I may just be yelling at clouds here, but it seems to me like Discord is just IRC with pictures added. Or Skype with text added. Whatever analogy it is, what it isn’t is a suitable replacement for a threaded forum like Reddit / Lemmy. Or you know… proper old-school forums like phpbb and invision and what not.
If you’re a gamer and you want to talk some shit and type some shit and maybe share a funny meme (pronounced “me me” I believe) with your mates then Discord is great. But for a group of people who don’t know each other randomly dropping in over the course of days and weeks to throw their 2 cents in about a topic? Utterly terrible. The conversation is current. If it happened more than 8 minutes ago it’s old news. If you want to reference something its searching a wall of text full of inane chatter. And there’s always some dickhead who thinks they need to reply to every single person commentating so its just a wall of their platitudes (lol! i like that! XD so random! Zxy likes this! Thanks for the update! Hey bby asl?).
Why are people constantly pushing to move communities to Discord? I see /r/Brisbane is trying to shuffle people there but ffs it’s a chat room. Its MSN. Its AOL chat rooms. Its middle aged men chatting up 16/f/cali who are also middle aged men. Its a permanent stream of lightweight small talk that is like standing in a perpetual supermarket checkout line except you don’t even get anything at the end. It makes me so mad I want to steal candy from a baby and take a dump in a policemans hat.
I use Discord for work cause I have a “Discord Bot” (its a bit of script and an API m8, lets not oversell the damn thing) which sends a message when people are ringing my office with their name / phone number / contact info and a bit of info about them to remind me who the heck it is. It’s great for that cause I get a real time heads up that Jenny from accounts is chasing my TPS report again or whatever and I can ignore the call. Or its my Uber Eats driver out front with my kebab and I need to hurry up and disconnect from my pesky customer to I can give old mate the nod to bring me my large mixed with tabouli.
But you know what its not great for? Replying to a news article from a couple of days back with an update. Or adding some helpful extra information to someone answer to a query so future internetters will find it and not go on a wild goose chase like you did. Or adding your own hot take to a conversation that happened a few hours ago while you were at work and didn’t get to interact with at the time but now you’re on lunch eating a mixed kebab with tabouli and you want to throw your comment on top but TOO BAD loser, Zxy has commented 600 times since then and it’s now 84 pages of scrolling back past stupid GIFs and bad me-mes and “hey bbys” from the thirstybois.
I forget why I started this now, but mostly I just wanted to rant about Discord being terrible for everything except the things IRC was good for and also pose the query: How to generate more local content? I can scroll Lemmy in general and see heaps of content… But I want my BNE me-mes. I want to know who’s stuck under a bridge now, or why the trains are stopped, or to see some bad rental advice, or see another sweet Ibis photo (no seriously I do love those), or to hear someone lie about how the northside is better than the southside.
I will try and be the change I wish to see in the world too but I am but one man. Just one handsome, charismatic, charming, and humble man who only has so many hours in the day.
(PS - I stole this photo from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsDvyKdikPc, but I haven’t watched it yet to know if its any good. It was just one of the first results for an image search of discord sucking and I CBF opening photoshop to make my own).
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Discord is just an easy real time communication platform. It is not suited to anything that is not in the moment. It should only augment a community, but so many people use it as a replacement for one.
Putting communities into discord also destroys search engines’ ability to find them and their content - isolating the web. Reddit was heaps better because you can find stuff via Google.
I think discord is better than irc (although I’d rather use something non-commercial, like mattermost or matrix, but those aren’t as easy to set up), but it’s not a good place to base a community out of, as you’ve said.
Hope the trend moves away from discord and back onto the indexable web, either into lemmy or good old message boards (some of which are still kicking around - whirlpool and OCAU are still active)
This. This is the evil of discord, no doubt they’re sitting on a pile of AI makings, or worse, just deleting it. It’s basically criminal to put any support for software on discords, use a forum, guys. There’s a reason in the age of search enshittification that ppl put reddit at the end of their queries…
Definitely my experience with discord also. It sucks. Maybe I’m just a grumpy old fart.
Only issue I have with Lemmy is that there isn’t enough of us here from the Brisbane community. Luckily(?) My 3rd party Reddit app is currently still alive so I’ve found myself going back there a bit. I even had another (boost is full Telstra) argument the other day for old times sake
I hope you were on the side of “Boost is full Telstra” otherwise it might be time for round two.
