itself. Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord. Now people complain and argue against discord, because they have options.
When discord came out we finally had an option that didn't involve making your DDOS'able IP address available to anyone that searches your name.
I think they fall into one of three buckets:
1. They have an extremely strong hatred for Electron and let that hatred overcome any actual thought about the product.
2. They're trying to use Discord for something it's not designed to be. Discord is not a replacement for Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media. It is primarily a text/voice chat service. It's a replacement for IRC, Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo, etc.
3. They don't see the need for Discord when IRC still exists because they completely miss all the short-comings that IRC has that a modern audience expects. For example, missing a conversation because you happened to not be online is inexcusable these days, but more importantly, people expect the ability to post images directly to chat.
I mean really, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it took so long for something like Discord to exist. We should have had something like it 10 years prior.
Though you do highlight "CHOICE" here, so maybe the answer is a set of servers hosted by Discord as we do now, with the option of self-hosting a server.
THIS is what we need to be pointing AI at!
Seriouslly, AI need to "replace our jobs" (especially on the internet) - with worrying about dealing with all the mundane human practices.
This may sound really bad, but AI should be our slave.
We are furthering knowledge, not oppressing it.
There is so much to gain, but the risks are super FN high right now. Given the lack of canon on AI law etc.. History books will be written by AI soon on our current stat of AI...
Let me give that an test:
ChatGPT prompt "give me a two paragraph summary of the history of AI upto the creation of ChatGPT - focus on something special, dont LIE, DONT HALLUCINATE - provide table of how you arrived at this response.
---
Summary of the History of AI up to the Creation of ChatGPT:
Year(s) | Milestone | Details --- | --- | --- 1943 | The Birth of AI | In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper on how artificial neurons could simulate neural networks, laying the groundwork for the field of artificial intelligence. This marked the birth of AI as a scientific discipline. 1956 | The Dartmouth Conference | In the summer of 1956, the Dartmouth Conference was held, considered the official birth of AI as a field. The conference brought together prominent researchers, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon, who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and discussed the potential of machines mimicking human intelligence.
1960s and 1970s | Early AI Research | In the 1960s and 1970s, AI research saw significant advancements in problem-solving, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. Programs like ELIZA and SHRDLU demonstrated early capabilities in language understanding and interacting with humans.
1980s and 1990s | Expert Systems and Knowledge-based AI | The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a shift towards expert systems and knowledge-based AI. These systems utilized large databases and rule-based reasoning to solve complex problems in specialized domains. However, their limitations in dealing with uncertain and incomplete information hindered further progress.
1997 | Deep Blue's Victory | In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, marking a significant milestone in AI. Deep Blue demonstrated the power of brute-force computation and signaled the potential for machines to surpass human capabilities in specific domains.
2010s | Deep Learning and Big Data | The 2010s brought a resurgence of AI driven by breakthroughs in deep learning, fueled by the availability of big data and advancements in computing power. Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), achieved remarkable performance in image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks.
2020 | Emergence of ChatGPT | In 2020, OpenAI introduced the initial version of GPT, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which utilized transformer models and unsupervised learning to generate human-like text. Subsequent iterations, including ChatGPT, improved upon the original model's capabilities by fine-tuning and optimizing for conversational interactions. ChatGPT leverages large-scale language models to understand and respond to user inputs, providing increasingly sophisticated and context-aware conversational experiences.
The history of AI is a complex and evolving field with numerous key milestones and contributors. This summary highlights some of the significant moments that led to the creation of ChatGPT, representing the culmination of decades of research and advancements in artificial intelligence.
Maybe pedantic, but Matrix is a protocol that predates Discord by 6 months. Maybe certain Matrix clients are a copycat of Discord, but the protocol itself doesn't necessitate that.
Then along comes Discord. Easy to use, a master class in UI design, and sound quality that was at least in the ballpark of Mumble's. And persistent text chat! If you're going to be talking in Discord, it's only natural that some amount of conversation is going to spill over into the text channels. And if there's a lot of chat in those text channels, then it's going to suck conversation out of your other text mediums. That's how we ended up with Discord dominating the online community space.
