16 ms·

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years

by kemayo 3y ago

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years. Discord's fine for what it is, but it's also a fundamentally different thing than social media or forums or a support-site. Projects that try to funnel everything onto Discord are (a) losing anyone who thinks joining an 800 person chatroom doesn't sound fun, and (b) always seem to wind up being very irritable at people who join and immediately ask all 800 people their common question, despite Discord being extremely poorly searchable.

reactordev 3y ago
Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.
  - bsder 3y ago
    Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass. So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.
      - bsder 3y ago
        In what way do those solve "have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc."? The technical authentication is the easy part. It's dealing with the humans that is the hard part.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Okta is a SaaS offering that does that. Maybe not fraud. What is fraud in this context? Spam? Check. Lost passwords? Check. Let someone else deal with auth? Check. All of those are either services or software you can host yourself that provide auth and user management, OTPs, 2FA, email recovery, forgotten passwords, single-sign on, and more.
        judge2020 3y ago
        > Spam? Check In what way? verification emails don't count. And for many servers where spam and troll accounts is a problem, custom bots and new member screening features deal with this - since they don't want to spend every waking moment staring at the server and banning people who join and immediately cause issues.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Okta recently partnered with a few folks to tackle this. They published a thing [1] in April. Fraudulent registrations and bots are being screened using Shape which was acquired by F5 [2]. I'm not saying this problem has been solved, but it's an area of active concentration. For most folks, the offerings are more than adequate. For the top saas or platforms, you'll probably always have this issue as you're a lucrative target. [1] https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections [2] https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense
- pengaru 3y ago
  And yet, the new generation is (mis)using it for collaboration purposes, without realizing everything they're losing in the process.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    When you want your friends to try your app but you end up with a whole support system inside discord, that’s how it happens. You’re hanging with your friends playing games, you show them that side project you’ve been working on, they all love it and it grows into a shit show of channels, rules, bots, response emoji’s to indicate intent, merging with other servers, with a whole new set of rules, channels, bots, mods. It’s unprofessional. AI tools that rely on Discord as their delivery, unprofessional. Possibly even down right illegal. Not the act of using a bot, but what service they offer through that bot.
- dsir 3y ago
  Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that. I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages. https://sociables.com/ https://sociables.com/
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    What if I specifically like the fact that the communities are siloed on Discord? I don't want people from other circles accidentally ending up on my community just because they were bored and were browsing. I don't want my Discord server ending up on the results of some global search either.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  I find it utterly insufferable. I, a very technically capable person, really struggle with using Discord. I can’t help but feel that people that misuse Discord in this way are doing it from a place from extreme ignorance and hubris. It is so blatantly not intended or appropriate for what a bunch of people use it for. The only thing it has going for it is that the person setting up the community knows how to use it. It is utterly inscrutable from the perspective of an outsider, trying to look past all the stuff that is at the very least using gamer jargon, if not functionally built explicitly for gamers in a way that is not useful for others. REALLY cynically, I think that Discord has a feature set that the admin / moderator / power user functionality of Discord gets a particular sort of controlling “community manager” very excited. They can have their bots and username colours and whatever else set up just the way they like them, usually in a way that people don’t really care about. A means of a power-seeker to tinker around with community dynamics in a way that is far from having an in-person analogue.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    So long as you have the nitro. I’m with you and I think it’s entirely ignorance and hubris. To be fair to discord, I think they know this. They know their product market fit, they know their audience. Their customers are those community managers that like shiny things and surveillance powers. The fault is entirely on those community managers thinking their customers would like it too.
    - gaws 3y ago
      > So long as you have the nitro. What do you mean? Nitro doesn't offer much besides using cross-server emojis and custom profiles.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        Do you run a community on Discord? Nitro levels enable more community features. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-Server-Boosting-FAQ- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
- WA 3y ago
  IRC…? ICQ was mostly 1:1 conversations.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    ICQ had rooms as well
- thefz 3y ago
