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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 documentati

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.

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.