Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:
why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?
simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:
- garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
- provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
- provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project
forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it’s something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website
if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they’re directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project
a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water
I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I’d like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there’s a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it’s overstating the friction, am i wrong here?
The main reason projects use it is because a plurality of people already have a discord account, and you don’t need to keep making a new account for every new forum or wiki you want to comment on, read, or post to. I don’t think this is just an issue of “critical mass” ether. Lot of people don’t really want to be handing information to every project they interact with, nor do people want to learn 30 different UIs and quirks.
It’s nature as a chat/call system first has it’s benefits in the form of printed community discussion. People feel like they’re part of a community more easily than on traditional forums and wikis, it’s just more conversational.
It’s far from a good wiki or forum, in fact it is basically non-functional as a wiki, but, as a forum and tech support line, it does work, largely buoyed by the good search function.
It’s open ended enough in it’s functionality, and enough people already know how to use plugins and bots for it, that a lot of it’s short comings can be paved over or overlooked.
It’s bloated and messy and the back end is… yah, and it’s UI and formatting are not well suited for certain tasks. But the average person is far more likely to actually use it. With a single link anyone who already has a discord account can get access to a community, post, comment, and search previous comments and questions. Not to mention that it’s easier to keep track of projects you’re interested in if they’re all centralized on a single platform.
???
Good search function? On Discord? Since when?
I have never encountered a Discord server that is useful for anything except live chat and automated notifications. Which is not an indictment of Discord; I mean, that’s what it’s for, and it’s pretty good at it at small-medium scales.
I use Discord on a daily basis, but when I encounter a project that uses Discord, I just do not engage with it at this point. It’s always a mess. Every server has its own arcane rules and mechanisms to access channels, usually with some bot commands that I need to dig through docs to learn. I don’t consider it “low friction” at all, even as someone who’s been using Discord for many years and always has it open.
I’ve seen discord communities that work like this:
Person posts a question in the main chat, people discuss it and reach a resolution, a mod, bot or sometimes the op copies the question, helpful troubleshooting and the eventual answer into a separate channel (usually one of many sorted by topic) which only sees those sorts of posts and acts as a fairly searchable faq.
That format, while labour’s intensive, seems pretty effective and low friction (for a user) to me. I’m not saying it’s the best tool for job, but it works and is popular which is what really matters.