Discord

[Nott]

Admittedly I'm writing this after uh...a really awful discord experience but also my experiences with the platform have been horrible all around. People before have already detailed how awful it is when it comes to storing information. I would love it for Game Devs to Stop Using Discord as their main information repository and/or place they post news because I don't want to join your discord! I write meta and it's horrid just horrid when I realize that the info I need is buried in a DISCORD SERVER, and I'd love it if people just made wikis or faqs or Literally Anything Else Other Than Discord to Index Information.

(Okay maybe not literally anything else because trying to find things through Youtube Videos, Reddit Threads, and Twitter isn't pleasant either but Discord is probably my most hated place to find information about something.)

On what it's Actually Supposed To Be Used For well....I don't use it much. In all honestly I message most of my friends over Tumblr which isn't Ideal and it's not a Great Messaging system but I'm on it the most so that's where I tend to talk to people. I started to use it more because a few other friends used discord more often. Plus I like talking and a lot of casual fandom discussion is on discord, so I tried talking in them more and...well...

I'll admit three things about me that influence my opinions for transparency's sake: 1. I'm easily sealioned and goaded into a response. I'm distinctly susceptible to this kind of harassment in the sense that I assume everyone is being sincere and wants to have a genuine discussion. I'm very passionate and stubborn when I care about something, and don't understand the concept of backing down from an argument cause to Me it's only a matter of time 'till they understand what I'm saying. This is why I'm not on twitter. 2. I can't keep up with fast paced conversation. If something is going too fast I'll start to feel disconnected and/or anxious. and 3. I'm not great at speaking in scenarios that involve more than 2 people and I'm quick to lose steam when a situation involves more than 3 people.

Suffice to say, Discord is a bit of a hell for me. Though I don't think it's just because of my traits- for one I was telling a friend of mine about the time like- three people jumped me in a discord server for daring to have an opinion different from them, and they just immediately went "That's really mean" and I didn't even process that cause that's just- a norm in discord servers. Even outside of me I've seen arguments have people join in and bully someone in it, and no one really bats an eye because that's expected of the culture.

Big discords are more likely to fall prey to this, but even small ones can be volatile, especially if there is a Dominant Opinion. You tend to get eaten alive in discord servers if your opinion in any way grates against what is considered popular in that community. This sort of reaction is usually attributed to teenagers, but college aged people have fought with me for no reason other than "I said something about their fav that they didn't like" which is rather unpleasant.

I think it's a bit of a problem with how Discord itself is set up though. You can only make so many channels and threads within a discord, and if it's big enough what tends to happen is there's 4 people having 3 different conversations in the same channel and with widely differing opinions on the same thing and widely different temperaments in a fast paced environment that priorities Responding At This Very Moment. It's not...great for discussion and what tends to happen is that I feel bullied out of communities I would like to interact with because I didn't read the room, or because I pissed off the wrong person for something that is in retrospect, very petty like an opinion on a character.

Plus that sort of environment just makes me a worse person, since it always puts me on edge. I'm not above it and it's really bothersome to think about afterwards.

[Monoki]

Discord is....alright. It's decent for keeping in contact with people I know in social media spaces. I find myself collecting servers more than really interacting with them however. This creates a huge cacophony of notifications I can't keep track of and in turn it makes me use it less. I've also felt that my creative stuff gets glossed over easily in art channels.

I've been hankering to do text-based RPing again. used to do it a lot on forums back when I was a teenager. But it seems Discord is the place most are choosing to do it these days. Seems like it would be hard to keep track of.

[warlock]

I will fully admit to being an early adopter and frequent user of Discord, pretty much since it started. It was far better than Skype when it first started, and all of my friends switched over to it pretty much immediately.

That being the case, I think it's probably one of the worst tools for actually communicating with people that you don't already know. Large discords are a cacophony most of the time, with multiple regulars having interwoven conversations that totally block out any new users from joining in. As someone on both the outside and inside of this, it's just hell.