  Exactly my use case. I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. We post stupid stuff or interesting things to read. Some days pass by with zero messages, some are frenzied. We get in voice channels and chat and game together. I am a guest in other similarly sized circles' discord servers and this way I keep in touch with different groups. For this use case, Discord is gold. And I happily pay for Nitro. For anything else like searching a wiki, it sucks, but it is not its use case.
  - gaws 3y ago
    > I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. This sounds cozy. Can I join?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Common internet fact: people can and will use the most popular platform for features it was actively not designed for. Hence, dozens long twitter rants that should have been a blog, imageboards being used for news, and closed off chatrooms being used to more or less house arcane knowledge, some documented and some not. Not much you can do there.
Cloudef 3y ago
back to the irc
extr 3y ago
One way that Discord is similar to Reddit (and, imo, a reason for it's relative success) is that it operates on the same authorization model. A single pseudonymous account gets you access to many disparate communities. In either case, once you have an account the activation energy needed to join that subreddit/server is very low.
sundvor 3y ago
I manage a Discord server for a few friends, topics are gaming related (DCS World primarily, but also Star Citizen and iRacing) - could easily be other hobbies. I have structured the channels to support the learning journey that DCS is. I absolutely love it, so incredibly useful. It's very easy to share resources, pictures - anything. The voice chat is also superb, just hop into a fixed hangout channel that anyone can join. I'll often just go into one early in the night, so that my friends (all over the world) can see me and hop on if they want. I have joined server vendor specific discord servers, as well as racing league ones. The fact that they are invitation based is perfect. Furthermore the scan on screen QR code with phone to sign in on desktop merits special mention, another massive usability win. I specifically love how siloed it is or can be. Sure there is a lot of fluff they're putting in (game stuff in the message editor etc) which I just ignore; I can only hope they never change this core design and turn it into way more than it is now. (Have been using it heavily since 2020, but started before then - fwiw. It absolutely helped me get through some of the strictest lock downs in the western world. Oh and I'm in my fifties, been on computers since the Vic20. I pay for Premium, and also for my early teenage son who uses it with his friends).
numpad0 3y ago
Glad I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with Discord, especially in the vicinity of that point (a). To me, Discord feels tainted with weird masculism or toxic kind of gamerism that isn't my kind.
- deprecative 3y ago
  How does a chat platform have any sort of nonsense like that? You're projecting or joining shit servers. It's a technology. It's neutral.
dormento 3y ago
We use Discord at my company. It was a compromise between us graybeards wanting email + issue tracker only and the new people wanting... Discord.
- gaws 3y ago
  > the new people wanting... Discord. Had they never heard of Slack?
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Doesn't slack have most of the same problems?
themensch 3y ago
The problem as I see it, as a heavy Discord user as well as a mod and admin for some moderately large communities, isn't that Discord isn't searchable - it's just the people are generally too lazy to do so. Often (and by often, I mean _daily_) I see people join a server, skip past the FAQ channel, and ask the same question the person above them asked. Said user would have had their answer had they: - read the FAQ - used the search - scrolled up just a little bit I don't disagree that the walled garden of Discord could use search improvements, but the users themselves bear much of the responsibility for the perceived distaste of the tool and I have yet to see a solution that isn't perceived as "mean" when people are directed, even gently, to try the aforementioned methods for seeking an answer.
eurusd 3y ago
The entire 3D printing community has switched to discord there is no more forum, blogs or something else; even reddit was not able to compete with discord, and that was before the blackout in June. Since then, a lot of 3D printing subreddits are closed or only accessible in archive mode. So what does it means in practice? I have 30 different discord servers on the 3D printing topic (across the others i use for gaming or friends), each with 50+ different channels, not counting subchannels. For the Voron 3D Printing, i have the official Discord + 4 other fans discords including 3 in my local language. You cannot read everything, as chats are mixing high quality information but also random chats not usefull. Some discords are only available if you pay a montly fee on Patreon Some discords are completely empty but make a "news announcement" some times to times that is not published elsewhere that is why i keep them in my list You have to manually pickup the notification otherwise some servers are constantly spamming. Of course you cannot search across all discords at the same time and discord is picky with typos so if you search "pizze" across the pizza-discordverse you will get nothing specifically for each precise component reference, you have to search the servers 1 by 1, this is really painfull Discord is trying to create their version of reddit threads but that is shitty and not usefull in practice It was a fantastic platform back to the covid period but now it's becoming very complex and not usable; the main pain point is that (as instagram) is it not indexed on any search engine.