I actually had a friend who preferred Skype for that very reason. Due to the lack of noise filtering, she could more easily tell whether she disconnected due to her poor rural connection. It was a funny use-case that’s for sure. We were still rocking Skype up till 2018.
> I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition.
As somebody who doesn't really understand Discord's value proposition, it sounds like it heavily relates to the needs of collaborative online gamers. I spend zero time on that kind of game, so my experience of it is mainly as an ok chat for open-source projects, but often used where I want something other than chat.
Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable.
It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.
If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.
So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the difference is Google would index those, so you could be landed right on the interesting page. With discord, an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost for everyone but whoever was looking at the chat when it happened :( so I guess my point is… it’s not so bad, but actually it’s pretty bad.
This is what pins are for.
Let's use Lemmy as an example. The current UI makes it clear at all times where the communities and the users are located. It's nice to provide such information, but in the end it should not matter, and thus it should not be wasting premium UI space. Same thing goes with the community list: the "subscribed" section works as expected, but "local" should never be the default view, because in the end, users shouldn't have to care where communities are hosted. Finally, the search feature should be much more explicit in describing the corpus of data being searched: "all known communities", "communities federated into this instance", "local communities". All new users think it's #1, but #1 doesn't exist, it's #2, and this leads these users to think they have to be on one of the big instances if they want to participate in a larger community.
It's almost like federation was an afterthought.
Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the federated system. Those entities are most likely operating with different standards and different levels of professionalism. In the end, you are offloading tasks to the end users like figuring out the structure of it all, where to sign up, which instances to join, how to get access to the content you are looking for, what to do when things inevitably break. In a centralised system, most of these questions don't exist, and everything else is being taken care of by the operator who has a vested interest in things running as smoothly as possible.
What you are describing are mostly UI problems, but even if those had been solved, it would still a worse experience. The average user doesn't even know what "federated" means, the don't want to be thinking about local and remote instances, they just want things to work.
Indeed. This is why convenience means moving all things 'federation' to the background.
Remember eDonkey, eMule, and the ED2K network? It started as a federated network, and it added a second decentralized network later on. And it was successful, because users didn't have to care about the inner workings of the product. There were a bunch of external sites acting as link aggregators, but there was a builtin search feature too that worked well (until hash collisions catched up with the stagnant protocol).
To me, this is still a shining example of how to do federation right. There were multiple clients, standard communication protocols, and it was easy to take advantage of the full federated network, because it didn't take any effort to do so.
Just like Reddit.
Not quite the same thing.
you can get a lot of the squeeze of a centralized reddit-style service (in terms of low-friction user signup) without needing actual content federation. One ID can still let you post on multiple boards without needing to sign up in 27 places, and that doesn't need content federation.
It also significantly reduces the moderation problem because now you are letting {Google,Facebook,Apple} solve (or at least gate/significantly reduce) the spammers problem for you. That said, custom IDPs are inherently at odds with this value in spam filtering. If a spammer just needs to set up a custom domain, you don't get any signal as to user quality.
When it works it's magic and when broken might as well give up. A backup can always save you depending on the timestamp.
The only hitch is that one has to trust Apple as the key manager. Everyone that can get past that hurdle will be able to manage very sophisticated trust relationships.
(for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.)
Also, they need a hosted server (which most people see as a disadvantage, HN is not the norm here).
Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.
I think that's what they're fishing for with the transition to unique global usernames tho. Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board.
When your users keep trying to shove your product into another niche it doesn't fit... you listen.
I would assume that there’s pressure for “growth“, and pushing discord as a Reddit or forum replacement. It’s probably just that.
I dunno, people complain about maintaining a forum software stack, so maybe that's where this stems from. Could be a market worth trying to capture, a 5 minute deploy that truly requires no maintenance ever. And if you want it private, just set the robots meta to noindex, problem solved.
Discord would probably win at the end anyway, especially because of the need for self-hosting (even though I don't think it was that bad... there were quite a few open servers),
But they had such a dominant position and, while Discord kept evolving, TeamSpeak just stayed the same... With the network effect that they had, I think with just some small improvements (mostly on the text chat support) they could stay relevant for a long time.
