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My complaints about Discord as a low-end user who has like five places I'm part of on purpose and the rest I'm pushed into due to a lack of other support options. --Notification default settings are set by the server, nobody bothers to change them and Discord's defaults are terrible. So I can't just set it how I like it, I have to re-do every single server I join. --Invite links dump you on the base page with no guidelines. I wouldn't mine places using it as a tech support replacement if their support link would actually take me to the support part of the thing. --No easy way to archive stuff. This isn't Discord's fault, it wasn't built for that, but even pinned messages have no way to sort them and put important ones higher (unless that's higher admin privileges than I have even on my "we have and use keys to each others' houses" friends server).
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Oct 14, 2023 18:37
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CitizenKeen posted:No, reddit doesn't have linear conversations. Certain retirement facilities are beginning to feature what you desire
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Oct 14, 2023 22:15
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Farg posted:Certain retirement facilities are beginning to feature what you desire I assume that's a joke that I'm old?
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Oct 15, 2023 06:58
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CitizenKeen posted:I assume that's a joke that I'm old? If retirement homes are going to have an Internet which still has distributed content, design for friendliness rather than psychological manipulation, and isn’t loaded with ads, then sign me up.
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Oct 15, 2023 07:06
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I like Discord fairly well, but I don't like the way it's overtaken forums because it's designed around being immediately present for a conversation like a chat room or messenger service, rather than the slightly more delayed style of posting forums have. With a forum you can wander in, read through the last few pages of posts at your leisure, write up a thoughtful and thorough response at your leisure, and then walk away for a bit after you've posted it while waiting for responses. Discord is built around the idea that people are actively sending short responses to each other at the same time and it's nowhere near as conducive to reading through old conversations or writing up longform responses. It's part of the larger problem I have with the shrinking attention span built into social media sites. The norm on the internet is no longer about creating reusable pieces of media people will come back to, it's about capturing people's immediate attention and once something falls off people's dashboards it might as well just not exist any more.
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Oct 15, 2023 23:45
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For communities, communication gets prioritized over info retention so if only one can be maintained, it's usually a Discord (also because of mobile usability) rather than a Reddit or Wiki. Forums just aren't a thing, partially because that involves webhosting and stuff. Idk if there's anywhere one can just host a message board like one can do with a Subreddit or a Discord Server or a Wiki.
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Oct 16, 2023 04:23
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Another way that Discord sucks for communication and community is that you basically only interact with the people who are there at the same time. With a forum, I can have discussions with people who are never on at the same time, so more of the community can interact with each other. On discord, those people pretty much don't exist for each other.
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Oct 16, 2023 05:32
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Basically where we went wrong as a society was letting the spammers win the war for USENET.
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Oct 16, 2023 06:27
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I was there for the Green Card Spam that started it all. I even called their provider to yell at them; there were just done with this poo poo by the time I called and had already dumped them as a customer. It was a simpler time.
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Oct 16, 2023 06:47
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Usenet was the best. Also, when the internet was smaller generally everyone who had an interest in a topic was in the same place.
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Oct 16, 2023 07:14
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Hel posted:Another way that Discord sucks for communication and community is that you basically only interact with the people who are there at the same time. With a forum, I can have discussions with people who are never on at the same time, so more of the community can interact with each other. On discord, those people pretty much don't exist for each other. Discord does now have a sort of "forum and threads" function you can use to get something more like this, so while it does have all the other issues like archival and lack of external searchability, if you want asynch discussion threads about things you can have that.
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Oct 16, 2023 08:00
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Hel posted:Another way that Discord sucks for communication and community is that you basically only interact with the people who are there at the same time. With a forum, I can have discussions with people who are never on at the same time, so more of the community can interact with each other. On discord, those people pretty much don't exist for each other. This is not my experience at all, but I use very few large discords and stick mostly to small communities and friend groups where it's more of a slow group chat. People absolutely use some of them in a style that resembles forums posting (especially with granular channels).
