13 ms·

Against Discord Channels

140 points by bb010g 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago
some more discussion 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832
WalterGR 5y ago
2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832
drawqrtz 5y ago
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.
FastEatSlow 5y ago
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.
lmm 5y ago
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.
loa_in_ 5y ago
> 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.
- karmanyaahm 5y ago
  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.
burnished 5y ago
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.
vkoskiv 5y ago
> discord servers are usually social spaces; I’m more interested in the people in them than the particular topics they’re talking about. I'm more interested in the topics. That's why I went to that discord server and that channel. To go read about that topic.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  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. Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.
  - fny 5y ago
    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.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      proboards ? 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.
    - grey_earthling 5y ago
      Is it interoperable when you don't have an account with the Discord company?
  - Jach 5y ago
    Power-tripping mods aren't anything new. 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.
iamevn 5y ago
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.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Is the general discussion channel the main channel that is not muted? Where 90% of activity is happening? Or something different?
delusional 5y ago
> 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.
rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago
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. Everything old is new again, I guess?
- eqmvii 5y ago
  I fought this battle and lost many times. More sub forums just means fewer eyeballs on any given topic…
- nerdponx 5y ago
  This, exactly. I'm astounded that people think it's some kind of attention-hacking conspiracy.
- bitshiftfaced 5y ago
  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.
- indymike 5y ago
  Mega-thread vs. subforum, the debate still rages.
cblconfederate 5y ago
You should be against discord to begin with. Channels are just a part of it.
ravenstine 5y ago
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.
ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
> 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?
kumarvvr 5y ago
Most Discord channels are created with specific topics in mind, and a few very generalized ones thrown around for everything else.
keithnz 5y ago
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.
madeofpalk 5y ago
I run a small social Discord with about 15 people, probably 10 active. Looking at our discord: General, Destiny, Minecraft, Minecraft server A, Minecraft server B. No one's too fussy about what goes where, but it's just useful to have channels as the context.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  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.
  - badwolf 5y ago
    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.
markshepard 5y ago
The way we use airsend (https://www.airsend.io 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.
imwillofficial 5y ago
This was painful to read.
jokoon 5y ago
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.
- theelous3 5y ago
  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.
  - packetlost 5y ago
    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.'
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    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.
Philip-J-Fry 5y 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.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  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.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    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.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      Discord is not real time communication, it's notification-based, asynchronous communication a bit faster than reddit, but mostly not like IRC.
- julianlam 5y ago
  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 ... So it's just cost cutting from up above.
throaway46546 5y ago
I hate discord. It is centralized. It's UI is terrible. It is buggy with terrible performance issues. Unfortunately I am forced to use it.
- 4ad 5y ago
  Same, except I am also forced to use Slack, which is worse.
- loo 5y ago
  It has better performance and UI than Element, for my money.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Cool. I love it.
loo 5y ago
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.
dan_pixelflow 5y ago
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. [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-Threads-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-... [2] https://discord.com/blog/announcing-the-discord-moderator-academy-exam https://discord.com/blog/announcing-the-discord-moderator-ac... [3] https://discord.com/moderation https://discord.com/moderation
4ad 5y ago
Channels are bad enough (for the reason explained in the post), but slack threads (also available now on discord) are another level of evil.
julianlam 5y ago
> * 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 :)
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  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.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    > 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.
lewisflude 5y ago
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.
Graffur 5y ago
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.
- agd 5y ago
  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.
- borepop 5y ago
  Agreed. I've tried several times to use Discord and find the entire experience to be a clunky, spammy mess. The interface is awful.
civilized 5y ago
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?
- exciteabletom 5y ago
  The post says: "discord just doesn’t scale well, because it lacks good threading" However, they recently added threads[1] where users can start small temporary channels for discussions. [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Threads https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Thr...
  - civilized 5y ago
    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.)
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      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.
animesh 5y ago
I love the ADHD notice. I would love to steal it at least in the spirit.
gren236 5y ago
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.
newbamboo 5y ago
I’m sad for those who use discord. It represents all that has gone wrong in tech. And fools don’t even know better.
topaz0 5y ago
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.
quartesixte 5y ago
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.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Telegram is an example, see Durov's group when Durov makes an announcement, conversation is almost imposible to follow.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Durov's announcement comments are like Twitch chat. Utter chaos with no rhyme or reason.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
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.
- bb010g 5y ago
  Can you set your account up to use TOTP codes instead?
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    heh... well, I don't know since I can't log into the account anymore.
Macha 5y ago
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.
dimgl 5y ago
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.
infinitezest 5y ago
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.

