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

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.