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Oct 16, 2023 08:04
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All of these complaints about Discord feel like they're coming from people that aren't really aware of Discord's features. You can absolutely control notifications on a micro-level so that the app doesn't ping you except for specific circumstances, and you can mute entire channels if you want. You can pretty easily drag your servers into any order, and even hide channels in servers so you aren't seeing constant unread indicators. Channels also can be made into separate threads that are hidden unless you click into the threads view to see which ones are active, so sub-topics can be discussed in smaller groups without the whole channel even seeing the discussion (unless they specifically want to and click into the thread). As for each server requiring you to read their rules, and create roles, well that makes complete sense because every server is it's own community and it's good to know the rules of a community before you start posting. It's also only really a chore if you are joining lots of servers sequentially, but I'd wager most people only join a new server every so often and certainly not many in less than an hour. The crux of this is that a lot of you are pinning for a forum design that doesn't really exist anymore for good reasons. It wasn't some vast corporate conspiracy that caused SomethingAwful and other forums like this to become less popular. As a larger portion of the population went online and started forming communities, large broad umbrella forums where posting was controlled by the whims of a relatively small number of mods and admins didn't really match how most people like to communicate. Reddit with all of it's subreddits, Discord, Slack, and even Mastodon starting to replace Twitter, all allowed people to form their own little enclaves where they could communicate with like-minded people easily. All of these micro-community apps work really well for that, so no poo poo they are doing well. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 08:40
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Discord had to retroactively fit threads into its system and tbh its implementation isn't foregrounded and doesn't really have the same experience as forums. Discord is fine for chat, meh for other things.
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Oct 16, 2023 08:43
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Anonymous Zebra posted:All of these complaints about Discord feel like they're coming from people that aren't really aware of Discord's features. You can absolutely control notifications on a micro-level so that the app doesn't ping you except for specific circumstances, and you can mute entire channels if you want. You can pretty easily drag your servers into any order, and even hide channels in servers so you aren't seeing constant unread indicators. Channels also can be made into separate threads that are hidden unless you click into the threads view to see which ones are active, so sub-topics can be discussed in smaller groups without the whole channel even seeing the discussion (unless they specifically want to and click into the thread). As for each server requiring you to read their rules, and create roles, well that makes complete sense because every server is it's own community and it's good to know the rules of a community before you start posting. It's also only really a chore if you are joining lots of servers sequentially, but I'd wager most people only join a new server every so often and certainly not many in less than an hour. What people are looking for is for one of the ways people can "form their own little enclaves where they could communicate with like-minded people easily" is to be spinning up a small forum, but unfortunately there's no Reddit or Discord equivalent for vBulletin.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:11
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Anonymous Zebra posted:large broad umbrella forums where posting was controlled by the whims of a relatively small number of mods and admins Discord is absolutely no different in this respect so I have no idea why you'd bring it up. Sure, your 15 person groupchat discord probably isn't subject to The Tyranny of Moderation but that's also not what people are talking about here.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:14
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Anonymous Zebra posted:It wasn't some vast corporate conspiracy that caused SomethingAwful and other forums like this to become less popular. On the contrary, it IS a vast corporate conspiracy...that SomethingAwful has not fallen into. All corporate forums have become less popular because of enshittification, or just outright deleted as being too much trouble and not bringing in enough money. Reddit's going that way unfortunately, though both are only possible due to a legion of unpaid volunteers, and Reddit just had a strike that got broken I presume because so many of the top moderators decided to keep going for reasons. One day some capitalist vampire parasite could offer Jeffery enough money to turn over the keys of the kingdom, and you, me, this forum, all this posting...will be doomed. I am just glad we have not yet reached that day yet.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:18
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Normally I'd say I'm skeptical that anyone would want to buy a site that, to most people these days, is best known for "the place that caused 4chan to happen," but Elon Musk bought twitter because he felt right-wingers weren't getting enough of a platform and now he spends his time posting about how "demographics are destiny" and beefing with a guy called catturd so anything is possible in this dumb world we live in.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:21
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Anonymous Zebra posted:All of these complaints about Discord feel like they're coming from people that aren't really aware of Discord's features. You can absolutely control notifications on a micro-level so that the app doesn't ping you except for specific circumstances, and you can mute entire channels if you want. You can pretty easily drag your servers into any order, and even hide channels in servers so you aren't seeing constant unread indicators. Channels also can be made into separate threads that are hidden unless you click into the threads view to see which ones are active, so sub-topics can be discussed in smaller groups without the whole channel even seeing the discussion (unless they specifically want to and click into the thread). As for each server requiring you to read their rules, and create roles, well that makes complete sense because every server is it's own community and it's good to know the rules of a community before you start posting. It's also only really a chore if you are joining lots of servers sequentially, but I'd wager most people only join a new server every so often and certainly not many in less than an hour. This post is too long to comfortably be addressed in Discord, and it’s not even that long. Effortposts in Discord are a loving nightmare.
