I spent years, but I didn’t find any interesting acquaintances, and I came across such people that I thought I was in the Stone Age, I seemed to be dumb by 25 percent at least when I communicated in discord or I was terribly bored, it’s difficult to explain, but that’s about how I can describe my experience.
I only use it to communicate with people who I already know or are in the same social circles as me. I do not use it to meet new people.
It’s a useful took for organizing server wide events and playing with friends.
I hate the SAAS enshittification it’s undergoing with the rest of the web. Having to pay for profile customizations shouldn’t be a thing. I remember editing my Neopets profile with HTML when I was 12. No paying, just learning how to tinker.
I really hate how groups are using it as a file storage system instead of running websites that are indexed and easier to find. But that’s on them.
Discord Nitro is no where near as valuable as they claim it is. The profile templates are garbage, all they do is obstruct your profiles with choppy animations, I mean who’d want to pay $8 for this shit on top of paying however much Nitro is?
As far as going into other servers, you’ll find yourself either in dead servers that only serve for minecraft purposes or just inane boring stuff. Those or you’ll find yourself in overcrowded servers with annoying bots wanting verification and overzealous moderation staffs.
When used strictly as a messenger/video call/game/irc-like program, it’s okay. I kinda like how there is all of that in one than in past days where you needed like 7 different programs. Although, it wouldn’t hurt to have alternatives that also provide the same benefits.
Oh and the Discord staff themselves are shady ass people with questionable morals and judgment.
Hate it but currently the online doable voice chat for crossover gaming PC and Xbox. We really need a Teamspeak-App for Xbox
Ive had many good years on discord. I feel to old for it now. Im an UNC on every server and the people who are my age 29 are really weird and under socialised. There is also a ton of pedofiles and BPD demons so watchout.
It depends on where you go on Discord, like any other social media. Personally, Discord is literally the only social media I really use, apart from Lemmy. This is largely because the architecture is so well-suited to small, comfortable groups of friends. It feels more natural than the void-screaming feeling that feed-style social media imparts.
I’ve been happy with it, and so have my friends. We have a place where we can consistently meet up and hang out for Minecraft and D&D, and it’s had reliable tools to facilitate that.
The massive public servers can feel very overwhelming, I’ll give you that. The more well-managed ones feel like a favorite cafe, bar, or pub. The more hectic and poorly moderated ones feel like a warzone. Moderating them really is more or less the same skillset you’d need to run a bar, anyway.
As far as pedophiles, scammers, creeps, and generally nasty people go? Honestly, black mold grows in your bathroom if you don’t open the window and air it out frequently. Evil people end up where target-rich environments are. Be vigilant, and you’ll keep your people safe.
I’ve seen the “join our discord” thousands of times but in this current dystopia I never liked the negative connotations of the name “discord” so I always noped out.
I don’t understand the appeal. I don’t really understand what it does better than more open alternatives. Like people jump on discord to voice chat with friends? That’s a phone call.
It’s good for keeping communication in one place - I mainly use it to host ttrpg games, so my server has all the lore stuff in one channel, general chat in another, character ideas and discussion in a forum-style channel where each character can have their own thread, and a voice channel for when we’re actually playing. Each campaign gets its own category, so players can also go back and check stuff out from old campaigns. I’d like to switch to an open alternative, but the few services that offer similar functionality are self hosted or still quite early in development so aren’t reliable enough for my needs.
It went to shit, they have all kinds of evil groups on there like the 764 cult. I hope the government finds them all.
governmentthe peopleGood call.
Its fantastic for what it is, its meh at what a lot of people try to make it, its garbage for a lot of stuff.
As a group chat, a place to hang out, or for a community that is looking for breakout rooms, its fantastic. I have a discord that’s just friends of mine, we have like 20-25 people, it gets 4 or 5 messages a day, unless we are actively having some discussion, sometimes people jump online and make an impromptu video hangout. Its fantastic.
Similarly, its fantastic for the magic groups I am in. Sure the meme page gets flooded, but thats what its for, you can post an lfg to the lfg channel, and find a game fairly quickly, then you jump over into a dedicated room and have fun.
Im in a couple of groups that organize for large events (think burning man groups), and its great for that. Discussions tend to be focused, we make breakout rooms for specific things (like camp layout, shift rotation etc). There are a couple rooms that are just for general chatter, but we only have like 20-30 people, so convos dont move that fast, its rare to have more than 3 in a week in the general hangout rooms, and rarely more than 2 at once.
Its meh as a community hangout, I am part of several board game store or magic store discords, and all of them are kinda…meh. You can occasionally set up for big games on them, and they tell you when tournaments or events are, but with too many people it becomes unfocused, individual stuff gets lost in the noise.
Its terrible as a forum, or as a general social media, searching for history sucks, nothing has permanence unless it is saved off of discord (its great for having a meeting about camp layout, but somebody needs to actually save the camp layout documents or they get lost).
[A comment I posted 9mo ago]
I fucking hate Discord and how it’s absorbed what should be forums.
When I’m creating a discussion online about a particular game or project, I’m looking to hear from the broader community over a longer term; not just limited to whomever happens to be online on this one specific platform at the time of posting.
People have different schedules, we’re not all online together at the same times; especially when you factor in timezones. Discord however makes it massively frustrating if not impossible to hold a discussion unless everyone you want to talk to is present and ready to read and reply now. Otherwise your conversation gets burried in the mess of other people having their own conversations and nobody wants to scroll through thousands of messages in the history of when they last logged on.
You can break out conversations into their own rooms, but that only goes so far and at that point you may as well just have a damn forum; that’s what they are for.
Then you get into the problem of repetition and searchability. People often run into common problems or ask the same questions; but with Discord, you’ve got to re-explain the same things every time they’re brought up, instead of just pointing the user to an old forum post that already solves their problem (they may have even found it themselves through a web search, saving them from even having to ask and waste people’s time. Discord isn’t indexed by search engines so old conversations/solutions are lost).
A group chat platform is not an acceptable replacement for a forum and I will die on that god damn hill.
Zulip is like a modern version of what you’re describing
Forums do feel a bit dated now. Instead of a forum you could make a Lemmy instance/community.
I’d argue that Lemmy is a type of Internet Forum. At least far more so than Discord is. It’s just far more distributed and less focused on a specific topic, while still maintaining the ability to hold longer form individual conversations that are indexed, open to the public, and searchable.
No need to argue the obvious.
forums still work…
They still work, but voting forms like Lemmy tend to handle larger audiences than non-voting ones.
Sounds like you need to find better servers.
“A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
People fled one technology and company to get locked in by another technology and company. Instead of learning and going another route.
The naming of discords ‘servers’ is a hostile naming and misleading misuse especially to non tech people.
So yeah. Big fan.
Behind the scenes the code calls them “guilds”.
Good for gaming voice chat and screen sharing. Terrible for killing online forums.
I don’t know how to exist in servers that have more than about a dozen people.
Yeah the whole thing feels a bit… Messy? Like it feels like when you get the tail end CC of a 40+ reply email chain at work and you need to figure out what’s going on. In many ways it feels like email to me, actually. The text based stuff anyway. Searching is God awful, there’s like 100–1000 messages per day you cannot possibly keep up with… But people are using it as a replacement for their entire community, which is just bad. I had to submit a bug report on a game’s Discord once, it was even worse than doing the same through Twitter.
I like the voice chat functionality though. Wish that screen sharing / streaming worked on Linux.
Screen sharing/streaming works fine for me on Linux, using Bazzite.