Smaller servers are definitely nice, but I can't help but feel like Discord manages to have the worst of both worlds when it comes to chatting systems. IRC and other public chat options of yore generally only kept track of public chatrooms when you were actively in them, so if you disconnected you just didn't get any information during your absence. This can definitely be seen as a con, but I think it actually frees up a chatroom to be more transient in terms of discussion. It's bad for historical record-keeping, but why are you having conversations that need to be archived on a chat program? That's what forums are for!

Discord incentivizes people to aggregate conversations AND information onto one platform, with both ideas working against one another. Every tool - chat apps, forums, e-mails - should be used for one thing, having everything nested into one Everything App makes it nearly impossible to escape if the platform begins crumbling, like Discord seems to perpetually be on the brink of.

[NoxidKin]

I use Discord to connect with people who share my hobbies.  Not that it always works, but I'm on a few servers for Game Dev and art and such, and a few servers for games that I like.  I've tried just hangout servers but I haven't enjoyed them as much, I prefer to have something in common with people to begin with.  Same reason I'm here on MelonLand really. <3

[Daryl Sun]

I primarily use Discord to chat with my boyfriend. I've tried getting him into Matrix, but Matrix has its own usability issues, at least for us.

I used to be a server collector, but I got too many pings from various servers, so I decided to limit the number of servers that I've joined to those for webcrafting communities where I'm fairly active or for games that my boyfriend and I both enjoy. I check the former regularly, because I like the discussions in them, while I only check the announcements channel for the latter regarding game updates.

[warlock]

Sorry for dusting off this topic, but it seems like a good time because Discord just announced that they're getting a new CEO, Humam Sakhnini. He's an ex-Activision-Blizzard-King executive who oversaw Candy Crush Saga become the most money-sucking mobile game in recent memory, CoD becoming a microtransaction nightmare, and half a dozen other projects that served to drain users of their money in as many ways as possible.

"During his stint with Activision Blizzard, Humam Sakhnini managed a multi-billion dollar portfolio of blockbuster gaming franchises including the likes of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and even the popular mobile game Candy Crush. Sakhnini was also the President of King Digital Entertainment before his days at Activision." - Source

This is also right on the heels of Discord making noises towards opening themselves up to the stock market, which is almost always a turning point where a product goes from being focused on usability (although you could argue that Discord has already moved away from this) into being entirely focused on profit due to their new intent on creating value for their investors.

Now is definitely a good time to start trying to find alternatives - my friends and I are trying out Matrix and (for the time being) Signal, but we haven't found one that's fit all of our needs.

[Charlynne]

Revolt might be the closest alternative that could work for us. I've used it before and I appreciate the effort in it. Plus, it's open source! I really hope people move there, because it would be a nightmare if they instead go for Guilded (owned by Roblox and requires a Roblox account), or Teamspeak (costs money to have more members to be in a guild)

https://revolt.chat/

[cindy]

I've definitely had issues trying to use Matrix. Nothing that would be impossible if I had no other choice, but as things stand its virtually impossible to get my community to migrate off of Discord, and very little else offers as rich a featureset. Of course that's the way of the tech industry these days. Get a captive audience and once you do, boil the frog.

And hell, there's still a lot of people who won't migrate off of "X" at this point, despite Bluesky at this point basically being fully featured and everything pre-X Twitter was. I feel like I'm going to be trapped on this burning ship for communication purposes in a similar way that in a lot of countries its basically mandatory to use Facebook's "WhatsApp".