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Oct 16, 2023 10:25
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Splicer posted:Nobody is complaining that your gaming group has a discord. People are complaining that "large broad umbrella [Discord]s where posting [is] controlled by the whims of a relatively small number of mods and admins" are being used where forums used to be used, with all the downsides of both. A subreddit would be an improvement for searchability and drop-in accessibility but (to my knowledge) you can't have thingBugs, thingGeneralDiscussion, and thingLolFunnyMemes as all distinct subsubreddits under the thing subreddit (and the lovely voting system ordering thing). I could be misreading this, but in what world are forums not enclaves controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Discord is literally spinning up a small enclave to communicate with like minded people. Like Discord is not great as far as discoverability goes since it can't be indexed by search engines. But that's pretty much it.(an unrelated aside but god are Google and most other search engines trash in general nowadays) But outside of the discoverability flaw Discord can pretty much do what you want it to do. Like I just opened up one of the discords I'm in and took a screenshot of the threads of games.  Other discords I'm in have channels where they encourage effort posts by having a posting timer of like 2-3 minutes to make you(theoretically anyway, in practice it works like 70% of the time) have to think out what you want to say. Dexo fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 10:50
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Dexo posted:I could be misreading this, but in what world are forums not enclaves controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Any individual discord server is an enclave controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Any individual subreddit is an enclave controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Any individual forum (such as SA as a whole) is an enclave controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Discord and other evolved chat room systems are the best fit for some purposes. Reddit and other algorithmicly sorted feed spews are the best fit for some purposes. Forums are the best fit for some purposes. Anyone can easily spin up a discord for free and pay money for extra features as required. All the technical upkeep is externalised. Anyone can easily spin up a subreddit for free and pay money for extra features as required. All the technical upkeep us externalised. Setting up a new forum is a pile of up front effort and cash and there's no off the shelf way to externalise technical upkeep. There is no technical reason why there couldn't be a Discord/Reddit equivalent where I log into forumz4us.com and press a couple of buttons to spin up Splicer's Cool Games (subforums: games, bugs, suggestions, cooking, general, memes, cursed memes), but forumz4us.com doesn't exist. So Discord, Reddit, Twitter etc are being used where they are fit for purpose and also as bad substitutes for forumz4us.com. The context of my original reply was in response to someone who was under the impression people were mad at the idea of bespoke communities, when the complaint is that these bespoke community platforms are being used for things their formats are not good at.
