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veave

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives.

It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on.

Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.

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Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so.

But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition.

- Forums are easy for search engines to index

- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable

- Forums have good threading in general

- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care)

- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums

Tell me how Discord does each of these better.

It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.

I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different.

Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.

The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.

You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable

I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'.

Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.

You might be thinking of a very different user base. I have been using discord for a while and even more so now(unfortunately) after the whole reddit thing.

But normal users probably do not care about any of that. You literally have people come in and ask a question that was literally asked and answered in the previous reply. People want an instant reply, they do not want to google for an answer. And the nature of the chat makes that possible.

Plus search engines not indexing things is probably seen as a benefit by some community owners. For example people who run private course communities or small groups want their communities open only to invited people.

Something else to think about is how discord differs, it is a chat app that transformed into a forum. While reddit has been trying to do the reverse. Maybe more people want a easy to chat app with some forum features tagged on, rather than the reverse.

That disrespects the other people's time. The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. Which means the community becomes deprived of experts, and people who value their time, possibly becoming useless and dying. I might have put up with it as an adolescent, but there's no way I'm doing that as an adult. As you suggest, the user base evolves as a result of product choices.

>The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves.

No one ever called humans rational beings. Of course that's the proper behavior to instill in a quality, knowledgeable internet user and foster a high quality community.

We lost that battle decades ago, however. We're also losing the battle where it is okay to gatekeep lazy people. I argue the opposite: the product evolved based on user affordances, which is typically a good UI/UX paradigm to follow. If people are going to be lazy, lower the barrier of entry, and leave any curation to each server's community and moderators.

And if we're being honest: most experts aren't sharing their information on social media. Not all of it, at least. Certainly not in public communities.

Discord is better than forums for casual chatting and sharing memes. As far as acting as a repo of frequently asked questions to be left open for information to be amended and appended, forums are far superior to Discord. It's surprising that there are people who think Discord is better in every way when, to me, it's clearly not true. I wonder how many of those Discord-type users actually grew up with the chat rooms and forums/BBSes of Web 1.0. For those who didn't, maybe Discord superficially seems like a huge advancement over forums.

The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.

Many of the forum software packages you mentioned are still actively maintained and used. That's hardly a "demise."

Just because there's a wildly popular internet community in one app/medium doesn't mean that other communities simply ceased to exist. They're just the same thing they've always been - niche.

The most interesting class of communication platform to me is 2/4chan style text/imageboards. Depending on the speed of the board they can feel like near-real-time chat (with copious memes and verbal banter), or a forum (complete with megathreads for beginners on a topic), or something exactly in-between

For information retrieval it's quite terrible. Generally even worse than Discord due to the archives being on random overloaded sites. OTOH it leads to a culture of survival of the fittest ideas ("meme" culture, I suppose), where instead of upvoting a post or image you like, you just repost it. Like a big shared human cache, or like human memory I suppose

The general lack of persistent identity has a profound influence on the culture of course. People tend to focus on the negatives that it brings, but it can also be refreshing to have pure and frank discussions with no ego or profile snooping or cliques. And just generally the feeling of low-stakes casual chatting, rather than remembering at the back of your head that everything will be on the record against your username

Discourse was expressly designed to re-do forums from scratch, rethinking every assumption. It's also a relatively recent creation. How is that "remaining in the past"?

Discourse is good. I see people host Discourse boards all the time.

Here is one https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/does-anyone-else-feel-l...

Of course it depends on those running the server and moderating, but most of the larger Discord "servers" I've joined have extensive information as pinned messages.

I did grow up with PHP forums, but they feel a bit clunky now. I'm sure a well-made one with a more modern stack and new features could be superior to Discord for text discussion though.

I'm old enough to remember anonymous ftp to grab the FAQ text file for various games, typically including a walkthroughs (e.g. the kind of thing now aggregated on sites like gamefaqs: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/...)

So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user.

Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on.

I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially.

Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?

When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up.

I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.

Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.

You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.

The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher.

Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot.

Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.

zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow

Discord is good for real-time interactions. Discord+Wiki seems to hit the forum from both sides.

That doesn't work because nobody will search the wiki when chat is around, and it might be outdated so people will ask anyway "just in case".

sounds like a Wiki problem. Maybe we should instead ask why people feel wikis are always outdated?

