What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
I think it’s because it’s great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the ‘loved an image’ spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.
Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn’t do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I’ve used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.
It’s just useful enough as a community tool.
Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.
I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.
This is the answer.
For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that’s super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.
If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord’s pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it’s got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that’s gonna be pretty painless.
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure, and the rest well – the townspeople in the fantasy fiefdom are now animated with human souls, ready to be ruled over by the
tyrant lords, conductor,community managers.Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.
I’m reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I’m no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that’s it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that’s practically unusable for what it’s supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.