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Oct 16, 2023 12:06
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Splicer posted:Splicer's Cool Games I keep clicking but no thing's happening 
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Oct 16, 2023 12:19
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Splicer posted:There is no technical reason why there couldn't be a Discord/Reddit equivalent where I log into forumz4us.com and press a couple of buttons to spin up Splicer's Cool Games (subforums: games, bugs, suggestions, cooking, general, memes, cursed memes), but forumz4us.com doesn't exist. So Discord, Reddit, Twitter etc are being used where they are fit for purpose and also as bad substitutes for forumz4us.com. Proboards is still around and has existed for 20 years at this point, though? I don't know if there any others lingering about but it's absolutely something you can do if you really want.
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Oct 16, 2023 12:27
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I think part of small forums falling aside is that people don’t want to make new accounts for every community. Even with browsers now storing login credentials, it’s still annoying mental overhead. Discord, Reddit, and other social media let you use a single account for all the subcommunities you want.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:01
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whydirt posted:I think part of small forums falling aside is that people don’t want to make new accounts for every community. Even with browsers now storing login credentials, it’s still annoying mental overhead. *brandishes menacingly* Facebook Groups
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Oct 16, 2023 13:19
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Dexo posted:I could be misreading this, but in what world are forums not enclaves controlled by the whims of a few mods/admins. Well gently caress, now I want to be in your Discords. Yours seem better than mine.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:25
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Discord is good for small communities. Like the 4e discord is good for getting your tools up and running. It's also a good way to provide information to your individual game group. But I can't imagine using it for general conversation about a topic.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:16
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Discord's great as a sort of feature-rich IRC channel. I'm in a few discords for communities of thousands or tens of thousands of people, used for exactly the purpose a forum would once have been used for, and it's awful.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:20
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CitizenKeen posted:Well gently caress, now I want to be in your Discords. Yours seem better than mine. I was gonna say, this sidebar feels 50% "old people yell at cloud" and 50% "the features are there, you're just not using them". 
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Oct 16, 2023 14:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Discord's great as a sort of feature-rich IRC channel. I'm in a few discords for communities of thousands or tens of thousands of people, used for exactly the purpose a forum would once have been used for, and it's awful. Discords like that I luckily don't ever like want to participate in as anything other than a resource to look up like if someone has had a similar issue to me or a solution, like I do for something like Foundry. Other than that discords I'm in that I'll post in top out at like 1-2k users. Yeah once you get to like tens of thousands of people it becomes worthless as a place to talk about poo poo in a non dire manner. But I feel that way about large forums as well. I felt that way about GAF and resetera, and avoid GBS here. I hate participating in large communities in general.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:40
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Discord may have certain features now that make it a better place/more conducive to what you'd want from it, it's still incumbent on the admin to set them up correctly. Something many don't, either out of dislike for actually administrating their community, or because they themselves don't care enough. (Or because they're largely absent and haven't passed on the admin powers to someone who is actually participating.)
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Oct 16, 2023 14:58
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moths posted:I've come to resent navigating a separate discord for nearly every Patreon, Kickstarter, LGS, or indie game. Don't forget random rear end YouTubers grinding that brand engagement. Tuxedo Catfish posted:The biggest problem with Discord is that it's a completely poo poo substitute for web forums and wikis but has, de facto, replaced or at least hollowed out those kinds of sites in a lot of communities/hobbies/etc. If I thought this change would seriously discourage people from using Discord as an archive, I would applaud it. In practice, I think that ship has already sailed, people will continue to use Discord as an archive, only now it's going to be a shittier archive because they don't want to pay to maintain a useful feature. The replacement of Wikis is the worst thing in my experience, at that point you might as well use a Subreddit as a knowledge repository. Mors Rattus posted:Honestly my big issue with official RPG discords is publish your goddamn errata and official rulings somewhere that isn't a Discord. PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 15:09
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:The replacement of Wikis is the worst thing in my experience, at that point you might as well use a Subreddit as a knowledge repository. Part of that blame goes right to fandom for gobbling up so many wikis and making them unusable without extensive custom adblock scripts.