140 points by bb010g 5y ago

some more discussion 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832

WalterGR 5y ago

2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29107832

drawqrtz 5y ago

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.

FastEatSlow 5y ago

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.

lmm 5y ago

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.

loa_in_ 5y ago

> 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.

karmanyaahm 5y ago
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.

burnished 5y ago

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.

vkoskiv 5y ago

> discord servers are usually social spaces; I’m more interested in the people in them than the particular topics they’re talking about. I'm more interested in the topics. That's why I went to that discord server and that channel. To go read about that topic.

agumonkey 5y ago
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. Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.
- fny 5y ago
  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.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    proboards ? 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.
  - grey_earthling 5y ago
    Is it interoperable when you don't have an account with the Discord company?
- Jach 5y ago
  Power-tripping mods aren't anything new. 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.

iamevn 5y ago

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.

skinnymuch 5y ago
Is the general discussion channel the main channel that is not muted? Where 90% of activity is happening? Or something different?

delusional 5y ago

> 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.

rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago

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. Everything old is new again, I guess?

eqmvii 5y ago
I fought this battle and lost many times. More sub forums just means fewer eyeballs on any given topic…
nerdponx 5y ago
This, exactly. I'm astounded that people think it's some kind of attention-hacking conspiracy.
bitshiftfaced 5y ago
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.
indymike 5y ago
Mega-thread vs. subforum, the debate still rages.

cblconfederate 5y ago

You should be against discord to begin with. Channels are just a part of it.

ravenstine 5y ago

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.

ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago

> 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?

kumarvvr 5y ago

Most Discord channels are created with specific topics in mind, and a few very generalized ones thrown around for everything else.

keithnz 5y ago

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.

madeofpalk 5y ago

I run a small social Discord with about 15 people, probably 10 active. Looking at our discord: General, Destiny, Minecraft, Minecraft server A, Minecraft server B. No one's too fussy about what goes where, but it's just useful to have channels as the context.

TheFreim 5y ago
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.
- badwolf 5y ago
  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.

markshepard 5y ago

The way we use airsend (https://www.airsend.io 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.

imwillofficial 5y ago

This was painful to read.

jokoon 5y ago

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.

theelous3 5y ago
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.
- packetlost 5y ago
  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.'
- MereInterest 5y ago
  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.

Philip-J-Fry 5y 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.

cblconfederate 5y ago
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.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  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.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Discord is not real time communication, it's notification-based, asynchronous communication a bit faster than reddit, but mostly not like IRC.
julianlam 5y ago
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 ... So it's just cost cutting from up above.

throaway46546 5y ago

I hate discord. It is centralized. It's UI is terrible. It is buggy with terrible performance issues. Unfortunately I am forced to use it.

4ad 5y ago
Same, except I am also forced to use Slack, which is worse.
loo 5y ago
It has better performance and UI than Element, for my money.
Kiro 5y ago
Cool. I love it.

loo 5y ago

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.

dan_pixelflow 5y ago

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. [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-Threads-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-... [2] https://discord.com/blog/announcing-the-discord-moderator-academy-exam https://discord.com/blog/announcing-the-discord-moderator-ac... [3] https://discord.com/moderation https://discord.com/moderation

4ad 5y ago

Channels are bad enough (for the reason explained in the post), but slack threads (also available now on discord) are another level of evil.

julianlam 5y ago

> * 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 :)

mumblemumble 5y ago
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.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  > 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.

lewisflude 5y ago

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.

Graffur 5y ago

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.

agd 5y ago
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.
borepop 5y ago
Agreed. I've tried several times to use Discord and find the entire experience to be a clunky, spammy mess. The interface is awful.

civilized 5y ago

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?

exciteabletom 5y ago
The post says: "discord just doesn’t scale well, because it lacks good threading" However, they recently added threads[1] where users can start small temporary channels for discussions. [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Threads https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Thr...
- civilized 5y ago
  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.)
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    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.

animesh 5y ago

I love the ADHD notice. I would love to steal it at least in the spirit.

gren236 5y ago

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.

newbamboo 5y ago

I’m sad for those who use discord. It represents all that has gone wrong in tech. And fools don’t even know better.

topaz0 5y ago

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.

quartesixte 5y ago

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.

stiltzkin 5y ago
Telegram is an example, see Durov's group when Durov makes an announcement, conversation is almost imposible to follow.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Durov's announcement comments are like Twitch chat. Utter chaos with no rhyme or reason.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

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.

bb010g 5y ago
Can you set your account up to use TOTP codes instead?
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  heh... well, I don't know since I can't log into the account anymore.

Macha 5y ago

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.

dimgl 5y ago

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.

infinitezest 5y ago

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.