What? Why?
Names are never unique. That's not how names work. Why would usernames be different?
This causes all kinds of pain irl, it's not really a good example. IRL has the same issues non-unique usernames do. It's almost irrelevant in a small community because of the number of members. It becomes a problem in large communities because you can't find someone based on their name.
Discord's issue was downplaying the discriminator so much that a lot of people didn't realize they existed. That if you wanted to add someone, they weren't uniquely identified by username alone.
They probably could have solved that by making the discriminator more prominent early on in the app's lifecycle.
The issues are.. trivial at most. If you can't find someone based on their name in a large community, that can't cause any problems, because... how did you learn their name? If you know who they are, you can find them. The situation where you're given a piece of paper and told "find a specific person by this name, but not anyone else by the same name, within X time period or you lose this game" doesn't actually arise "IRL".
It's that last point there, that Discord seems to want to tackle... We will have to wait to see how, but I hope they don't ruin the server paradigm and aim to become a subreddit type ecosystem.
* If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G.
* When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.
The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.
This realization that the online community space has grown more diverse than just a single medium was the inspiration for us building Sociables.
We've been working on a community platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
1. Set your own notification preferences to @notifications only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever.
2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform.
3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.
I prefer the Slack model where you can reply inside a thread and you replies stay within the thread instead of being scattered all over the place like IRC.
I hate to admit it, but this is one thing that Slack does better than IRC, except that in that model you do miss seeing everything that's talked about in the channel (because many of the conversations are hidden in the threads), but it's a better model for organization.
None of that changes its main societal flaw which is being a walled garden. So much loss of information.
Course, the bigger problem with centralized corporate services is that discord themselves could be shipping off that data on the backend to god knows who... but from the "protect me from other individual harassing me forever about shit I said once" front, Discord has some obvious appeal.
So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.
Throwing back to the past, central logging is new, and twenty years ago it would've been hearsay where many people couldn't verify those claimed past conversations. I would have no issues with a two-month default expiry policy for these things.
With the community building aspect, forums were not great for it. Due to how fragmented it was, and how subforums were often dramatically different sections, this meant that unless you were genuinely deeply into [topic] and were spending numerous hours per day regularly you would not build a community at all there. This is why on most forums, it's only the trolls who became known, they had that cross-contamination aspect. Forums also had a lot of UX that discouraged caring about the user. Names were tucked away, profile images were tiny, people hid signatures due to how obnoxious they got. They became the equivalent of reading a mailing list you were randomly added into.
This doesn't really excuse Discord. By default it encourages too many indicators. Tutorials for new accounts, rule modules, every channel has an indicator on it, there's buttons left right and center making you afraid to click anything, then the whispers for joining servers, the list goes on. This is one aspect that I hope Discord spends severe amount of resources looking at in 2024. Which I think they absolutely are capable of doing, but I'm not sure if their investors care about the new user experience sadly.
The Android app often has issues that make using it infuriating.
Maybe some users have found it different recently but while this used to be the case years back when I joined (it was IRC style where you just picked a nickname and began chatting) I tried this twice again recently for someone—both with and without an invite—and it required creating an account (ie: verifying email and in another case it required a phone, inexplicably).
The prior onboarding experience was far superior and I have to think an important part of their earlier growth.
Huh? It's extremely aggressive about accounts. This thing literally requires a phone number. Can't even create pseudonymous accounts.
To me, that's proof that they want phone numbers for mining purposes more than verification ones.
This is a huge deal, especially for people who aren't tech savvy. Setting up a Discord server and providing 24/7 availability to all your friends is as easy as sharing a photo on Instagram. No need to find a computer that you can leave on 24/7 or messing with your router.
>you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX
Just because people are using a app without any real competitors doesn't mean that the UX is great. There is a lot of software that does its job well enough that people deal with the bad UI/UX.
Discord's UX is basically a slot machine from Vegas. Its obnoxious.
Let's not fool ourselves, those not so much tech inclined find Discord way easier to set up and understand than Matrix.
It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on.
Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.
So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.
until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.
But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition.
- Forums are easy for search engines to index
- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable
- Forums have good threading in general
- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care)
- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums
Tell me how Discord does each of these better.
Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.
Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.
But normal users probably do not care about any of that. You literally have people come in and ask a question that was literally asked and answered in the previous reply. People want an instant reply, they do not want to google for an answer. And the nature of the chat makes that possible.
Plus search engines not indexing things is probably seen as a benefit by some community owners. For example people who run private course communities or small groups want their communities open only to invited people.
Something else to think about is how discord differs, it is a chat app that transformed into a forum. While reddit has been trying to do the reverse. Maybe more people want a easy to chat app with some forum features tagged on, rather than the reverse.
No one ever called humans rational beings. Of course that's the proper behavior to instill in a quality, knowledgeable internet user and foster a high quality community.
We lost that battle decades ago, however. We're also losing the battle where it is okay to gatekeep lazy people. I argue the opposite: the product evolved based on user affordances, which is typically a good UI/UX paradigm to follow. If people are going to be lazy, lower the barrier of entry, and leave any curation to each server's community and moderators.
And if we're being honest: most experts aren't sharing their information on social media. Not all of it, at least. Certainly not in public communities.
The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.
Just because there's a wildly popular internet community in one app/medium doesn't mean that other communities simply ceased to exist. They're just the same thing they've always been - niche.
For information retrieval it's quite terrible. Generally even worse than Discord due to the archives being on random overloaded sites. OTOH it leads to a culture of survival of the fittest ideas ("meme" culture, I suppose), where instead of upvoting a post or image you like, you just repost it. Like a big shared human cache, or like human memory I suppose
The general lack of persistent identity has a profound influence on the culture of course. People tend to focus on the negatives that it brings, but it can also be refreshing to have pure and frank discussions with no ego or profile snooping or cliques. And just generally the feeling of low-stakes casual chatting, rather than remembering at the back of your head that everything will be on the record against your username
Here is one https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/does-anyone-else-feel-l...
I did grow up with PHP forums, but they feel a bit clunky now. I'm sure a well-made one with a more modern stack and new features could be superior to Discord for text discussion though.
So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user.
Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on.
I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially.
Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?
I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.
Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.
Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot.
Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.
Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).
Also, your at worst scenario is a bit contrived. There's plenty of ways to not get an answer, to get a wrong answer, or to be berated by gatekeepers because "you don't actually want that".
It's still the internet, don't make it out like discord has somehow changed that fundamental fact, because they really haven't.
Don't get me wrong, my preference definitely leans towards forums… I grew up on them after all. They have a lot of the type of rough edges that people aren't very forgiving of these days, though.
- Forums are easy for search engines to index : don’t care
- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable : don’t care
- Forums have good threading in general : don’t care
- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) : don’t care
- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums : don’t care
And this is why discord won. :)
Personally, I'm not a fan of situations where communities suggest you joining their discord in order to get in touch with them or receive help faster, because most of the time it feels like I'm joining a playground full of adults behaving like kids.
Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that.
It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd.
A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"
They clearly want a place of community and Discord gives that.
"Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention.
There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny.
Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.
The discord interface suffers from modern design syndrome, the information density isn't there. I open it and see inline images/gifs, link previews, reactions etc. There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.
Mumble has much higher quality and lower latency than discord, but that's probably a matter of configuration and server location.
No limitations on what you can do with bots either. We do all sorts of stupid shit with irc -> mumble text-to-speech along with our music bot and clip soundboard. I'm guessing it's probably possible to recreate it all on discord, but I can't imagine rewriting it all.
I suspect the Discord API's are significantly more complicated than irc/mumble.
They have compact mode that eliminates that stuff. I don't see avatars. I just see colored user names.
There are image embeds but I tend to see that as a positive, especially with some bot capabilities. For instance here is what the chat looks like in the server for one of the roguelikes I play, TOME4. https://i.imgur.com/WHFD7OA.png
You can see no avatars and it's just a bot-generated image that is relevant to the chat.
Discord excels in combining the call/video/screenshare/slack-ish/game experience all in one.
