Technology

If people need to make an account, I'd bet your engagement drops at least 90%. That's the friction they mean.

I sure Discord is handy and reduces friction, for development, but when it's used as a substitute for a support forum for paid products, it's atrocious. (not a knock on Discord, but certainly a knock on companies that choose the wrong tool for support).

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.

For me personally the shitty UI of discord causes so much friction that I'll never interact with discord ever again, unless I can reach it via some gateway from some of the messaging systems I use - which so far doesn't happen as I'd need to log in to discord to configure the gateway. I tried that once, never again.

Wait, starting up projects on Discord is a thing?

Edit: Ahem... who on the hell expects wiki / github to gather audience!? Did I trip into a different universe?

Personally, if I see a software project on Discord, I nope out. I have made very few exceptions and every time I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth it. Discord isn't really good for anything other than what it was designed for: Persistent IRC - plus a voice chat option. It's perfectly fine to chat with a bunch of friends and play some games together. But that is about it.

It is terrible for tracking subjects, for finding information, for storing information, and for engaging in chats across more than one instance. It is unintuitive to navigate, and while they have made improvements, it is up to the user to make a server bearable to navigate by hiding the flood of channels that the average instance contains. Even so, Discord will still try to show you things you have explicitly disabled as a "suggestion". Discord is bloody intolerable.

So yes, you may grow a community quickly because the people who already use Discord can jump on there. You will, however, lose a bunch of users wiling and able to use a better option who are, most likely, more experienced web users - and sick of the Discord bullshit. While this certainly includes me, I have seen the same sentiment again and again in my feeds. Power users tend to loathe Discord.

One big plus for Discord is that you can essentially lock it down to people who are interested in your project, instead of the entire public to browse. This hurts searching for answers, but helps immensely for projects that can be taken down like romhacks and speed running tools for example

Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.

I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).

I've been working on a Conan exiles rp server for the past 9 months that automates a lot of the bookkeeping and game logic that's usually relegated to humans and rule sets. In my experience with other servers, an excessive use of staff discretion leads to nepotism and bias or at the very least ample opportunity for its appearance.

A big part of automating some of these tasks is enabled by the use of webhooks. Rather than track every player character's information in a ticket that the user needs to submit, a bunch of scripts strapped to NPCs post the information via webhooks to a discord channel that's only viewable to those with the appropriate rank.

Without easy webhook integration, this wouldn't be possible. Never mind that all those tickets i was just talking about are made, organized, and recorded via discord bot.

A well set up discord server can be a huge boon to a project, especially if it's public-facing in any way. For game servers or mods it's especially useful, because the chance of your target users having it is very high.

Discord has experienced a little enshittification, but it's largely been inconsequential so far. Meanwhile, Matrix is cool but nobody has it and it doesn't have the same tools. Even with the cross-posting there's a need to risk your discord account or server and it isn't fully integrated.

But like, discord has aaaalll this community management and automation stuff built around it, most of which is pretty intuitive and well supported. That's hard to compete with.

It absolutely is a thing. Network effect matters. Usability matters. Open source/community solutions usually lack that (and the lack of familiarity makes it worse).

garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project

I'm sure this is true for certain kinds of communities. Personally I've never been tempted to try using Discord, because any project that uses it is obviously built by and for people with (imo) very poor taste in technology.

When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don't recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.

With GitHub or a forum it's likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.

Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don't need to create all of them at once...

And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I've even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it's not a good idea.

The genie is out of the bottle and discord is unfortunately here to stay for the foreseeable future. What we need are good reliable tools to export all this data to an external service / knowledge base. At least that way they could be picked up by web search and be accessible without a discord account one day down the line when discord goes to shit.

Network effects have always been strong with online services.

@jherazob I don't get the comment about Discord being frictionless, at least for anyone who values their privacy and/or doesn't want to be tracked. I have tried several times to sign up for Discord using a desktop computer (I am old; I don't use a mobile phone for interacting with social media because it is too difficult to type a message on those things) and every single time it has demanded a phone number, which is a big NO for me. I've never had a working Discord account because of that damn phone number thing; perhaps it does not require that from everyone but it always has for me even when I've had an invite code for some community.

But also, I just have to say that I am really turned off by the weird cartoony artwork on that site. I think whoever did that art must have either been higher than a kite, or trying to appeal to 3-year-olds. It's like something Dr. Seuss might have drawn if he'd been taking psychedelic drugs. So, to me Discord never really came off as a site for serious discussion.