Back in the good old days, forums and IRC ran parallel with each other and had no reason to intersect. With the internet becoming bigger, more consolidated and commercialized than ever, people are finding ways to spend time on as few different sites as possible. Forums have closed in favor of cheaper-to-run Discord servers. This has led to a great exodus on over thirty years of early Internet history. I miss these forums because:
- Search indexing. This is the biggest downside to Discord and other IRC chats, there are no archival properties outside of the ecosystem. Unless you meet the requirements to join and in some cases are pre-vetted, accessing information is extremely hard with Discord servers. It is not very convenient having to join several channels and servers just to find one item guide on the character you like to use. Forums index all this information to be easily searched by the web. This is what they were built for.
- Synchronous vs asynchronous communication: Discord is very fast paced and does not necessarily reward quality posts and comments, but instead to get known by posting as much as possible. You cannot communicate on your own time like on a forum, you have to lurk all day and hope you get in the discussion within time.
- Server politics and cliques: Even moreso than forums I found Discord servers to be pretty cliquey. There is always an “it” person or group who controls the flow and nuance of the conversations. Diversion from these popular groups, just like real life, can lead to alienation whereas forums had more of an egalitarian vibe. Moderators seem way more involved on Discord chats than forums, for better or worse. I have found most moderators on Discord servers to be insufferable, and so does half the internet.
- Online dishibition/anonymity: On forums your content is archived forever until deleted, and your presence on the whole internet, not just one server, is affected by the posts you make. It is also harder to change your name on forums. The more permanent presence of forums and the content encourage longform and high quality content. Shitposters were generally shunned. People are a lot meaner and more willing to bully on Discord I have found. An innocuous question posted on a forum will get a vastly different response on Discord, people seem more arrogant and crass because of the crazy level of anonymity Discord offers. After all, why not call that user a rude name or bully a noob? No one will see it 3 hours later and even if they do, I can change my name and tag and repeat again. I have been laughed, bullied, and trolled out of too many Discords to count but forums are generally more accepting and I have never been kicked or banned off of one.
- Game Chat Dead: This is more of a function of party chats killing game chat as a whole, but it is nearly impossible to make friends and build competent guilds nowadays through game chat. Everyone rather sit on party chat or discord with their established clique, and playing solo queue is a painful experience. It’s almost a self fulfilling prophecy. less people use game chat for party chat, so the people who use game chat get bothered by the lack of mics so they don’t use game chat either.
I really miss the forums, and basically every one I grew up on was shut down. I get companies have to save money but it is a shame going on a Discord board only to sift through trolls and bull to find one piece of content I needed. The forum had it all right there.
I also dislike Discord mainly because it’s all either walled gardens or information silos.
It’s especially bad when you have Open Source Software doing stuff on Discord. If devs lose interest, all the documentation is gone.
it’s really annoying. for people gaming on Linux systems there’s this genius project called ProtonGE, a customized version of Valve’s Proton that lets you played Windows games with some additional enhancements over Valve’s version. there’s a Github page that hosts the code and releases, but the readme file says that if you have any issues, you have to contact the developer on Discord. like… why? the issue tracker is literally right there, viewable for everyone without having to create an account. how’s a glorified instant messenger better at tracking issues than the interface that’s been specifically made for that purpose?!
The average Dev absolutely sucks at documentation from the start, this makes it worse
I just cannot understand why so many projects decide to make it the main means of communicating with users and providing tech support.
Especially when it’s open source projects bc they should use element!
I have a couple of friend groups that are on Discord, and it works perfectly for what we use it for, which is mostly posting stupid memes a few times a day and keeping up with each other (the main discord is a group of friends from college plus a few others that have joined over time). Discord works great for our game nights and D&D sessions (this is why we started using it in the first place) but I don’t really want to engage with it for other things. I do hate it when companies try to use Discord as their primary communication, it really doesn’t work well for that.
I did not live enough to experience the age of forums on the internet, but I can be sure that it would be better than discord “servers”.
The only problem I see with forums is that you need an account for each forum, even for searching in the forums
Yep, I totally agree, which is why I avoid Discord as much as possible. Forums worked because they weren’t chat rooms, and making a hybrid basically brings all of the problems of a chatroom into a forum system which adds almost no benefit, but a huge amount of problems.
Not every group uses Discord exclusively, and some still have forums, thankfully. Also, there’s also Reddit, which is basically the closest thing I’ve found to a “universal” forum protocol, although it too has its share of issues.
I’ll take Reddit over Discord anytime though.
Outside of easy to use voice chat, I don’t get anything from Discord that wouldn’t work better in a forum of some kind.
I’m simply overwhelmed by all the servers and channels on Discord.
I like 18xx board games. I know of seven Discord servers that deal with them, but each has a dozen or two channels for topics I don’t care about. If I want to find something, I have to do separate searches in each server. Plus I have to scroll through and mute all the extra channels in each server, which takes way too much effort on mobile.
I’m just happy to know I’m not the only one. It feels like you are trying to keep up with dozens of different conversations at one time and you only have a broad idea of what the individual conversations are about.
I can’t tell if it is just one of those “generational” things or if it just doesn’t click for some people.
I can’t tell if it is just one of those “generational” things or if it just doesn’t click for some people.
probably both; there’s been a general movement toward more instantaneously interactive spaces/media online, and the movement from forums to instant messaging has been a very big part of that
