11–20 of 146 posts
Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that. It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum. It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.
This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.
They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.
Because it's serverless *badum tss*
No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling.
Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up.
Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.
The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…
The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…
Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.
Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.
The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.
LLMs also excel in this area.
Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use.
If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).
With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.
I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that).
This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.
The two things needed to break that network effect are:
1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content
2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)