3 ms·

Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the bur

Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.

hardware2win 3y ago
Maybe support for rich media types
Laremere 3y ago
I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.
zeku 3y ago
Generally the "replace reddit" combo is: Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
I think Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.

hardware2win 3y ago

Maybe support for rich media types

Laremere 3y ago

I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.

zeku 3y ago

Generally the "replace reddit" combo is: Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.

ssnistfajen 3y ago

I think Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.