It’s great for communicating among individuals and in group chats, but I think it ultimately fails as a platform between creators and fans even though it seems like every creator or product team has one these days.
Let’s say you’re a server admin and you push updates to an #announcements channel. If people want to then discuss those updates, they have to go to a completely different channel. Unless there’s one specifically for talking about announcements, that conversation is going to be mixed in with a bunch of other stuff. Sure, we have sub-threads now, but not all servers allow those to be created by anyone. They also disappear after being inactive for a while, so anyone looking in the future won’t know if there was an important piece of information that’s been lost.
Now let’s say you’re a regular server member and you’ve been away from a channel for a while. If you’re like me and you find it hard to follow a conversation in reverse, you need to first scroll up before you read anything. (Discord does help with this by putting you 50 messages behind, but that’s often not enough, and with no post ranking system, it’s hard to know which discussions are the most interesting without reading every single one.) Then maybe you find a question from someone that never got answered and you want to help them out. You could reply to them, but if it’s been long enough they might not see it and you’d be interrupting whatever conversation is happening at the bottom. So then you think you might try messaging them directly, but most servers don’t allow that for safety reasons which is understandable.
It just seems that at every turn, Discord can’t replicate the usefulness that traditional forums have. In a forum, everything is organized, focused, won’t disappear, you can read everything in chronological order, and when you reply to someone it doesn’t feel like you’re interrupting people.
What do you all think? Am I just bad at using Discord?
Discord hasn’t ever been trying to do what forums do; it’s an evolution of text and voice chat rooms. Discord is for synchronous, live communication, while forums are asynchronous. Information gets lost in synchronous platforms because there’s an inherent assumption that the value of that information is highest in the moment when people are communicating real-time. Getting the 50 message chat history isn’t supposed to be about catching up on what everyone was talking about last week, it’s intended to get you caught up in the conversation that’s happening now. Twitter is the same way. It’s not particularly easy to browse older conversations by design.
It’s possible the format just isn’t for you, but there are a couple things that could help. I think the most important part is finding the right size of community. I personally prefer servers in the range of 50-100 active people. I joined up with one as a part of the Reddit exodus and it quickly grew to 1,000+. Too chaotic for my taste, but I know people who love very active servers like that. Threads are designed to help with the reply problem. A large server that doesn’t permit threads is probably not one you want to be a part of unless it has a mod team that’s very on top of things.
Good channel and role organization is also important, but unfortunately a lot of the good tools are third-party. Because not everyone has the same tools, it can be challenging to find a server that’s well-organized. For example, there a tool that allows people to highlight a specific message, listing a history of selected messages in a non-chat channel. If a server is good at using it, that sort of thing might help you catch up. Another thing we could see soon (if it’s not happening already) is generative AI posting daily summaries of conversations.
It took me a while to get comfortable enough to contribute at will in my favorite Discord servers and not feel like I was interrupting. Cultures vary greatly by server, but no matter the server, there has to be some degree of willingness to jump in.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply! I guess it does boil down to a difference in how people like to consume content. I prefer being able to get a digest or summary of interesting things to read and don’t care so much about what’s brand new. Using AI for this could work well and I’m sure we’ll see that pretty soon.
And certainly you’re right about needing a willingness to jump in. I always feel like whatever I have to say is less important than what others are doing which scares me out of posting. That’s why I like places like Lemmy where I can make a post and if people see it that’s cool, but it’s not in everyone’s face and easy to ignore.