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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

> What happens next.

Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord... Which is awful, with how siloed and noisy Discord is.

I hope I am wrong, and that a good alternative gains traction.

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Discord will not replace Reddit. It's a chat client. I don't understand why people keep saying it's a replacement. It's not. I have tried!

It doesn't replace reddit, but Discord is serving community building needs. A lot of large successful projects do support via Discords.

I know it is incredibly inefficient with the same questions being asked and answered constantly, but it appears to be what we do now. But even with that downside, it creates more intimacy/connection instead between members. So it likely leads to more engagement, even if it is inefficient.

But does that scale? It's one thing building an online community serving 100-5,000 users. It's quite a different thing to build an online community serving 100,000-10,000,000 users.

Absolutely not. The noise of a Discord server of that size would be immense. The substance would quickly be lost to the non-stop noise.

It scales horribly.

But that has not stopped some servers from exploding in size. And its "fine" if you are just trying to shoot the breeze or shout into the void, not look for specific information (which is truly horrendous) or answer FAQ (which is even more horrendous than reddit).

Also discord stuff are not searchable publicly. The experience is completely different, it's not even comparable.

It doesn't scale, but most communities are not 100,000+ users. Most communities are relatively small.

> Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord

I wish they'd at least try Discourse first.

Discord is where knowledge goes to die.

Discourse and similar traditional forum style platforms have horrible UX.

The fact that topic replies are presented sequentially and not as nested threads makes large topics downright miserable to navigate, and responses almost impossible to follow. And I will die on this hill, I don't care how many grizzled old timers try to tell me this is better. I'm not a zoomer who doesn't remember the internet pre-2010, I've been here since the '90s. I know exactly how bad it was, and the better UX is a massive part of why Reddit largely replaced these old communities over the last 15 years.

UX matters. Nested threads are huge for good UX.

I recommended Discourse for it's overall approachability and lack of confidence in my ability to convince a community moving to Discord to something more complicated.

People don't like upfront investment for longer term gains so sequential is a way easier sell.

I guess I'm saying my Discourse recommendation is damage control much like a tourniquet and not my ideal.

I don't know, discord makes me hate life less than discourse.

For me Discord is not a replacement, I find difficult to follow unless the channel is almost deserted then what’s the point

I wonder if there is an opportunity for some grassroots data liberation from Discord. I.e. if a tool that allows admins / users to scrape and mirror discord server data somewhere.

Also how come there is no more open, not CCP-aligned Discord alternative yet?

Isn't that what matrix is?

hmm is there a way to access Discord through Matrix?

I meant not replacing Discord but rather connecting to it / siphoning the user-generated data to a more open place

I have to agree with others. Although Discord has it's uses, it would be really hard to migrate a subreddit, and still operate efficiently.

Where would they advertise their Discord servers though? You still need to use the Reddit platform to carry over large user bases - which means at one point mods should briefly end blackout. But how to coordinate that without giving in?

There's a message greeting you when you visit a subreddit that's gone dark[1]. They could have an invite there, if that's their plan.

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/Music

I'm afraid you might be right. Most of the reddit clones or alternatives are cesspits of right wing hate, I guess that's because historically the only people fleeing reddit have been those that are too toxic for reddit to allow.

I'm hopeful the atmosphere changes, but I believe discord or hive might be the best positioned to be the refuge. Discord is awful for anything not transient. Hive has the whole web3 nonsense behind it. But they both seem more....balanced in their audience who uses them.

I'm not super familiar with how the fediverse works, but I was able to join a Lemmy instance that doesn't seem to fit that bill.

> but I was able to join a Lemmy instance that doesn't seem to fit that bil

Yeah, the way to avoid racism other cess pools on Mastodon seems to be choosing a server that mods and frequently updates ban lists.

https://hachyderm.io tops that list for me.

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