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The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggl

by elif 2y ago

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc. It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord) It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all. If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord. Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.

dmonitor 2y ago
discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
- kibwen 2y ago
  It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine. That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
  - ZeWaka 2y ago
    Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the channel sidebar.
  - moltopoco 2y ago
    Another alternative would be to use threads more. But they are terrible in Discord, even worse than in Slack. When two Discord users are chit-chatting about their dogs all through the night, a mod should just drag-select all of these messages and put them in a "dog chat" thread. I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.
elif 2y ago
There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0] There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy. [0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI
- elif 2y ago
  I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
- api 2y ago
  Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.
  - elif 2y ago
    Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?
- stackskipton 2y ago
  I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives. I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon. Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.

by elif 2y ago

dmonitor 2y ago

discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users

jacobgkau 2y ago
I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
kibwen 2y ago
It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine. That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
- ZeWaka 2y ago
  Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the channel sidebar.
- moltopoco 2y ago
  Another alternative would be to use threads more. But they are terrible in Discord, even worse than in Slack. When two Discord users are chit-chatting about their dogs all through the night, a mod should just drag-select all of these messages and put them in a "dog chat" thread. I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.

elif 2y ago

There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0] There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy. [0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI

elif 2y ago
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
api 2y ago
Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.
- elif 2y ago
  Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?
stackskipton 2y ago
I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives. I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon. Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.