13 ms·

I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a

by serf 3y ago

I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. 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even taller than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.

redmerchant2 3y ago
Related is the content locked behind sub stack and patreon paywalls. 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.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
They didn't have to do anything but make a quality app. Look at the destruction of all the open community and the burnout of moderators trying to keep them from being ridden with spam. Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.
veave 3y ago
It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives. 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.
- AnonCoward42 3y ago
  Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.
  - veave 3y ago
    When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
    - AnonCoward42 3y ago
      I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control. So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
        noirbot 3y ago
        Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public. 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.
    - jghn 3y ago
      Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
- nerdix 3y ago
  I must be missing something fundamental because from where I'm standing, it's worse than forums in every way possible.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. 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.
  - faangsticle 3y ago
    It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.
    - bovermyer 3y ago
      I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different. Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.
      - faangsticle 3y ago
        The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable
    - bovermyer 3y ago
      I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'. Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.
- doix 3y ago
  My friends and I still use IRC (for text) and mumble(for voice chat), I'm guessing as long as they are still maintained or if the source still compiles, we'll probably keep using them. 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.
  - rjbwork 3y ago
    >There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them. 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 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.
    - juki 3y ago
      Images can also be turned off under "Text & Images" in the settings.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  IRC was way better (and you had your choice of client) for programming communities. 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.
Filligree 3y ago
> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. 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.
- chx 3y ago
  I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. 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.
  - vicktour 3y ago
    I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
    - chx 3y ago
      > I wish it would actually work on Linux. 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.
- Levitz 3y ago
  Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.
  - xattt 3y ago
    Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Gamefaqs and the surprisingly decent Steam forums are still able to answer any questions I have.
dandellion 3y ago
Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.
- coldpie 3y ago
  I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.
- sneak 3y ago
  It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever. 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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.
Ekaros 3y ago
I'm not entirely sure people even want the content to be discoverable by search engines. Or care for that matter. 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.
- kmmlng 3y ago
  Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.
dekervin 3y ago
I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users. 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.
j_crick 3y ago
Damn, I miss what.cd so much.
lezojeda 3y ago
[dead]
IE6 3y ago
> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. 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.
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?
  - IE6 3y ago
    EverQuest
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  FWIW we used to do 72 people EQ1 raids fine with vent. Although i think someone was paying 5-10$/month for it. Often another 20-30 in some other channels as well.
seydor 3y ago
reddit was so bad and so politically onesided that people couldnt talk anymore, it did not evolve, so a lot of people migrated 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
newZWhoDis 3y ago
Discord growth hack (that somehow slack has still not figured out) is making a stupid-easy shareable link that anyone can click to join your server. It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).
dmortin 3y ago
> I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Same reason Reddit locked down their API. AI training models. Reddit's traffic has been on a down trend over last six months as people consult GPT instead of googling "search term" + reddit.com .
  - dmortin 3y ago
    Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.
- notamy 3y ago
  Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.
i_am_jl 3y ago
>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. 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.
fndex 3y ago
I think one reason Discord is so popular and many people don't talk about is the same reason why games like Minecraft, Tibia, GTA San Andreas and many other old games are still popular today. 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.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Are you referring to bots?
  - fndex 3y ago
    Yes.
SinParadise 3y ago
Zoom is said to be easy to use for voip, but I found discord to be vastly superior in terms of ease of use and config. 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.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability. 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)
bluehatbrit 3y ago
If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something. 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.
jliptzin 3y ago
All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.
dhkk 3y ago
Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC
- TAForObvReasons 3y ago
  Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.
vkou 3y ago
Exactly what knowledge is locked up behind discord's walled garden? As a knowledge repository, it's utter garbage, and always has been.
judge2020 3y ago
There's a different feel for something like Reddit, where you know your messages will be on google next day and easily searchable, and Discord, where technically your messages are still a permanent record, but the difficulty for someone to do something like find everything you've chatted about is much higher with search engines out of the picture. Communities are communities but typically the discussions within them aren't 100% in a reddit-like thread style where each message is an attempt to add to the discussion. This feel means the vast majority of Discord users are participating in chat and talk, while Reddit HN etc. likely follow the 90-9-1 rule (90% are lurkers, 9% will reply, 1% will post original content).
aceazzameen 3y ago
There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either. 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.

by serf 3y ago

redmerchant2 3y ago

Related is the content locked behind sub stack and patreon paywalls. 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.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

They didn't have to do anything but make a quality app. Look at the destruction of all the open community and the burnout of moderators trying to keep them from being ridden with spam. Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.

veave 3y ago

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives. 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.