Because it's probably something sucky like Confluence, and because people go back to work instead of editing the wiki to help the next person once they find the answer.

One thing that I’ve not seen any traditional forum software do particularly well is search. For some reason, forum search sucks to the point that if the forum is visible when logged out you’re better off doing a “<query> site:forums.foobar.baz” search with Google.

Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).

You say that as if using the site operator is the only way to do it, which it's not. Most people can figure out that just adding the name of the forum to their query is often sufficient. And this is often how people find forums at all. If you're googling for something in general and not looking for it on discord, you won't find any discord chats. You might find a forum though.

Also, your at worst scenario is a bit contrived. There's plenty of ways to not get an answer, to get a wrong answer, or to be berated by gatekeepers because "you don't actually want that".

It's still the internet, don't make it out like discord has somehow changed that fundamental fact, because they really haven't.

The core point that forum search is bad and pulls down their user experience stands, however.

Don't get me wrong, my preference definitely leans towards forums… I grew up on them after all. They have a lot of the type of rough edges that people aren't very forgiving of these days, though.

From the perspective of the average user:

- Forums are easy for search engines to index : don’t care

- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable : don’t care

- Forums have good threading in general : don’t care

- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) : don’t care

- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums : don’t care

And this is why discord won. :)

If the average user is just someone who wants look at memes all day, sure.

This is the tragedy. People who don't want to put with this nonsense are being dragged into it because the communities of products they use live there.

The only thing counting in favor of discord is the ability to use as many servers as you like with a single account, while you might face forums where links in the posts gets visible only if you register an account. I don't recall seeing any discord server so far that would lock posted content from their users. Tho there are servers that request you to agree on terms and go thru some simple verification to prove that you're a human being and not a bot.

Personally, I'm not a fan of situations where communities suggest you joining their discord in order to get in touch with them or receive help faster, because most of the time it feels like I'm joining a playground full of adults behaving like kids.

It's actually capped at 99, unless they changed it since the time I bumped into that limit.

That's still a big number and you can always leave servers you don't think you'll find useful or enjoyable

Discord is great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new.

Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that.

It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd.

A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"

My point is that saying Discord is universally better than forums ignores context and is not a useful comparison.

TBF, you're ignoring their context.It's clear they aren't saying it's the best archival service that lets you search for anything in seconds.

They clearly want a place of community and Discord gives that.

Forums aren't popular more the same reason email isn't. Spam. Forum operators fought a valiant yet losing battle against spambots. While tools like fail2ban eventually came around to make it easier, a generation of users grew up learning that forums suck and Discord was the right app at the right time to lure them away.

"Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention.

There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny.

Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.

I must be missing something fundamental because from where I'm standing, it's worse than forums in every way possible.

Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.

When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).

I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control.

So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.

Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public.

Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.

Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)

I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages. Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.

I sympathize, but also realize that liking text message boards is an increasingly niche opinion as people are raised on Tiktok and Twtich 1and Instagram and whatnot. I'm not going to say "kids these days are too lazy to read", but it's clear that focusing on fast chat feeds and pictures/videos is a lot more addictive and monetizeable than text.

until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.

My friends and I still use IRC (for text) and mumble(for voice chat), I'm guessing as long as they are still maintained or if the source still compiles, we'll probably keep using them.

The discord interface suffers from modern design syndrome, the information density isn't there. I open it and see inline images/gifs, link previews, reactions etc. There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.

Mumble has much higher quality and lower latency than discord, but that's probably a matter of configuration and server location.

No limitations on what you can do with bots either. We do all sorts of stupid shit with irc -> mumble text-to-speech along with our music bot and clip soundboard. I'm guessing it's probably possible to recreate it all on discord, but I can't imagine rewriting it all.

I suspect the Discord API's are significantly more complicated than irc/mumble.

>There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.

They have compact mode that eliminates that stuff. I don't see avatars. I just see colored user names.

There are image embeds but I tend to see that as a positive, especially with some bot capabilities. For instance here is what the chat looks like in the server for one of the roguelikes I play, TOME4. https://i.imgur.com/WHFD7OA.png

You can see no avatars and it's just a bot-generated image that is relevant to the chat.

Images can also be turned off under "Text & Images" in the settings.

IRC was way better (and you had your choice of client) for programming communities.

Discord excels in combining the call/video/screenshare/slack-ish/game experience all in one.

It's a really solid service with good mobile and desktop versions.

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