this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Edit: tldr: I think I probably could've saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.
I didn't think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That's the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it's a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don't have as much moderation control. I dn't think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that's not something I use much.
I'm in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers' communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn't something that does it so well and so easily -- and even then, I'd probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let's say it's like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can't find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it's more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we're all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we're all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there's a social aspect, it is to replace "water cooler talk" which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works... fine. I don't love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it's terrible when it's the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that's the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord's failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.