AnonCoward42 3y ago
Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.
- veave 3y ago
  When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
  - AnonCoward42 3y ago
    I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control. So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
      - noirbot 3y ago
        Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public. 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.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
nerdix 3y ago
I must be missing something fundamental because from where I'm standing, it's worse than forums in every way possible.
bovermyer 3y ago
Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. 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.
- faangsticle 3y ago
  It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.
  - bovermyer 3y ago
    I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different. Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.
    - faangsticle 3y ago
      The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable
  - bovermyer 3y ago
    I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'. Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.
doix 3y ago
My friends and I still use IRC (for text) and mumble(for voice chat), I'm guessing as long as they are still maintained or if the source still compiles, we'll probably keep using them. 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.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  >There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them. 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 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.
  - juki 3y ago
    Images can also be turned off under "Text & Images" in the settings.
isaacremuant 3y ago
IRC was way better (and you had your choice of client) for programming communities. 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.

Filligree 3y ago

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. 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.

chx 3y ago
I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. 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.
- vicktour 3y ago
  I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
  - chx 3y ago
    > I wish it would actually work on Linux. 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.
Levitz 3y ago
Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.
- xattt 3y ago
  Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.

WeylandYutani 3y ago

Gamefaqs and the surprisingly decent Steam forums are still able to answer any questions I have.

dandellion 3y ago

Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.

coldpie 3y ago
I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.
bluecalm 3y ago
You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.
sneak 3y ago
It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever. 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.
lolinder 3y ago
I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.
- imtringued 3y ago
  It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.

Ekaros 3y ago

I'm not entirely sure people even want the content to be discoverable by search engines. Or care for that matter. 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.

kmmlng 3y ago
Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.

dekervin 3y ago

I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users. 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.

j_crick 3y ago

Damn, I miss what.cd so much.

lezojeda 3y ago

[dead]

IE6 3y ago

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. 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.

shiftpgdn 3y ago
Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?
- IE6 3y ago
  EverQuest
dontupvoteme 3y ago
FWIW we used to do 72 people EQ1 raids fine with vent. Although i think someone was paying 5-10$/month for it. Often another 20-30 in some other channels as well.

seydor 3y ago

reddit was so bad and so politically onesided that people couldnt talk anymore, it did not evolve, so a lot of people migrated 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

newZWhoDis 3y ago

Discord growth hack (that somehow slack has still not figured out) is making a stupid-easy shareable link that anyone can click to join your server. It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).

dmortin 3y ago

> I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?

shiftpgdn 3y ago
Same reason Reddit locked down their API. AI training models. Reddit's traffic has been on a down trend over last six months as people consult GPT instead of googling "search term" + reddit.com .
- dmortin 3y ago
  Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.
notamy 3y ago
Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.

i_am_jl 3y ago

>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. 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.

fndex 3y ago

I think one reason Discord is so popular and many people don't talk about is the same reason why games like Minecraft, Tibia, GTA San Andreas and many other old games are still popular today. 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.

ShamelessC 3y ago
Are you referring to bots?
- fndex 3y ago
  Yes.

SinParadise 3y ago

Zoom is said to be easy to use for voip, but I found discord to be vastly superior in terms of ease of use and config. 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.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability. 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)

bluehatbrit 3y ago

If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something. 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.

jliptzin 3y ago

All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.

dhkk 3y ago

Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC

TAForObvReasons 3y ago
Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.

vkou 3y ago

Exactly what knowledge is locked up behind discord's walled garden? As a knowledge repository, it's utter garbage, and always has been.

judge2020 3y ago

There's a different feel for something like Reddit, where you know your messages will be on google next day and easily searchable, and Discord, where technically your messages are still a permanent record, but the difficulty for someone to do something like find everything you've chatted about is much higher with search engines out of the picture. Communities are communities but typically the discussions within them aren't 100% in a reddit-like thread style where each message is an attempt to add to the discussion. This feel means the vast majority of Discord users are participating in chat and talk, while Reddit HN etc. likely follow the 90-9-1 rule (90% are lurkers, 9% will reply, 1% will post original content).

aceazzameen 3y ago

There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either. 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.