Discordia, discordiae [f.]: A Misunderstanding

I don’t understand the appeal of Discord.

Oh, sure: I understand it for things like gaming.  The few times that I’ve run D&D games with remote participants, I happily used Discord, and found it to be excellent for that purpose.  Nowadays, there are fancier platforms for such purposes—Alchemy, Owlbear Rodeo, or even things like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which have been around so long they’re starting to show their age—but honestly I might just stick to something like Discord for its simplicity.

The thing I don’t understand is that it seems to have become the flavor of the decade for hosting online communities.  Web forums are considered passé nowadays: downright old-fashioned, some would even say.  How many times have I heard lately “if you have a question, just pop into our Discord”?  People are actually using it for product support, and it just makes no sense to me.

Now, on the one hand, you might say: well, that makes perfect sense—Discord is primarily popular among Zoomers, while you are very old.  And, sure, I can’t argue the first part, and while I might protest the second one a bit—I’m not a freakin’ Boomer (I am in fact, an elder Gen-Xer, if one believes in those sorts of things^*)—I’m not going to deny that it’s a fair observation.  But I have one foolproof argument that absolutely proves that this has nothing to do with my age: IRC.

Because, in exactly the same way that Reddit is just Usenet reborn, Discord is 100% just the second coming of IRC.  And IRC was invented in 1988, and by the time I was in the age range that Zoomers occupy now—the upper age range, granted, but still: within the range—it was the way that cool tech people communicated.  And I didn’t understand the appeal of it then either.

See, Discord (just like IRC before it) has several fundamental problems that make it really bad for online support in particular, and long-lived online communities in general.  And please don’t think I’m trying to bring back webforums here: I always thought they were pretty awful too, at least compared to the interface of something like Usenet.  But it’s pretty easy to look good when you’re put up against something as terrible as Discord.  And, as much as I’ve always hated webforums, I’ve had some experience with them: I’ve been the moderator a popular Heroscape website for coming up on two decades now.  Of course, most of the younger fans (such as they are for a game that’s been discontinued for years now^**) have moved to YouTube and, I suppose, Discord, but please don’t imagine that I’m upset about that.  Being a moderator of a forum whose traffic is declining means I have less work to do, so I’m all for everyone moving on to other venues.  But my point is, I have a bit of experience not only participating, but even managing, a long-running online community.  So I’m not just talking out of my ass here.

So, what can a webforum do that Discord can’t?  Well, first off, the organization is just better.  A webforum has forums, which have threads.  The vast majority of them also have dedicated areas for file uploads, and often a separate one for images.  Many have blogs or something similar attached to them.  Threads can be moved to another forum when they’re posted in the wrong place by a clueless user, or split apart when they get too crowded, or merged when people are trying to have the same conversation in multiple places at once.  Discord has ... channels.  That’s pretty much it.  There are a couple of different types of channels, but (as near as I can tell, in any event) that has more to do with the method of communication than anything else (e.g. text channels, voice channels, video channels, etc).  So, channels are the only way to organize things, so everything is sort of forced uncomfortably into that model.

A bigger problem, which Discord shares with IRC, is that it’s all real-time.  If I show up on a webforum, I can post a question, then sign off and check back in a few hours (or the next day) for an answer.  On Discord, I post a question, and if someone is there who can answer the question, I get the answer instantly, which is certainly nice.  But if there isn’t anyone there at that exact moment, I just don’t get an answer at all.  I guess some people do go back in time to read all the messages that came in since the last time they were online, but that’s not easy to do, and it might be way too many messages anyway, if the community is large, and even if the person sees the question and knows the answer, they’re probably not going to post it because the conversation has moved on since then so now their answer has no context, and even if the person makes it through all that and actually posts the answer, then I very well might not be online to receive it.  It is quite possibly the worst possible model for customer support that could be imagined in this reality or any other.

But the biggest problem with Discord is that it’s very difficult to search.  At least IRC had logging: most IRC chats were saved and posted to web pages, where you could do minimal, primitive, Ctrl-F-type searches.  A webforum, on the other hand, typically has sophisticated searching: I can find all threads in a certain group of forums that have posts from a given user that contain 2 or more words, not necessarily adjacent.  Not to mention I can use Google to search instead if that’s somehow advantageous.  Meanwhile, searching in Discord is a miserable affair, and can only be done on Discord.  I can set up my own Discord server, but I can’t log those messages to a separate location, because it’s not really my server: it’s just a virtual server controlled by Discord.  And the inability to locate old messages easily means that people just ask the same questions over and over, and people have to spew out the same answers over and over, which everyone no doubt gets sick of doing, and I can tell you from experience that everyone definitely gets sick of reading them.  Lack of easy and versatile search means that the community has no history ... no memory.  And a community with no memory is cursed to just do the same things over and over, not even expecting a different result: just expecting no result whatsoever.  Which is exactly what it gets.

So I don’t see the appeal of Discord, just as I didn’t see the appeal of IRC.  Personally, I was happy to see the latter fade in popularity, though of course there are still corners of the Internet where you can still find IRC communities, presumably inhabited by gray-bearded programmers of COBOL and Ada reminscing about the good ol’ days of JCL and PDP-11s.  But everything that fades comes around again.  AIM is gone, but now we have WhatsApp.  Usenet is (mostly) gone, but now we have Reddit.  And here’s Discord, with the exact same interface that didn’t work with IRC, trying to make it work again.  Honestly, Reddit has the best user interface, I think: subreddits are like forums, threads are threads, and the conversations are displayed heirarchically, so that a response to a given message goes with that message rather than just being tacked on at the end (as they would be in a webforum thread).  This is exactly how Usenet worked (and Slashdot, for that matter), and I still think it’s the superior way to display and store community conversations.  But Reddit has its own issues, which are eerily similar to Usenet’s: it has a reputation for being a cesspool, which certain parts of it deserve, and it often makes it easy for misinformation to thrive and multiply.  Perhaps that’s because the moderation tools for webforums are better ...

Or perhaps it’s because each webforum was run by its own community.  They owned the servers and they set the rules.  Usenet and IRC were like that too: very decentralized, with each community having near complete autonomy.  But Reddit is a company, as is Discord; in fact, it’s very rare these days for a comunity of any type to set up its own servers and run its own software.  You set up virtual servers at Amazon or Microsoft, web sites at Squarespace and WordPress, you put your photos on Instagram and your blogs on Tumblr.  Well, assuming you even bother with blogs at all: these days, it’s more common to just tweet, which of course means you’re using Elon Musk’s personal dumpster fire.  Each one is its own company, with its own goals, and none of those goals are to help your online community thrive, unless of course your thriving can line their pockets in the process.  And obviously the un-decentralization of the Internet is a much broader topic than this meager blog post can address, but I do think Discord is symptomatic of that issue.

So I continue not to “get” Discord, even though I occasionally use it, because often there just isn’t another option.  But it’s always an option of last resort.  Unless, as I noted initially, I’m gaming online.  It’s still pretty good at what it was originally intended for.  I just feel like, somewhere along the way, they got a bit lost trying to be everything to all people.  That hardly ever works.

__________

* And one mostly shouldn’t.  Personally, while I think it is bullshit to imagine you know what any given person is going to do or say based on an arbitrary “generation” label assigned by the Pew Research Center, I do think it’s okay to use the labels as a convenient shorthand for talking about demographic differences between age groups, which are absolutely a thing that exists.

** But is now officially making a comeback, for what it’s worth.