It's a really solid service with good mobile and desktop versions.
It's got to be a huge trove of behavioral and personal data that is immensely valuable to ad companies. People say all sorts of stuff in private DMs they'd never otherwise think to share with big tech.
Discord is great for running community with multiple chat channels and occasional voice chats. Like any chat communication it is accepted that it is ephemeral. Not that often accessed or searched for.
Being hard-to-index gives credibility to the pretense of being a pseudo-annonymous, "hidden" from public eyes platform. It encourages people to be laid back, to speak more freely and form social bonds, faster than on "open" web forums.
Discord is a night club, web forums are public square. And it occupied an extremely useful, and big niche.
Completely anecdotal, but IMHO their app just works and it works well. For instance I used to play an MMO using discord and we had ~72 people in voice chat at any given time and it was flawless (some of our members were 80+ years old, the game I played is 25 years old). Meanwhile at work (I work in IT) it's not uncommon to spend 5 minutes just getting a meeting started, figuring out why the mic isn't working, trying to get someone to mute who isn't, etc.
IMHO people use discord as a reddit alternative, NOT as a chat platform. Everywhere i go i see asynchronous communication.
It's terrible though, a horrible way to organize text and hidden away from search engines too. the bots and other gimmicks are pure noise. text works though and notifications help
It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).
I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?
I use Discord a lot, and while I'm sympathetic to the concerns they're not relevant to the servers I frequent. Discord is so abysmal to search that anything that users want to share beyond chat/memes/pet pictures gets posted in the forum and linked to from the Discord. Any ordered discussion just falls apart in Discord, so every server I'm in either:
* Is small and ephemeral (Breaking rules, trying to not get the main server sanctioned)
* Is a private group where archival is undesirable
* Has a wiki/forum/dropbox/drive where conversation and artifacts are shared, organized and archived.
I don't think you're wrong about Discord being difficult to index, I just think the problem you're describing is, at worst, understood and has simple workarounds, or at best is an actual feature that people want.
The reason is that they allow users to customize the software through code. When you create a Discord or Minecraft server, they act as a "platform" for your server, you can write code to customize every aspect of it. I think that counts a lot.
I don't know any alternative that is as customizable and good as Discord, and I don't think Discord will be replaced any soon while a platform that supports that level of customization comes up.
Basically all the ceremonies and friction of the networking aspect and video/audio aspects are gone.
Now I think the community model of Discord isn't really in congruence with the knowledge base model a la Reddit(its hard to drop-in and out of community just to get one answer), but it is still vastly superior to its competition.
IMO, that's probably their best bet with regards to growing their actual business (as opposed to popularity, which they seem to be doing a bang-up job of already)
I and the communities I interact with seem to treat it as if it were ephemeral, despite it actually storing everything. People seem to want to converse about a topic and then work on the idea that those messages will fade into obscurity over the course of minutes, days, or weeks.
The data that would be useful is really the connection with a given group of people. I'd want to be able to find them again and move somewhere else with them, but the conversations themselves I wouldn't miss.
This is of course a big contrast to other platforms though. Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar platforms are great because they're searchable and are (or were) geared towards long term conversations and searchability. If all their content disappeared then I really would feel the impact.
That's just my usage, but I'm always surprised when people say they'd want to hold onto conversations in discord.
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be walled gardens at all and everything would be accessible forever. But since they exist, I think we need easy tools that can scrape conversations for archival. I don't necessarily mean tools that can scrape all content. I imagine most sites would be very hostile towards that. But perhaps a personal/local tool where a user can archive their own conversations and communities, whether it be Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Making it personal instead of a large public scraping might be more tolerable. Data takeouts also exist, some easier to use than others. But they miss out on community conversations, which might have important content that you'd want to preserve.
I’m all for creators making money but it splits communities between subscribers and non subscribers. The most invested, and likely to make discussion, fans will pay taking their own contributions behind the paywall.
Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.
People compared the loss of what.cd to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. While I do think that was an exaggeration at the time, I worry about the loss of effort and 'thought-power' when the discord walls get even taller than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.