by kemayo 3y ago

reactordev 3y ago

Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.

nocoiner 3y ago
I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.
- bsder 3y ago
  Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass. So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.
    - bsder 3y ago
      In what way do those solve "have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc."? The technical authentication is the easy part. It's dealing with the humans that is the hard part.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        Okta is a SaaS offering that does that. Maybe not fraud. What is fraud in this context? Spam? Check. Lost passwords? Check. Let someone else deal with auth? Check. All of those are either services or software you can host yourself that provide auth and user management, OTPs, 2FA, email recovery, forgotten passwords, single-sign on, and more.
        judge2020 3y ago
        > Spam? Check In what way? verification emails don't count. And for many servers where spam and troll accounts is a problem, custom bots and new member screening features deal with this - since they don't want to spend every waking moment staring at the server and banning people who join and immediately cause issues.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Okta recently partnered with a few folks to tackle this. They published a thing [1] in April. Fraudulent registrations and bots are being screened using Shape which was acquired by F5 [2]. I'm not saying this problem has been solved, but it's an area of active concentration. For most folks, the offerings are more than adequate. For the top saas or platforms, you'll probably always have this issue as you're a lucrative target. [1] https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections [2] https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense
pengaru 3y ago
And yet, the new generation is (mis)using it for collaboration purposes, without realizing everything they're losing in the process.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  When you want your friends to try your app but you end up with a whole support system inside discord, that’s how it happens. You’re hanging with your friends playing games, you show them that side project you’ve been working on, they all love it and it grows into a shit show of channels, rules, bots, response emoji’s to indicate intent, merging with other servers, with a whole new set of rules, channels, bots, mods. It’s unprofessional. AI tools that rely on Discord as their delivery, unprofessional. Possibly even down right illegal. Not the act of using a bot, but what service they offer through that bot.
dsir 3y ago
Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that. I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages. https://sociables.com/ https://sociables.com/
- theshrike79 3y ago
  What if I specifically like the fact that the communities are siloed on Discord? I don't want people from other circles accidentally ending up on my community just because they were bored and were browsing. I don't want my Discord server ending up on the results of some global search either.
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
I find it utterly insufferable. I, a very technically capable person, really struggle with using Discord. I can’t help but feel that people that misuse Discord in this way are doing it from a place from extreme ignorance and hubris. It is so blatantly not intended or appropriate for what a bunch of people use it for. The only thing it has going for it is that the person setting up the community knows how to use it. It is utterly inscrutable from the perspective of an outsider, trying to look past all the stuff that is at the very least using gamer jargon, if not functionally built explicitly for gamers in a way that is not useful for others. REALLY cynically, I think that Discord has a feature set that the admin / moderator / power user functionality of Discord gets a particular sort of controlling “community manager” very excited. They can have their bots and username colours and whatever else set up just the way they like them, usually in a way that people don’t really care about. A means of a power-seeker to tinker around with community dynamics in a way that is far from having an in-person analogue.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  So long as you have the nitro. I’m with you and I think it’s entirely ignorance and hubris. To be fair to discord, I think they know this. They know their product market fit, they know their audience. Their customers are those community managers that like shiny things and surveillance powers. The fault is entirely on those community managers thinking their customers would like it too.
  - gaws 3y ago
    > So long as you have the nitro. What do you mean? Nitro doesn't offer much besides using cross-server emojis and custom profiles.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      Do you run a community on Discord? Nitro levels enable more community features. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-Server-Boosting-FAQ- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
WA 3y ago
IRC…? ICQ was mostly 1:1 conversations.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  ICQ had rooms as well
thefz 3y ago
Exactly my use case. I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. We post stupid stuff or interesting things to read. Some days pass by with zero messages, some are frenzied. We get in voice channels and chat and game together. I am a guest in other similarly sized circles' discord servers and this way I keep in touch with different groups. For this use case, Discord is gold. And I happily pay for Nitro. For anything else like searching a wiki, it sucks, but it is not its use case.
- gaws 3y ago
  > I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. This sounds cozy. Can I join?
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Common internet fact: people can and will use the most popular platform for features it was actively not designed for. Hence, dozens long twitter rants that should have been a blog, imageboards being used for news, and closed off chatrooms being used to more or less house arcane knowledge, some documented and some not. Not much you can do there.

