> 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 at

> Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10 subchannels. It quickly becomes impossible to follow up. It seems it's by design, it's another attempt of attention hacking. The most effective Discords I’m in have 1-5 channels. They’re also effective because everyone is there for a reason: Either to keep in touch with a specific group of people, or to discuss a specific topic. There seems to be an entirely different class of Discord where people are trying to create an entire community. These balloon into monstrosities with 10-100 different channels ranging from on-topic to off-topic. I have no interest in keeping up with all of the different channels or people coming and going. In the worst case I’ve seen, an initially helpful Slack was split into over 500 different channels for every possible topic. Every time someone tried to start a conversation, several people would jump in to tell the person “there’s a channel for that”. The person would join the channel, see that there were only 4 people in it, and give up. I left when it felt like 50% of the discussions were about policing which topics could be discussed in which channel. In the larger discords, the conversations seem to be dominated by a small fraction of chronically online users who involve themselves in every conversation. It’s very clearly a replacement for social interaction at that point. A lot of these seem to spring up in conjunction with people building e-mail lists and trying to amass Twitter followers.