Definitely was!
People who want to argue otherwise baffle and infuriate me
Obligatory “not from Brisbane”.
I agree. If it weren’t for the fact that a couple of gaming communities I’m involved in are built around that platform, I wouldn’t use it. It’s pretty bad for anything other than banter amongst mates, and if you are a less active user and/or out of the loop it is genuinely terrible. Plus it has a pretty dismal privacy policy.
Discord is just a shitty version of Teamspeak with some forum/chat features. Its main success is due to it being free, and pretty much any idiot can use it. That being said, it was never really meant to be anything like Reddit. More of a hub for gaming communities and such. It’s handy for my roleplaying groups, videogame stuff, and keeping up with some close friends, but that’s about it.
Everybody compares Discord to what came before but calling it a shitty Teamspeak really does a disservice to how much improvement on the existing platforms Discord actually made. Things like audio quality, in-platform screen sharing and streaming, a persistent chat more like IRC than a VOIP system, etc, are all things that Discord does really really well above and beyond our old systems.
Those forum and chat features allow for greater coordination in a simpler space than what was required in the past. I don’t need to host anything like a website or do any weird workarounds to show strategies and pictures for our WoW fights. It just works inline, and we have a dedicated strat channel. That’s not something we could have done in Vent or Teamspeak, and I remember that back in the day we used to run things like WoW-Enjin sites so we could have a forum to discuss strategies. I’m super glad I don’t need that anymore.
I remember Vent. I remember Teamspeak. They sucked. I’ll take the feature bloated Discord any day of the week over those old platforms.
It’s true. Discord shits all over the previous software we had to use for voice chat back in the day. Teamspeak was fine for what we had available at the time, but it was always kind of a pain. I’ve never had discord not just work. And having an IRC-like chat in the same application makes things much easier. I do prefer IRC over discord for chat, but the convenience of discord and the inclusion of voice chat, being able to post images and gifs, etc., means that it wins overall.
Mumble was great, fuck discord
The teenagers both use discord and they love it. I gave it a go and hated it.
I don’t have the time or energy for chat room style interactions any more. In years past, sure, I was there hitting F5 with the best of the oldies wanting to see the chat updates but not now. If I’ve got a few minutes to open lemmy and have a read, that’s what I do.
I do hear you though about the lack of content.
We all need to start posting when we hear the choppers and I will be here to remind everyone to turn their lights on next time it rains.
All in all, impressive rant.
A/S/L?
Look, I don’t think you’ve said anything here that I disagree with. Discord is not a replacement for forum-like services like Lemmy or Reddit. It’s fundamentally a space for more ephemeral discussions. The conversation is current. It’s chatter.
This does have the significant disadvantage of being less discoverable. People can’t search on Google (or on the site’s own search) to turn up a post with a bunch of comments helping them with the problem they’re experiencing, even if others have already discussed it themselves. For any even vaguely archival purpose, you lose a lot of value.
But that doesn’t mean they’re worthless. Ephemeral discussion is such an incredibly natural human experience. I’ve used Discord for a long time in very small groups, but post-Reddit-implosion is the first time I’ve been in a big Discord that I actually pay attention to. And I have absolutely loved it. The Brisbane Discord community is amazing. People are funny and genuine. I can discuss something that’s just throwaway that I don’t want people to have to be as involved in as it might be back in the day if I was going to create a Reddit post.
By virtue of being as ephemeral as it is, if you are having a serious conversation, you can have a much better back-and-forth, more similar to how you might with an in-person communication, but with a little more room for there to be two or more separate lines of discussion simultaneously. For certain conversations, this isn’t as good. I couldn’t (or could, but it would not be as idiomatic or be as useful if I did) write this multi-paragraph detailed reasoning on Discord. But there are other kinds of conversation where I think it’s very useful, especially if it involves a lot of back-and-forth between the two parties. For a simple tech support conversation, for example, it’s easier if you can ask the original querent if they’ve tried <this>, and they can quickly reply back with their answer. Because Discord is basically synchronous, both parties can suppose that the other is probably still around to respond soon. On Lemmy, I might be much more likely to post a reply and not check the same thread again until the next day, or many hours later. It’s fine for what it is, but if someone has a pressing question, that’s no good for them.
We just had this in the Brisbane Discord, with a friendly yank who joined in wanting to know more about our city. There was a lot more back-and-forth and discussion about things that I think we would have ever seen on a more permanent site like Reddit.
