How did Discord become the go-to service for gamers?

My main beef with Discord is getting a link and finding out the invite link has expired.

I used to get those a lot, but I don’t see that so much anymore.

I think most servers have figured out that it’s less of a hassle to use permanent links and make users jump through a few hoops to get posting privileges once they’re there.

My main beef with Discord is the godawful over-stuffed impenetrable UI that makes it so much harder to keep up with a number of simultaneous conversations – and more importantly, catch up with them – than it is in Slack.

Try this fun little exercise: put someone who’s never used Discord before in a voice channel and ask them to leave it. Then watch them struggle. But not for long, because you’re not a monster. Then show them that amongst the sea of icons and buttons and text and text buttons they have to hit the one that kinda sorta looks like a telephone handset with an X next to it and watch their surprise.

I’ve done this for a number of new Discord users. It’s almost shocking how bad some of the UI is.

Also: why can’t we have threads? Threads are good. Slack has threads. Mattermost has threads. Hipchat HAD tnreads. Threads tame chaos. Why can’t Discord have them?

And yes, developers using Discord instead of fora as their primary means of communicating with their users are a curse, too. But that’s not Discord’s fault, that’s the developers’ fault. If you want your game to endure, put your meaningful communication somewhere that will endure, too. Not in a phreaking practically ephemeral chat client.

OK, grumpy old man mode off.

On the bright side, it does make it about as easy as it’s ever been to have chat, voice, and streaming all in one place. There’s something to be said for that. (Nitro’s still a ripoff, though.)

I had to Google that this weekend.

Discord is multiplatform, unlike all the alternatives that had always been Windows only. It helps. Also it’s somewhat stable.

I’m with @kaosfere and am not a discord fan. Its UI is fairly atrocious and the chat experience is extremely messy and missing features that Slack and others do better. What bothers me most is the “functionality” people add to big discords. Click on this reaction symbol to get access to this special area! Read our 12 pages of stickies to follow our rules. Bleh.

I use discord when I have to and it’s serviceable for online gaming, but for fostering good asynchronous discussion it’s crap.

Yea, it’s going to suck when we lose all this information about games that’s currently being compiled exclusively in Discord. And the fact that it isn’t Google searchable is a huge issue for discoverability. I don’t want to join a Discord for a specific thing that I’m not going to care about a week/month later.

Also don’t like that Discord is the sole arbiter and unlike every service before it I can’t spin up my own instance on something like DigitalOcean or self-host.

i don’t think they have figured out how to make money yet either it’s all a lot of vc cash.

This is one of the biggest problems with Discord, imo. The few I’m on regularly have long surpassed everything else – subreddits, youtube guides, written guides – in terms of knowlege, but the knowledge that’s there isnt easily discovered and is barely searchable. And none of the built-in or customized features (pins, bots, special channels, moderating, etc.) really address the core issues.

Still, I will continue to use the platform because there’s nothing better.

Rather than be bitter about the world moving on (because we sure are good at that!), first from Usenet and then from web forums, it might be useful to think about just why that would be happening.

What’s eaten the web forum? It’s been Discord from one direction, Reddit from the other. (And maybe Facebook from the third? I don’t use FB, so have no idea of how that works, just that a lot of discussions by “normal people” seemed to move there.). They have a few features in common:

  1. A centralized platform for people to host their own communities. I.e. they decide the rules, do the moderation with tools provided by the platform, etc.
  2. Easy to join new communities once you’re on a platform. Just subscribe to the subreddit, join the Discord server, etc. No need to create new accounts.
  3. The platform can surface content from all these separate communities into a single view, or a single app. No need for people to check in daily for what’s up. (This is kind of important, since any forum you’re not checking in a few times a week you’re probably not using in a year.)
  4. The discussions are phemeral. A Discord thread will be unfindable forever. A Reddit thread will die down in a couple of days. (And it is pretty obvious from both the UI and the UI changes that Reddit has no interest in the discussion part at all).

Only point 4 is fundamental to Reddit’s / Discord’s models. But I think you could totally make a platform that meets points 1-3, but where the basic data model and UX of a discussions are those of a web forum. I.e. a forum / topic / thread / post hierarchy, with threads being ordered by most recent activity rather than expiring.

Does this exist already?