Cloudef 3y ago

back to the irc

extr 3y ago

One way that Discord is similar to Reddit (and, imo, a reason for it's relative success) is that it operates on the same authorization model. A single pseudonymous account gets you access to many disparate communities. In either case, once you have an account the activation energy needed to join that subreddit/server is very low.

sundvor 3y ago

I manage a Discord server for a few friends, topics are gaming related (DCS World primarily, but also Star Citizen and iRacing) - could easily be other hobbies. I have structured the channels to support the learning journey that DCS is. I absolutely love it, so incredibly useful. It's very easy to share resources, pictures - anything. The voice chat is also superb, just hop into a fixed hangout channel that anyone can join. I'll often just go into one early in the night, so that my friends (all over the world) can see me and hop on if they want. I have joined server vendor specific discord servers, as well as racing league ones. The fact that they are invitation based is perfect. Furthermore the scan on screen QR code with phone to sign in on desktop merits special mention, another massive usability win. I specifically love how siloed it is or can be. Sure there is a lot of fluff they're putting in (game stuff in the message editor etc) which I just ignore; I can only hope they never change this core design and turn it into way more than it is now. (Have been using it heavily since 2020, but started before then - fwiw. It absolutely helped me get through some of the strictest lock downs in the western world. Oh and I'm in my fifties, been on computers since the Vic20. I pay for Premium, and also for my early teenage son who uses it with his friends).

numpad0 3y ago

Glad I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with Discord, especially in the vicinity of that point (a). To me, Discord feels tainted with weird masculism or toxic kind of gamerism that isn't my kind.

deprecative 3y ago
How does a chat platform have any sort of nonsense like that? You're projecting or joining shit servers. It's a technology. It's neutral.

dormento 3y ago

We use Discord at my company. It was a compromise between us graybeards wanting email + issue tracker only and the new people wanting... Discord.

gaws 3y ago
> the new people wanting... Discord. Had they never heard of Slack?
- bmicraft 3y ago
  Doesn't slack have most of the same problems?

themensch 3y ago

The problem as I see it, as a heavy Discord user as well as a mod and admin for some moderately large communities, isn't that Discord isn't searchable - it's just the people are generally too lazy to do so. Often (and by often, I mean _daily_) I see people join a server, skip past the FAQ channel, and ask the same question the person above them asked. Said user would have had their answer had they: - read the FAQ - used the search - scrolled up just a little bit I don't disagree that the walled garden of Discord could use search improvements, but the users themselves bear much of the responsibility for the perceived distaste of the tool and I have yet to see a solution that isn't perceived as "mean" when people are directed, even gently, to try the aforementioned methods for seeking an answer.

eurusd 3y ago

The entire 3D printing community has switched to discord there is no more forum, blogs or something else; even reddit was not able to compete with discord, and that was before the blackout in June. Since then, a lot of 3D printing subreddits are closed or only accessible in archive mode. So what does it means in practice? I have 30 different discord servers on the 3D printing topic (across the others i use for gaming or friends), each with 50+ different channels, not counting subchannels. For the Voron 3D Printing, i have the official Discord + 4 other fans discords including 3 in my local language. You cannot read everything, as chats are mixing high quality information but also random chats not usefull. Some discords are only available if you pay a montly fee on Patreon Some discords are completely empty but make a "news announcement" some times to times that is not published elsewhere that is why i keep them in my list You have to manually pickup the notification otherwise some servers are constantly spamming. Of course you cannot search across all discords at the same time and discord is picky with typos so if you search "pizze" across the pizza-discordverse you will get nothing specifically for each precise component reference, you have to search the servers 1 by 1, this is really painfull Discord is trying to create their version of reddit threads but that is shitty and not usefull in practice It was a fantastic platform back to the covid period but now it's becoming very complex and not usable; the main pain point is that (as instagram) is it not indexed on any search engine.