03-07-2023, 08:24 PM
This is a topic I think about often, and is one of the main reasons I made this forum and want to keep it running, despite how little traffic it gets.
I was reminded of this again when I read this blog post:
Discord, or the Death of Lore
As much as I love using discord for communication, I think it's a terrible way to host a "community" online. Besides the unarchivable aspect of it, there's also the fact that if you're not online when things happen, you'll never be able to participate in a meaningful way, especially if the userbase in a server is large.
It's a great chat app, and when used as such, it's really convenient. But with how easy it takes to spun up a server, a lot of hobby communities have deleted their forums or general web accessible spaces, and opted to move their community discussions and information to a discord server.
I unfortunately had a hand in this in a relatively large community I used to run, when we hopped on discord in its early days, mostly because of how novel the idea of our community being able to chat live was at the time. Once our discord took off, it started cannibalizing our forum usage, and in a real sense, that killed our "community." Unless you were one of the few people who were online when discussions happened, you missed out on contributing. It also decayed our web presence for new people to really find us and get an idea of what we liked to discuss before joining. People stopped posting on our forums, and it died.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think communities and documentations should move to discord since it's so easy to use? Or do you think it removes the information from the public space and moves the "world wide web" into gated "platforms"? Is this misplaced nostalgia and we should just move with the times?
I was reminded of this again when I read this blog post:
Discord, or the Death of Lore
As much as I love using discord for communication, I think it's a terrible way to host a "community" online. Besides the unarchivable aspect of it, there's also the fact that if you're not online when things happen, you'll never be able to participate in a meaningful way, especially if the userbase in a server is large.
It's a great chat app, and when used as such, it's really convenient. But with how easy it takes to spun up a server, a lot of hobby communities have deleted their forums or general web accessible spaces, and opted to move their community discussions and information to a discord server.
I unfortunately had a hand in this in a relatively large community I used to run, when we hopped on discord in its early days, mostly because of how novel the idea of our community being able to chat live was at the time. Once our discord took off, it started cannibalizing our forum usage, and in a real sense, that killed our "community." Unless you were one of the few people who were online when discussions happened, you missed out on contributing. It also decayed our web presence for new people to really find us and get an idea of what we liked to discuss before joining. People stopped posting on our forums, and it died.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think communities and documentations should move to discord since it's so easy to use? Or do you think it removes the information from the public space and moves the "world wide web" into gated "platforms"? Is this misplaced nostalgia and we should just move with the times?
Si vis artem, para bellum
