Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:
stop using discord for your open source communities
That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.
Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.
This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.
I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.
A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.
I almost never see someone link to a Discord past conversation on fixing an issue/problem solving. It’s a one-way black hole.
I wonder if it’s due to younger people’s lack of understanding file structure. All modern operating systems offer the user the blackhole theory of storage where you just plop all of your files into one big unorganized storage bin.
It’s so bad that computer science students are entering college without understanding what folders/ directories are.
So it makes sense that people who use discord are comfortable with the idea of just having one big pile of discussions instead of having them broken up separately.
Unfortunately, it’s a big mess to navigate.
Absolutely. You can’t really search Discord communities and it is genuinely bad if you want to keep some important information for others to use. Channels were messy enough and the introduction of threads has made things even worse. I was once a moderator of a Discord server and I can say that moderation capabilities are (edit: were?) also very limited to the point where moderating a relatively active (2k+ members) server was getting a 24/7 job and we had like 7 mods(!).
I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them? Moreover, why do so many open-source oriented communities (e.g. pine64) use the proprietary platform that is Discord? The only reason I see is solely the fact that Discord is very well known, and many people use it. And the situation is getting even worse: as far as I am aware Discord, which was initially created for communication between gamers, was widely used during the pandemic for online classes and a lot of development teams even use it as an alternative to Slack.
I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.
But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.
If you were trying to manage a server with 2k active users 7 mods isn’t all that much. Assuming for a moment this was a little while ago (discord did release some pretty nifty mod tools over the last year or so) and you had not set anything up in regards to third party bots.
With the newest discord modtools in addition with third party bots discord is in my experience very good to manage for a chat platform. Certainly much easier than IRC ever was and still is for that matter.
Of course not all 2k were active but the server definitely had a very active and dedicated core of users and we had many newbies joining almost everyday. The worst I remember, actually, was when one of our admins decided to promote the project on TikTok (for some reason) and his content was blessed by the algorithm. It was a literal meat grinder.
I’m not sure if there was even something that could have been automated. Like, of course you could automate banning raiders or spammers, iirc we had that, but what is there to automate when you’re dealing with plain xenophobia/racism/homophobia (and this was not a rare occasion)? Introducing word filters might work in some contexts but this was not the case since it was a very multilingual server. Well, server-wide filters would be useless, channel-wide filters could be helpful, though, but I doubt there is a way to implement them without bots, unless Discord introduced such capabilities.
Good to hear that a lot has now changed for the better though but it would not really improve my experience back then simply because the community of discord servers can sometimes be pretty awful. Maybe it’ll go away as Discord is getting way more mainstream nowadays but even just a few years ago it was a very specific kind of people that joined Discord and they were not always nice.
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