Against Discord Channels

1. Server is used in the "classic" meaning of the word as it relates to online gaming. It's an old use of the term that probably predates about half the userbase on hn.

2. I doubt it's intentional. I don't think a lack of features is cause for an attention hacking conspiracy. Yes, all of those features you mentioned are desirable - but you can get halfway there by not having a movies channel to begin with.

Discord has never been a particularly good bit of software. That's all there is to it.

But to me, the encouragement to explore / read conversations you may have no interest in is a good thing. Just like forums.

The alternative experience on IRC can be stifling. People really do atomize their conversations there. And often avoid chatting from fear of stepping on someone's disinterested toes, or going even slightly off topic.

At least on Discord, ~everyone in a server is present in all of the channels.

So relocating a topic isn't "switch to a room with hardly anyone in it". It's more like a category move on a forum.

Getting people to join in a new channel on IRC is like pulling calcified teeth!

The most effective Discords I’m in have 1-5 channels.

They’re also effective because everyone is there for a reason: Either to keep in touch with a specific group of people, or to discuss a specific topic.

There seems to be an entirely different class of Discord where people are trying to create an entire community. These balloon into monstrosities with 10-100 different channels ranging from on-topic to off-topic. I have no interest in keeping up with all of the different channels or people coming and going.

In the worst case I’ve seen, an initially helpful Slack was split into over 500 different channels for every possible topic. Every time someone tried to start a conversation, several people would jump in to tell the person “there’s a channel for that”. The person would join the channel, see that there were only 4 people in it, and give up. I left when it felt like 50% of the discussions were about policing which topics could be discussed in which channel.

In the larger discords, the conversations seem to be dominated by a small fraction of chronically online users who involve themselves in every conversation. It’s very clearly a replacement for social interaction at that point. A lot of these seem to spring up in conjunction with people building e-mail lists and trying to amass Twitter followers.

I bet the usage of "server" came from the TeamSpeak world where you had to self-host it on your own (dedicated) server.

Of course giving away the hosting for free is going to attract users and one doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Yes, we did exactly that back in the day by running our own IRC server. I don't see what the problem is, nor do I understand the arguments in this article. Very uncompelling imo.

Spam posts need to be deleted, content needs to be checked, people need to treat each other well.

Contrast to discord, where if you find a spammer, just ban his ass. The spam message (or bad content) will already have scrolled out of view of most users ...

So it's just cost cutting from up above.

FYI, There is a setting, per server and globally, to allow DMs or require preauthorization by friend-request.

It's like saying everyone on IRC should instead host a PhpBB instance for their communities.

Low friction. Doesn't require any knowledge to get up and running so anyone can do it. Doesn't require keeping forum software up to date and all that jazz. Single account makes it trivial to join new communities, no need to set up yet another forum account.

Drag and drop uploads of images, videos etc makes it trivial to share content. Want a quick voice chat? No problem, just hop into one of the voice channels.

Reddit might have replaced the chat aspect, but they turned actively user hostile so not a fun place to be. And no trivial way to voice chat with people.

Discord ain't perfect, but there's absolutely a reason why it's so popular. Yes it started with gaming but it works so well for many other communities.

What you do instead is start with one channel about the topic of interest. If people start talking so much about "alternative topic b" that it interferes with the main topic, then (and only then) do you splinter it off to its own channel.

People can then mute that channel and boost the signal that they came there for. But it has to come from a genuine need.

My other pet peeve is when people get gung-ho over moving a currently active discussion to the "correct" channel. More times than not, it's too much trouble and just kills a discussion that would have otherwise been interesting and fruitful.

Maybe it's an age question. I don't know.

The problem is that Discord is increasingly being adopted by communities where voice isn't used and where ephemeral chat isn't helpful. E.g. All these crypto discord communities where it's impossible to find out what's going on unless you check the channel 24/7. A traditional forum would work much better for most of these cases.

The fact that Discord are trying to grow aggressively pre-IPO isn't helping.

But I also think there's a reason the pendulum swung away from them. For a social space, that aspect of permanence is a double-edged sword. It also means that your embarrassing moments are preserved for all posterity, and probably even Googleable. That creates some baseline anxiety in some people who are aware of that phenomenon, and I suspect that that is a part of the reason why flamewars were more common back in the day.

But, perhaps more insidiously, that permanence can become an engine of gatekeeping. It was so frustrating to watch the old guard on the forum I read unwittingly chase away newcomers with their endless links to old discussions. They thought they were being helpful. What they were trying to say is, "Here's some content that might interest you." But what was being heard was, "We don't need to talk about this thing you want to talk about because we've talked about it 4 times already."

And so a new generation of people naturally gravitated toward places where those sorts of things don't - can't - happen.

However, they recently added threads[1] where users can start small temporary channels for discussions.

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/tr/articles/4403205878423-Thr...

Though I think we can all agree the server bar UI is absolute garbage unusable by anyone in more than a dozen communities and needs to be punted into the solar core.

(To be clear, I do loathe communities with a hundred little channels, most of which I never even look at, and I do mute aggressively, so there are definitely client-side features missing in that regard, but I'm not blaming the community moderators for their absence.)

Many of us here have seen these tides over a long enough period to know what's coming. Young people haven't seen more than a cycle to protect themselves so they buy in to what's easiest. It's a short-term outlook.

Google Talk could have ruled the world of communication built on a real decentralized protocol but it wasn't profitable. Things that aren't profitable get shit-canned or worked over until they are profitable. Once they are profitable market incentives demand they become more profitable and then yet more profitable endlessly.

If human beings just stopped for one second and asked where's the money in this? What's the play? Well, we'd make smarter decisions all around.

Nothing more than five inches in front of our faces at all times.

I do wish we changed the incentives so we could build enduring protocols aligned with user interests.

In practice, threads are effectively the same as channels with the benefit that if people stop talking after x minutes it self-deletes/archives/disappears, but ultimately works the same where discussion gets channeled into smaller and smaller circles - policing of "this should go here", "there's a thread for that", "just make a thread" etc.

In fact it is even worse than channels because by default threads are not visible. They get hidden behind a button to even view them, and they naturally do not alert you to when a new thread is being created. It adds another layer of inaccessibility to channels that filters down the amount of people you will actually be engaging with at any one time.

I agree discord is great for being easy to use and access, but ultimately it falls apart above say a couple hundred members. At 330k members really you are better off just opening a forum, it's an insane amount of people that really I think you do struggle to develop any sense of community and I'm almost positive that there is very little meaningful interaction between your epic content creator and his fans in this discord server.

And let's be honest, discord moderators are a joke. The majority of the time people who choose or seek to be moderators, particularly in the manner you mention through a moderator "exam", are individuals that are grasping for a small sense of power to lord over people. Moderation isn't rocket science. I'm rather skeptical that it hasn't polluted your view given the way you vaguely name-drop moderating for a large community, a job that is completely thankless and likely unpaid except for in the clout you might gain by name dropping.

Having to use a bouncer or go to a website was a pain, though, and lack of redaction is a very mixed bag. With Discord's or Matrix's server-side history, you can see old messages by default, but users or attackers could also delete some of those messages (silently on Discord), and on Discord a deleted account becomes anonymous in the message history (unless their name happens to be transcribed, not mentioned).