I'm so confused by the love of discord.
Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?
Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?
I used Discord to create a “server” for my Eve Echoes corporation which went from ten people to 200 people then down to 40 or so people. I didn’t have to pay to scale the server up and down from whatever hosting solution I was using to accommodate this huge increase then slow decrease of member.
Heck, I didn’t actually create the server, someone else did then handed me owner access. Super convenient. Like, I was astonished that’s how it works.
Everything was integrated so I could ping 50 people and a good number would jump into voice chat and help me defend against the Russians or the Chinese invasions. It was a bustling community created ex nihilo.
I played for a few months, had a good time, but once the pandemic started to wane I wanted to go “back to the real world”. Being a leader of space miners is hard work! So I handed over ownership to someone in the “Corp” who, in true EVE fashion is a real life accountant and loves their space ships and spreadsheets.
It was incredibly easy to set up and then give the discord server away (twice!) over the course of a few months. Easier than giving someone my house keys. The process would have been an absolute nightmare for anything using DNS, or even worse pinned to an actual IP address. Good luck getting 50-00 semi active people to switch to a new server.
I'm almost 40, so I think I can explain this. Discord is turn-key community infrastructure for users and moderators. Bespoke solutions have more incidental complexities compared to Discord with regard to hanging out with others and playing games. This initial gravity is what is pulling in the rest of the Internet communities.
VoIP is not easy to set up and use in the best circumstances, and Discord makes it painless. I cannot stress this enough! Usually it took That Guy who spent days pouring over how-tos and several aborted attempts at setting it up. Discord is similar to what GameSpy brought to game server hosting compared to hosting a game yourself. If that sounds like foreshadowing, I agree!
Discord also is replacing the whole communication/coordination stack. Forums are a casualty for the same reason Reddit took over; setting up a public internet service is hard. But Discord steps beyond that. It is taking over the chat communications gamers use to coordinate, including text messages and AIM/IRQ/IRC/etc. This meshes very well with guilds and amateur competitive gaming, as well as the hangout vibe of sitting in a chat room. Throw in built-in video streaming and you have Twitch.tv functionality all in the same app.
Combine the above with a single unified moderation, and you have a critical nexus of features for community management without all the fuss of hosting the infrastructure yourself. Individuals have a single login that can access hundreds of communities, while moderators have similar management controls as forums over their own.
Are there downsides? Oh my yes, but those will manifest later as Discord matures into its own blow-up stage of venture capital social networks.
Reddit lasted what, over 10 years? And Discord started in 2015 but still seems to know not to destroy communities by e.g. making third-party moderation bots pay to use the service.
It makes a lot more sense as a community to coast on whatever the current most popular free platform(s) are, since it means there's no financial overhead to running the community and the centralized nature means the barrier to entry for prospective communities members is near-zero. Once federation can achieve these things, we'll see communities at least fracture with an arm on the federated site, ready to jump ship once Discord or the next platform starts to sink.
When someone builds a better reddit, I’m sure people would move over too. I’ll take free stuff being handed out for as long as it’s being handed out.
Many of my friends also don't have social media and we all exist within a discord server and share our lives and game together very often.
Discord has this buy in like a social media platform for a lot of people.
It's what I've described above--plus communities moving to discord and away from reddit.
If you do an online game now you will end up on discord if you're even halfway serious about the game.
One of the big things discord has allowed for my friend group is it's the first platform like this that has brought in the "normies". People who would never visit a forum and didn't even know teamspeak or ventrilo ever existed.
It's a smooth experience at almost all times on desktop and mobile.
If you go to college nowadays most of the majors have discords--and study groups have discords.
My friends don't even text me anymore, they DM me on discord and have for years at this point.
Discord was first to provide:
Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution
Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG?
In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk
Also: identity per "server"
Easy to invite: link instead of ip port
Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.
The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.
Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise.
I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product.
Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.
Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.
> Also: identity per "server"
But Discord doesn't provide identity per server. You get one identity, and if you want a different one you need to sign up for a new account using a new email address.
Further up the thread, another user said the value in discord was the community -- the users -- rather than the messages. Wouldn't you want to be able to maintain these ties across servers?
The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.
I dont want you to be able to read messages of my mmorpg team, privacy is desired.
That has been the dominant web design paradigm for close to a decade now. Discord is just following industry trends.
IRC isn't very nice to use, then again it is years when I last used voice-chat softwares but those were bit pain too.
And it is not really a forum. It is online chat room, entirely different thing.
I really dislike using Discord (visually confusing, spammy), but they've clearly hit the ball out the park in terms of adoption. The fact that you could provide similar functionality by combining two other products isn't really relevant is it?
This popularity can be attributed to several key characteristics:
1. Vtubers are frequently involved in numerous events, commissions, and livestream collaborations, each with different stakeholders and often temporary in nature. Discord makes it incredibly easy to set up dedicated servers for each of these endeavors.
2. Discord's voice chat functionality is highly robust, making it a common choice for managing voice communication during livestreams that involve multiple participants.
3. Discord provides a centralized platform for coordination and infrastructure. This eliminates the need to set up additional systems with different user IDs and other complexities.