It’s much, much worse for “future interneters”. But it’s kinda better for the current audience.
If you want pictures of cute animals, I think Discord is a more natural platform than Lemmy for that, as long as you’re on the right server. People can just throw up their pictures with much less effort involved than on Lemmy. You don’t need to think about it as something that’s going to stick around for a while. Just chuck it up there and whoever sees it will see it. As a viewer, you can just scroll up through the #pets channel to see as much as you like.
In some ways, Discord can be better for getting your hot takes seen. On Reddit, if you joined a thread hours later, the person you reply to might see it (unless their comment was super popular and they turned off notifications for their sanity), but nobody else will, because it’ll be buried way down. On Discord, the latest comment is at the bottom, so everyone will see it. Discord is more supportive of that kind of hot takes & shitposting than Reddit is, for this reason.
or to hear someone lie about how the northside is better than the southside
This depends on whether you believe a true statement can ever be a lie. I would agree that someone who believes something that’s incorrect cannot be lying (they’re just mistaken), but does the inverse hold? I don’t think it does, which would mean it’s impossible for you to ever hear a lie about how the northside is better than the southside.
TL;DR they’re both different and serve different purposes. Also: northside is best side.
We just had this in the Brisbane Discord, with a friendly yank who joined in wanting to know more about our city. There was a lot more back-and-forth and discussion about things that I think we would have ever seen on a more permanent site like Reddit.
That being by way of the point I guess. I’m glad the few people who were there at the time had fun… But now the next person who wants the same information is either using Discord search (which is so delightfully abstract in its interpretation of results that it makes Reddit’s search look useful), or repeating the same stuff again. If it was a Lemmy/Reddit post, the next Yank who wants to know how many cheeseburgers they need to bring in their carry on could have the information at their finger tips. And more importantly (imo), the people who weren’t there at the exact time can also participate due to the comments being focused on the topic of conversation, not the timing of the conversation.
Instead of a large number of people being able to participate over a few days of interaction, a few hyperactive people who happened to be there got to spam a dozen comments in a quick burst of y’alls and howdy’s and freezepeaches with the visiting American and it’s all over.
I have much to say but insufficient poop time remaining to complete the words.
Discord also doesn’t let you delete your data, thus breaking GDPR. They need something to sell to data brokers.
I don’t belong in this community but just wanted to say I agree. I joined some Discord servers as alternatives when the Reddit API changes were announced. Chat rooms can’t replace forums. Discord kind of encourages that you spend your time there and experience the action in real time. Forums let you come back at anytime and catch up on stuff, look stuff up, etc.
From what little I’ve read about Discord, it’s going the way of Reddit anyways. Enshittification.
It’s been getting worse, yeah. Some things get better, other things get worse. Overall I think the platform is in better shape than reddit because while they are pushing unpopular changes it doesn’t really make a difference to the main experience of using the platform. With reddit’s changes it fucked the majority of the userbase up by disallowing them from using their preferred clients and impacted general day-to-day site use. That’s not the case generally when Discord pushes a dumb update. Nitro’s gotten more expensive but the platform works totally fine without paying for the extra bells and whistles. It feels like the hardest and least liked change was the removal of discriminators and that’s not a real major change to the core use of the platform so much as it was a minor annoyance to pick a new name.
I’ve never considered using discord as a replacement for Reddit or Lemmy. I use it all the time but for communicating with people I know or have something in common with in different social circles. You’re not wrong but for me it’s like saying pillows suck because they don’t bang in nails properly.
Its just a platform. How you use it is what matters.
I got banned twice on my regular account (by discord admins, not group/server mods) that I had in some dear group chats and one or two servers. The reasons for both was essentially, “spamming/bot account”.
Now, I’m no spam expert, but I don’t think posting an average 4 or 5 messages an hour for maybe maximum 20 messages in one day counts as spamming, especially if they were relevant to the topics.
I agree, discord has swallowed up so many communities that used to be open and searchable. It makes me really sad.
I think the main reason some communities want to move to Discord is because they’re probably not confident maintaining their own platform/servers/infrastructure.
But yeah, Discord sucks. It’s privacy policy is horrendous. Matrix and Discourse are open-source alternatives but yeah, you have to maintain your own infrastructure (ideally).
This post has to be a “me me”.