[Memory]

i'm actually seriously looking into other ways of messaging people - MSN Escargot, IRC, XMPP, all that. cuz quite frankly all the crap that's been putting into Discord lately is really annoying me.

i don't wanna buy Nitro ever again, it costs waay too much money, for what should be free things aside from boosting? i don't get it. but i would like to use custom GIFs for my profile pics, without Nitro? Vesktop's okay, the only real reason i still use Discord anyways is cuz my online friends refuse to use anything else, plus it's generally more convenient for them :P

though especially with my PC i've got, Discord slows to a crawl half the time; typing a message, i only see like, 5-9 words appear after a second, and then another 5-9 words, etc. plus i don't really like how invasive it is anyways. and Matrix, it's got it's own issues, and historically both Discord and Matrix have been hell for me; though i'll admit they can be pretty easy to use. i just need a proper cloud storage thing and delete my private Discord server though, since that's where i used to put a heap of my images into for the sake of convenience from my phone to my PC.
and i think again the only real reason why i don't have those other things is simply since my friends don't want to move to another platform. i think it's fair enough, though.

i have Pidgin on my PC, though i never use it    but i think something else other than Matrix would be real nice to have 

[nintendowii99]

I've used discord on and off since about 2021. I've never used it extensively, but I am in several groups. Mainly just for reference, since the communities aren't anywhere else online (small niche speedrunning and things like that). I have a couple of irl friends that I talk to on it, but i'm bad at responding since I don't have it on my phone and don't leave it open on my pc.

[Cobra!]

So I just read that Discord is changing ownership to a former Activision executive and they’re going “public”.

This is ringing many alarm bells for me. A company going public never ends well, especially when someone who worked at the top of Activision is behind the wheel.
I use Discord to engage in homebrew and retro tech communities, and I get the feeling people will migrate to another platform, or the networks I worked to get and my help network will just collapse…

Well, I can only hope that this time they move to something more open source or at the very least federated.

[Memory]

So I just read that Discord is changing ownership to a former Activision executive and they’re going “public”.

This is ringing many alarm bells for me. A company going public never ends well, especially when someone who worked at the top of Activision is behind the wheel.
I use Discord to engage in homebrew and retro tech communities, and I get the feeling people will migrate to another platform, or the networks I worked to get and my help network will just collapse…

Well, I can only hope that this time they move to something more open source or at the very least federated.

what the hell (o_O)

i've been telling all my friends to use XMPP but they're looking towards Matrix more lol
i wonder how long Discord is gonna last... well, we can't see the future now, can't we?

edit: i've told them about it; one of them's gonna switch over to Matrix or main IRC anyways, and my bestie (to me at least lol) isn't really sure but Matrix is jankfest central to her :P

i wonder, are you (the reader) gonna move somewhere else?

[boreal_cryptid]

i used it more active before, but mostly because some communities (modding, moddev) have only discord server. with all documentation, updates, help channels, tutorials, etc. it honesty feels like a paywall.

i really tried to get used to it, but it's soooo cluttered that i get overwhelmed very quickly.

for now, i use nekoweb server and small trans server. i login once in a while (from browser) to check what's new, and then log out for a few months again.

i want to leave from other servers soon, and keep only, like, essential?

overall, i feel like it was better uhh at the beginning. idk.

[boreal_cryptid]

welp, disappointed, but not surprised 

Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online.
(sorry for paywall... i will add full version later.

“Throughout every step of our data collection process, we prioritized adherence to ethical standards,” they wrote in a section called ‘Ethical Concerns.’ “Precautions were taken to collect data responsibly. All data was sourced from groups that are explicitly considered public according to Discord’s terms of use, which every user agrees to upon signing up. The data was anonymized, and the methodology was detailed to promote reproducibility and transparency.”

Even with the pains taken to anonymize the data, the scrape appears to be against Discord’s Terms of Service. The Discord Developer policy, which covers the use of its API, is clear. “Do not mine or scrape any data, content, or information available on or through Discord services,” it says. Some form of this prohibition against scraping has been in place since at least 2020.

man...   

[edea]

After today's news that there's a secret AI image gen bot that's been invited to every single server and is hidden from the member list, I only wish more to get out of the discord ecosystem. At least there's a way to ban it.... but my entire social circle is stubbornly stuck on discord even still.

Matrix looks okay but still suffers from some of the issues i have with discord. XMPP is a cool throwback but i feel like getting people i know to move there is even more of a stretch.