Against Discord Channels | Hacker News Reader

Against Discord Channels

becca.ooo

19 pointsLordAtlas10 comments

The worst part for me is "unread message" indicators. I'm the type of person that cannot bear having such an indicator or notification left unread/unopened. I see a dot on a channel and I generally have more internal need to remove the dot than I do any need to read what happened. I know I can disable notifications with some reasonable amount of granularity, but all this does is cause me to miss things that I actually did want to read, or cause me to cycle through every channel to catch up.

At least with a single channel I can mentally filter what I don't care about, and as long as the unread message notifier is gone I can do this fairly quickly.

I agree with everything in the article, but want to add that I believe a single channel also builds a greater sense of community at a small scale (dozens of users, not hundreds or thousands - see also Dunbar's number [0]). As the author suggests, this removes the issue of conversations splitting unnaturally into subject-appropriate sub channels. I have often seen discussion completely squashed for veering from a topic appropriate to, say, #movies, to the soundtrack of the movie ("this belongs in #ost").

I think one of the main things against having a single channel is the potential signal to noise concern, where a significant number of things simply aren't worth reading. I don't have an answer this other than keep your group small and intimate enough that what they say is relevant simply because it's said by somebody who matters to you (again see [0]). On a related note, being able to train yourself how to filter out the noise is a very useful skill, and I recommend using 4chan to develop this skill... if you have thick enough skin and fortitude of mind, that is. Don't try that if you can't follow Tyler The Creator's advice on cyberbullying [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1]: https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/28567082226430771...

On pc/web client it's unbearable. And there's no visual distinction between personal or global unread message so you're out fishing the whole server like a broken outlook mailbox to see if something was meant for you.

I prefer Discord over Slack or Google Chat. It's easier to use and you can have all servers in one page.

Still think email worked fine. People shouldn't expect (how difficult this may be) instant reactions.

Discord feels like a "better Slack", but still is a worse forum. There's so much content locked inside some Discord channels, that could be freely available if only it was on a basic phpBB.

I’m curious to see how this would work with one channel, but threads are allowed — expiring after 24h inactivity as usual, but allowing natural conversation to spring into its own section, thus allowing free-form conversation without the crowding of many conversations on one text channel.

(Of course, there’d have to be some tweaking to avoid threads becoming glorified channels with slightly different disadvantages.

I agree. If I join a Discord group with dozens of channels, more likely than not, I'll forget about it and eventually leave. IRC did well with one or a handful of channels for each topic (maybe #topic, #topic-dev, #topic-botspam).

> discord just doesn’t scale well

I agree, and IRC was the same in my opinion. Small servers > large servers, at least of terms of enjoyment. Technical help-focused servers may be an exception.

I tend to agree as well. I am on like 15 servers, and all but one are muted. I check them when I need to but a bunch of them (public ones) are over-done with rooms and it's difficult to find things from the past (yes, there's search but it's inefficient compared to looking at forum threads).

To me, discord has become like the worst of both forums and irc -at least from an archival and organizational point of view.

Instant chat in general does not scale well. You get many people talking over one another, and the 'solutions' put into place, like threads and topics, just do not work well in a chat program in my opinion.

I've noticed that people cannot handle more than 2 simultaneous conversations on discord (resulting to the establishment of overflow channels and stronger offtopic rules) whereas on IRC it can be multiple things going on at the same time.

In the larger IRC channels you'll have a half dozen conversations going on at the same time simultaneously basically 24/7. I know of no other chat program that makes that even remotely workable, while in IRC it's near effortless.

I feel like that's why you often see discord servers with so many channels. If you don't split up your discord like that it becomes unmanageable to have conversations, While IRC is fine with fewer much larger channels.

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