Users are worryingly hostile to developers.

If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?

Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.

My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.

> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.

I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.

Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.

I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers

Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)

There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P

As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.

Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to use commands & embeds for common things

Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.

I'm gonna give it up for that one. Nicely done.

As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free.

Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?

You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client. There's a reason they 'just' use Discord. So now you want developers to have to check emails, IRC, forum posts, whatever other outdated communication platform, AND Discord? Why on Earth would they use all that when Discord takes care of all of those features and more.

Having more than one central place to communicate is 'hostile'.

> You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client.

Just because something is old, doesn’t mean it is bad.

Disagree.

>>You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client

I'd hardly call discord a 'stream lined' system. Latency (especially in voice which is supposed to be it strong suit) is bad, search is subpar compared to even simple google searches, information is silo'd, its yet another place that can potentially leak PII, and basically the network is a SPOF. SourceForge promised all you mention, and was backed by (at the time) the largest IPO in history..and lasted what 2-3 years before it started decaying? I remember projects scrambling to find hosting after SF - and I remember how fast everyone jumped on GitHub .. I was donating to GH from the beginning just to help prevent another SF scenario...

As for it 'hostile' - its a lot easier to do a google search and find all sorts of information streams about something, rather then having to figure out the discord server for a project, search the discord server, and still miss any info. from outside of discord. That seems more 'hostile' to me then less wall-garden systems.

Edit: last I knew, over 1K oss projects still maintain libera.chat channels

In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.

How so? You literally just open a web page, and choose a nickname. It's easier than creating a Discord account and verifying your email address and phone number.

Discord has a gradual onboarding process. If your IP isn't poisoned, and your browser looks pretty normal, you just have to enter a username and you're in with an "unclaimed account"

They'll then nag you to fill in more details as you use it. It's honestly a pretty slick way of doing onboarding.

Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.