It’s great for communicating among individuals and in group chats, but I think it ultimately fails as a platform between creators and fans even though it seems like every creator or product team has one these days.
Let’s say you’re a server admin and you push updates to an #announcements channel. If people want to then discuss those updates, they have to go to a completely different channel. Unless there’s one specifically for talking about announcements, that conversation is going to be mixed in with a bunch of other stuff. Sure, we have sub-threads now, but not all servers allow those to be created by anyone. They also disappear after being inactive for a while, so anyone looking in the future won’t know if there was an important piece of information that’s been lost.
Now let’s say you’re a regular server member and you’ve been away from a channel for a while. If you’re like me and you find it hard to follow a conversation in reverse, you need to first scroll up before you read anything. (Discord does help with this by putting you 50 messages behind, but that’s often not enough, and with no post ranking system, it’s hard to know which discussions are the most interesting without reading every single one.) Then maybe you find a question from someone that never got answered and you want to help them out. You could reply to them, but if it’s been long enough they might not see it and you’d be interrupting whatever conversation is happening at the bottom. So then you think you might try messaging them directly, but most servers don’t allow that for safety reasons which is understandable.
It just seems that at every turn, Discord can’t replicate the usefulness that traditional forums have. In a forum, everything is organized, focused, won’t disappear, you can read everything in chronological order, and when you reply to someone it doesn’t feel like you’re interrupting people.
What do you all think? Am I just bad at using Discord?
I mean, people could just make an announcements channel that allows public messaging, that’s not like a legal requirement of servers to make those restricted to posting, but they could totally make an announcement discussion channel, and even make a thread within the channel for each announcement post. Threads don’t actually disappear, I don’t believe, they go away from the immediate discord sidebar, but you can go to any channel and press the threads button at the top and see all previous threads intact.
And replying to someone’s old message with context is totally possible. You can quote reply and @ them so they’re notified and they can also tap your quote message to be taken back to the original message, helping them to remember context.
I don’t really see discord as best at being a social media overall, but it is a decent community platform. I think the fact that reading older content is extremely difficult is true, and sort of a symptom of Discord’s design, but that’s the only real con I can think of.
And traditional forums don’t theoretically disappear, but pretty much all of the self hosted ones I used to frequent back in the day are dead and gone, unless you count the way back machine. Actually, I’m curious, is there any software that allows you to back up at least the text contents of a discord server?