6 ms·

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 th

by 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
      I sympathize, but also realize that liking text message boards is an increasingly niche opinion as people are raised on Tiktok and Twtich 1and Instagram and whatnot. I'm not going to say "kids these days are too lazy to read", but it's clear that focusing on fast chat feeds and pictures/videos is a lot more addictive and monetizeable than text. until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.
    - xp84 3y ago
      I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages. Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.
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.

by veave 3y ago

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
    I sympathize, but also realize that liking text message boards is an increasingly niche opinion as people are raised on Tiktok and Twtich 1and Instagram and whatnot. I'm not going to say "kids these days are too lazy to read", but it's clear that focusing on fast chat feeds and pictures/videos is a lot more addictive and monetizeable than text. until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.
  - xp84 3y ago
    I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages. Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.

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.