What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @[email protected] for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure. They cosplay at running a pseudo-corporation and Discord adds their requested features, at a price/donation premium.
P.S: I run a Discord channel of 223 users with no moderation, we have one text channel and two voice channels. We use the service like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak for a Steam Clan. I’ve literally had these busybodies from disparate communities join just to tell me I was “doing it wrong”.
P.S.S: I also hate HOAs.
I’m reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I’m no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”
I don’t mind using it for larger teams, it can be great for organised communication such as dev teams!
But it shouldn’t replace documentation.
(Also, Discord itself is a proprietary, censoring telemetry wasp nest, your FOSS dev team shouldn’t be organised in it but Matrix, XMPP, IRC channels or something else open.)
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that’s it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that’s practically unusable for what it’s supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.