Seems like developers are deciding it’s largely a waste of time and money to duplicate functionality that Reddit, Discord, Boardgamegeek or a wiki can provide. Plus your fans will do the lion’s share of the work for you!

I certainly find Discord’s UI occasionally a bit opaque, but the voice and chat functionality is very good, and having one service that absolutely everyone in every geek pursuit ever uses is fantastic. Any time day or night I can pop in to the Discord and ask a question and get an answer more or less instantly. That’s better service than any forum I never wanted to sign up for anyway.

In my experience saying you can pop in and get instant answers is over sold, what I’m usually popping into looks like a parade of inane inside jokes among regulars.

Combine that with the ephemeral nature of it and I find I have little use for it.

Easy to use and set up. They marketed to gamers for a long time. The pandemic pulled in a lot of non-gamers and communities.

Now they’re just mostly shitting on/ignoring gaming communities because they got big and people are looking for the next thing to replace them.

It’s decent for what it is, but all I really use it for is when Steam’s VOIP shits the bed. It’s a phone call for the most part to me, so stuff streamers and gamers are complaining about are mostly beyond me. A lot of them are looking to Guilded (I think that’s the name), but they also say it’s not quite there yet.

Article:

Guilded has some nice features Discord doesn’t, like integrated forums and a calendar and what not. I hope Discord eventually adds these things.

Well, that’s not been my experience, but different servers are different.

One time I did join a discord and ask a question because I could see no other way of getting the information and the developer and another very helpful dude were actually in there and answered my question, but like…what if they hadn’t been there. In two or three or four years they will, in all likelihood, not be and then where is the person who has my same question? Up shit creek. I’m not an app developer so I don’t really care why Discord has replaced forums, and I suspect that most of the reason has nothing whatsoever to do with use cases or any of that stuff, it’s just “what you do,” and most people tend to go with what’s familiar and easy, and right now that means discord. If the tide changes they’ll all just flow to the next thing. Reddit sucks in a lot of ways but at least it’s transparent to google searches.

Don’t points 1-3 describe Usenet? For that matter isn’t Reddit just Usenet with a better UI?

It depends on the discord. In most cases, discords are communities, and I think it’s closer to oldschool mailing lists than forums.

Wherein I continue to aggressively agree with Kolbex - to add on to this point Reddit actually allows you to give some sort of permanence to information with sidebars and wiki functionality. Trying to give a message any permanence on Discord relies on either using the awful pin system (if you want to reorder the pins, you can’t just move one you have to un/repin everything since the most recently pinned item goes to the top) or setting up a separate channel with 50/50 odds that the message/info dump will even load once it gets old enough.

On top of the issue with loading old messages Discord barely functions on large enough servers (an outlier, but one of the servers I’m in is up to nearly 250k members and the admins are handcuffed on adding/removing roles because there’s a good chance it will crash the server) and has a 100 server limit - meaning as more games, communities, or whatever move to Discord the “join to see the only source of information for <game>” becomes “juggle which servers I’m in and go through the annoying welcome bot and role selection all over again if I decide I need it later”. Which I imagine isn’t an issue for 90% of users, but is an issue for 0% of users pulling information off Reddit, GameFAQs, or some random forum. Hell, for one game alone I have 7 different servers right now each with their own niche or area of specialty.

I would love to not use Discord however the choice is to either use it or not have access to the communities and resources for the games I’m playing.

I was asking whether something existed that did 1-3, but had the web forum data model. Neither Usenet nor Reddit share that model, and to me it seems kind of an important distinction in building communities. I’d never read a general purpose politics forum, or something like /r/politics. Nor would I ever bother making an account on a web forum dedicated to the weather or to dieting or whatever. But when those threads appear on Qt3, I might pop in. I’m here primarily for the games discussion, but all that other stuff is immediately more interesting just because the discussion is between people whose writing I’ve been reading for a decade.

(For Usenet, you could get a tiny bit of this stability. It was always possible that somebody posting in rec.arts.sf.written and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic was also posting in talk.politics.misc. But if I had been reading the first two groups for years and then tried reading the third, odds are that 99% of the posters were basically strangers).

But also, I don’t think Usenet did point 1. Spinning up a new Usenet newsgroup was pretty painful. (If you wanted something in the big 7, it was months of bureaucracy at least from my recollection of skimming news.groups.proposals). And once the group was created, it wasn’t your community. It was a public free for all.