Look, I would never tell you Discord was good. You have to believe me here. What I'm saying, because I have a brain parasite that instantly sends fire to my brain when I worry I might be incorrectly idealizing the past, is that the current state of affairs where you have to join a discord to get up-to-date information about a project or community is more like the forum era than it isn't. Basically I think the problem is Something Else and I will tell you that I think it's a problem about getting from discussing information to documenting it.
I agree completely current state of affairs for documenting information on the internet is hilariously terrible, and that it is becoming a NEW kind of terrible with a distinct contemporary flavor. The state of affairs is this: if I want to know anything about anything, that is cared about by communities on the internet, such as how to play a fighting game or how to make your computer do something, you now have to join a discord server. Immediately you're thrust from having a minor question to what feels like joining a cult. This is socially intimidating and may result in really unpleasant social interaction, and then you have to deal with scouring a gigantic chatroom for real information in an application that was never designed for retaining and documenting said information.
This definitely sucks, but I think it also describes word for word my experiences as a kid with traditional online forums. They were cliquey, often had arcane and temperamental mods, and were absolute hell to sort through for real information. They have lots of quirks and differences and were popular at different cultural moments so you may have better associations with one or the other and feel much more comfortable in that structure you're used to, but I think they have a lot of inherent similarities. I'm describing my own personal experience here of course! But I think that personal experience informs a lot of our preferences one way or the other.
Here's my theory on Discord popularity right now:
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We are emerging from a period of time where we did not have ANYTHING that resembled forums or discord or anything in-between. For many, was no social network for an intimate subculture at all between the surge of Twitter's popularity that heralded the death of the forum and the emergence of Discord as a social network and not a chat app. There is arguably your locked twitter, but this is a friend hangout zone only, there was no way to make this a hangout group for a subculture, not really. It was as unfriendly for creating affinity groups as Discord is for retaining information. You were, what, supposed to follow a software developer's TWITTER? We used to live like that...unbelievable.
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Wikis are an unusable hell dominated by Wikia, who has bullied all legitimate wikis off google. Wikis are not places for group discussion, and are terrible at retaining the decisions that led to writing them, and are full of bias, but they are also basically the only tool for documenting the information that otherwise you'd have to trawl a forum or discord for pages and pages to find.
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I think there are two separate big problems that we had in the age of complete twitter/facebook/tumblr dominance. The first is that every thought and every discussion had to happen in a huge public square that meant anything could go viral and thus everyone adopted hyperscrupulosity and hyperscrutiny over everything they said and did, and we desperately needed some kind of alternative space to this. The second problem is that documentation on the internet is hard and really sucks, and has become worse with no solutions or alternatives. Discords are pretty bad for this, but I don't think forums were great either unless you were especially used to them and preferred them.
Personally, I think that the internet needs more and more specialized networks. There needs to be groups based on your intimate friend circle, your less intimate acquaintance circle, the subcultures and hobbies and communities you belong to, and, finally, a big public square where you can reach out to the vast world and get people interested in your thing.
Every social media company (present company excluded) wants infinite meteoric growth at any cost. Their agenda is to destroy or overtake the competition and be all things to all people. They want your entire life to occur on their platform whether or not that's good for you. It is certainly brainially easier to log into one website, but the shape of that website also shapes the way you talk and thus the way you think. While we're at it, do you ever think about how ANNOYING twitter makes you sound? EVERYTHING I say on that website makes me feel smug, shrill, and at either on one extreme or the other of a spectrum of histrionic to terminally cynical.
Anyways, I empathize with the gripes about Discord as an information repository, but I think there's a missing place on the internet for a place to discuss the development of a project and it's going to be Github if we aren't careful. Without any sort of specific solution in mind, all I can say is that we badly need a sixth or even seventh website, and that the sort of community and project focused discussion that doesn't seem to fit in any existing social network might be because by their very nature, the goals of those groups are not as readily compatible with those of corporate software.
what would the ideal thing be like? in particular, for specialized topics such as fan communities around particular games, or user groups around particular software, what would be the best way to organize and find that information?
our personal thoughts lean towards wikis-but-not-Wikia, fuck Wikia. we think that's about the right level of semi-permeable membrane around the interesting stuff, which doesn't ask people to make a commitment to the social space if all they want is to passively receive information.
the other approach we could see working is something more like gamefaqs, which used to be top-quality content. in that model, each "page" is a long piece by a single author, with their personal voice visible throughout it - which is probably a lot of the incentive for anyone to publish things. there may be many pieces on the same topic. again, no commitment needed for people who only want to read it.
if you're dubious that anything like these is possible, and need some motivation to consider the question seriously: we saw a search engine a while back, and we wish we could remember its name, which simply excludes every page that has any form of advertising on it... very effective at filtering out the corporate crap and getting to the stuff made for people. if everyone actually wanted to use something like that, it would be, you know, at least a first step towards a post-corporate web. so we think that general model is at least viable enough to be worth trying to imagine what it would let us do, you know?
We honestly wonder if the current discord way of things would be at just somewhat okay if community discords were (optionally) web-visible and indexable, making it more like gitter
this exists, it's called Guilded
