Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information.
Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.
Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.
In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion platform, make one.
And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's lots of unattractive platforms already.
> The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to create third party clients.
Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".
I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging.
Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you.
> A Discord community that I moderate
> The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
A ThinkPad with Ryzen 3500U, 16G RAM and NVMe SSD.
> I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Sorry, Discord is nowhere near the concept of being lightweight. I use both web based and desktop IRC clients and none of them make my laptop sound like it's about to be launched into outer space. Sure, they may not have all the features that Discord offers but both of them let me talk to thousands of users, which is what I expect.
Again, third party clients would definitely help here but Discord is hostile towards them. Spotify is a good example in this case. Their website is just as sluggish but at least I can use several desktop and terminal clients and not worry about buying a better laptop or more RAM.
> This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
I'm more suprised and disappointed with Discord than this behaviour by people on the Internet. Their rules say that they don't allow spam and raiding servers and even when we provide detailed screenshots of people talking about raiding us and leaving spam on our servers, they don't bother the least bit about taking any sort of action. The only response that we got from them, just once, after sending them multiple reports was "ban them". No shit, I didn't know I could do that, thanks Discord.
The problem with Discord is it fails to provide any way at all to move from chat to forum, or perhaps a better phrase would be "plazas and warrens" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... . Discord nails the 'fast' part but there's no way for good stuff to 'percolate up' into slower long-term mediums (https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design). Usenet had FAQs, IRCs had associated mailing lists & bugtrackers, Reddits have wikis, and so on. Discord has just an ever-increasing backlog. (The search functionality isn't too bad, but nevertheless, I regularly found myself searching for stuff I knew I or someone else had said or linked, and failing to find it simply because there were so many hits to scroll through snippets thereof.)
I don't see Reddit's Wikis, IRC Mailing lists, Usenet FAQs as "integrated" into the core experience particularly well.
Reddit Wikis are just a parallel communication channel vended by the same company. If I was going to do user journey analysis, from the core user experience of "Reddit threads" to Reddit wikis... it's not there.
Famously, nobody ever reads the Reddit sidebar/FAQs.
Someone has to essentially manually copy and update content in a wiki/FAQ. Which has gone from Web 2.0 esque content creation, to a very "Web 1.0-esque" approach.
Ultimately I feel like people are just demanding from Discord, something that IRC style communication has never provided. The closest we've ever gotten that I've seen is Slack search.
"Quick and easy to write" is honestly just perpendicular to "quick and high quality" to read.
I think with most chat mediums it's hard to escalate / archive a chat thread into a post somewhere that could be useful as a support reference for example. And there is nothing in discord preventing people from escalating into associated mailing lists, forms and bug trackers like IRC, it just isn't culturally done, except maybe a few with github issue trackers.
> Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists.
However, email has one property that basically all chat platforms lack: each mail is presented as a standalone unit of correspondence with its own metadata, from the start. Just like with forum posts, you spend some minutes writing it, then send it off and wait for a reply—not continuously mash the keyboard, sending your thoughts nearly raw one after another. Streams-of-consciousness that are chats, are not suited to be indexed and presented as separate and complete pieces of info, at all.
>Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord. Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private conversation with your buddies.
Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.
Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.
In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion platform, make one.
And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's lots of unattractive platforms already.