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Oct 16, 2023 15:17
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Anonymous Zebra posted:The crux of this is that a lot of you are pinning for a forum design that doesn't really exist anymore for good reasons. It wasn't some vast corporate conspiracy that caused SomethingAwful and other forums like this to become less popular. Modern social media is literally a vast corporate conspiracy.
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Oct 16, 2023 15:24
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Splicer posted:I think you're misreading but I think that's on me. I'll clarify. There are some free things for setting up forums, but setting up a new community even on Discord and Reddit is already hard (in terms of getting people to actually come to it; usually you need to ride some other pre-existing wave like a popular piece of media or social movement), and forums are not a thing people are used to interacting with already. So you'd be doing something hard using the least popular kind of social media.
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Oct 16, 2023 15:29
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BlackIronHeart posted:I don't give a poo poo, my good dude, I don't really want to interact with other folks simply because we bought the same thing from someone. It feels very "consumption as identity" in an unpleasant way. I'm sure the community is really nice, but I still want to be able to opt out of that. Hunter Noventa posted:Part of that blame goes right to fandom for gobbling up so many wikis and making them unusable without extensive custom adblock scripts. I remember back when this was happening to Wikis I frequented. Still the best sources of information for much stuff, but so much shittier to experience.
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Oct 16, 2023 15:39
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Not really sure if this is the right place for this, but I guess it's industry related: Anyone following or aware of the drama on the RPG Auctions facebook group? TLDR on it is that this group is massive; like 10k+ members but is run and admined by ONE dude with no moderators. Despite that, the group actually runs pretty well. A while back though, the admin decided to open up a Patreon where you can pay like $5 a month for a "community ambassador" badge which as far as I can tell does nothing. Fine, whatever. Over the weekend, dude drops this thing basically stating that "if you want to sell miniatures in this group, you now have to have a Miniatures Merchant badge which you can get by subscribing to Patreon at $9/month for earlybirds or $14/month for everyone else." Lotta folks called him out on it and had threads locked and deleted and he gave a response that was "this group was never run for altruistic purposes; it's always been part of a business plan." Like...is running a Facebook group a legit business these days? How do you guys feel about people charging to use a free service?
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Oct 16, 2023 16:17
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Splicer posted:There is no technical reason why there couldn't be a Discord/Reddit equivalent where I log into forumz4us.com and press a couple of buttons to spin up Splicer's Cool Games (subforums: games, bugs, suggestions, cooking, general, memes, cursed memes), but forumz4us.com doesn't exist. So Discord, Reddit, Twitter etc are being used where they are fit for purpose and also as bad substitutes for forumz4us.com. I think that's pretty much it. There's no other way on the intertubes for the average guy to create his own discussion forum with no money and little effort.
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Oct 16, 2023 17:00
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EdsTeioh posted:Not really sure if this is the right place for this, but I guess it's industry related: Anyone following or aware of the drama on the RPG Auctions facebook group? TLDR on it is that this group is massive; like 10k+ members but is run and admined by ONE dude with no moderators. Despite that, the group actually runs pretty well. A while back though, the admin decided to open up a Patreon where you can pay like $5 a month for a "community ambassador" badge which as far as I can tell does nothing. Fine, whatever. Over the weekend, dude drops this thing basically stating that "if you want to sell miniatures in this group, you now have to have a Miniatures Merchant badge which you can get by subscribing to Patreon at $9/month for earlybirds or $14/month for everyone else." Lotta folks called him out on it and had threads locked and deleted and he gave a response that was "this group was never run for altruistic purposes; it's always been part of a business plan." Like...is running a Facebook group a legit business these days? How do you guys feel about people charging to use a free service? lol. lmao I mean on the one hand the dude can do whatever he wants with his group, but also nobody is going to pay for that.
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Oct 16, 2023 17:14
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That's the typical arc for a web site. You have a lot of users and they make you no money, so you institute some change that will pay off if even a fraction of those users buy in. But then it causes a mass exodus rather than making the operation profitable.
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