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).
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…
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.
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.
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.
