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Comment by andersrs | Hacker News Reader

I'm the mod of a small subreddit [1] with a few thousand members. Today I've spun up a Discord server [2]. Personally I've had a guts full of the banners trying to force the Reddit mobile app down my throat. It sucks it's a shitty app. Just no. I don't like how Discord is a walled garden however it seems like Reddit too is also becoming a closed platform. I might as well go for the company that can actually build a great experience and Discord is miles ahead with their UX and people seem to love it.

[1] r/Redactle - https://redactle.net puzzle game | [2] https://discord.gg/VKnrnXev

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There's so many places you could take your community that aren't another VC-backed SV startup well on its way to trying to be the next TikTok or whatever (see the Discord username change fiasco).

Try Discourse, or Zulip (disclaimer: I used to work there), or Mastodon, or spin up your own forum using any number of self-hostable solutions. Try anything but Discord. Future you will thank you when Discord is the one in the news some future day.

I dislike how sync Discord is, too. I mean, I don't have time to sit here and chat with people for hours. That is why I'm on HN and Reddit. I read, give it a thought, post some good comments (plus a couple of shitposts) and then I get off my computer. I come back later to check on my responses.

Discord just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to scroll through hours of chat, and I'm not going to sit there and watch the chat rehash the same discussion people had hours ago.

I have things to do... kids to take care of, a house to clean, groceries, dinner, places to go, etc.

If Discord tacks on a layer of forum-like discussions besides the chat... It might take over a chunk of current reddit-focused communities.

At least for me, personally, that would supply the only thing I still use Reddit for, some of my hobbies have communities on Reddit + Discord and I participate in both, if Discord provided a discussion board to allow a more asynchronous communication I would ditch Reddit completely.

It seems to have something like this. I'm in the CloudFlare community Discord and there seem to be some channels which are message boards. Crappy message boards, though. Just like Slack with threads, I haven't seen evidence of a chat platform adding meaningful async communication that doesn't feel tacked-on.

Good call - I'm sure the next private company won't eventually treat their users like garbage.

We’re web surfers; surfers move from wave to wave, they don’t expect to find the perfect wave frozen in time unmoving and never ending.

Have you considered also joining Kbin (kbin.social) and/or Lemmy (lemmy.ml)?

I'm considering them now. I tried kbin yesterday and it seemed very slow. I doubt I'll be able to get enough of a critical mass to make it work but it might be worth a shot. Certainly a torrent like forum system is nicer than yet another walled garden.

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