Discord

I hate the app called Discord and I will not join your so-called community there.

Reasons I hate Discord the app:

1. Infantilizing user experience. It literally says “links are spoopy!” anytime you try to follow a link somewhere out of Discord. I’m not a gamer but I can’t even imagine how they put up with this shit.

2. No main TL. Discord is all little rooms, there’s no public commons. You join somebody’s private server, they’re the God king and run it however they want. Then within the server there are all these separate little chat channels, and you can’t tell who’s looking at your posts or not.

3. Synchronous chat experience. All chat rooms have this problem, where to understand what’s been happening you have to scroll through endless reams of chronological messages. Twitter’s DAG is much more usable for search and discovery.

4. Patreon sync. If you have a Patreon, you can set it up to give invites to your private Discord for people who patronize you. This is what creates the laughable dynamic of every “dirtbag” podcast: “we hate capitalism! Send us $5 to join our parasocial friend group!”

5. Semi-public real-time interface creates bad social dynamics. This happens in Twitter GCs as well, where people puff themselves up arguing with each other because they feel like they have an audience to play to.

Meanwhile, the rest of them GC is just waiting for it to end.

The longer that bystanders avoid the confrontation, the more heated it gets, as the arguers try to drag them in, until it has poisoned the entire history of the chat channel and one or the other gets kicked.

At least on Reddit, where you expect to see this shit, they have sub-threads that get hidden after a certain level of back and forth. Twitter makes top-level comments the default view, instead of sub-threads at all, which is perhaps a more democratic dynamic.

But Discord makes real-time, high-context, status-thick interactions the norm. And if you can’t be ready to have one of those all the time from your phone, well, get ready for FOMO I guess.

6. Discord is rife with grooming, grifters, and cults of personality.

The structural metaphor of these little rooms with these charismatic personalities hosting them is to create a warren of micro-cults.

They’re not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with them.

A group chat should be a space station from which you all explore a shared world. Gamers use Discord correctly.

Anybody who tries to make it a world of its own is in trouble, because they’re living in a space station with some strangers from the internet.

I know that the names Discord and Slack are actually references to the Discordians and the Church of the Subgenius and that’s very nifty.

But every time I click on a button that says “Discord”, something happens in the language part of my brain anyway.

For those who are asking what a better alternative would be? Look into the forum software called “Discourse”. It has rooms and conversations like old style forums but has modern social media affordances.

I actually have a Discourse server set up somewhere 🤔

I guess if I’m paying for a VPN anyway I could share with you guys. But I don’t really want to be a “community” “organizer”.

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