A myriad of Qyriad

In my observation there are two reasons:

1. Running a website, wiki, forum, github issues tracker, or literally anything else requires upfront work, some amount of planning, and usually some amount of ongoing effort. Discord requires nothing. You click new server, create a handful of channels, post a link and walk away. You don't even need to register an account to do so, because,

2. You are already logged into Discord, just like everyone else.

This is the far more important part. 99.9% of the users who visit your github, wiki, forum or website are not "logged in," and virtually none of them are willing to make an account on your site. They aren't even willing to click "log in with google." Asking someone to log in usually causes them to leave your site.

On the other hand, everyone is already logged into Discord, right now, as we speak, because we don't have a choice. It's the unifying irritant. Everyone has been faced with an unavoidable need, at one time or another, to log into this thing, and then it's just always open on their computer, forever. That means that if someone gets a discord link, there's a near 100% chance that clicking it will instantly, seamlessly drop them into your server, ready to go.

It turns out that "conversion rate" - the ratio between how many times you offer an action to people vs. how many times they actually take it - skyrockets if you do this. You can get 800 people to join a discord in less time than it takes to get 20 to post on a forum. The problem is that you don't, actually, want that.

It's super easy to create a Discord! And then, after a couple weeks, someone misbehaves, so you write a rule. A month later, you have a dozen rules. And soon you realize that nobody is following them, because hundreds of new people are flooding in every week - they're already logged in, you see.

The fact that it takes so little effort to join your discord means that tons of people are joining. People who wouldn't have put in the effort to join a forum.

We all know that every git project gets absolutely terrible issues on the weekly, but you have to remind yourself: those are the people who actually bothered to log in. They actually spent some effort. There's a whole category of people who you don't see on github, the set who are investigating your project so noncommitally that the moment they have to put in the slightest effort, anything more than "give it to me i want it nowwwwwww," they will give up and walk away. Many are literal children.

Since Discord is ubiquitous, even among literal children, everyone who sees your support link will click it - and now they're in the server. So far, the whole process has been free: they downloaded your project for free, read your docs for free, and now are being offered free support. At no point has anything made them feel like they aren't entitled to something that works exactly the way they want, right now.

So now they're in your server, expecting free support. And they're in a hurry - they're always in a hurry, otherwise they'd have had the patience to sign into github. They want to ask one question, they want the answer now, they are not going to read the rules, and there is an infinite supply of them. They just keep showing up.

Well, you're probably a FOSS project, so you aren't paying moderators to stay on top of this. On a forum, that's not so bad: people ignore the repetitive threads asking dumb questions and stick to the productive ones. Periodically, your one volunteer mod comes through and scrapes a pile of threads into the garbage.

But whoops - Discord happens in realtime. The flood of new people constantly coming in and asking the same terrible questions and becoming publicly livid when they don't get the answers they want* never stops, and it interferes with any legitimate conversation. You try to divide conversations into channels, but that results in new users seeing a wall of channels and becoming deeply intimidated - as they should. They are worried about posting in the "wrong channel", and their worry is legitimate, because they are going to get yelled at. This drives away the people who give a shit about how they're perceived by others.

*spend five minutes on the OBSproject discord if you don't believe me. it's hell on earth.

Meanwhile, hundreds of new users join every week, post in the wrong channel and get scolded - but by the time they've been yelled at, they've already posted the next part of their rambling request. Someone else replies, and it rapidly becomes apparent that it'll be faster to just finish the conversation in the "wrong" channel than finish scolding them, and sure enough, once they get their answer, they've satisfied their one reason for ever joining your server and they leave. Any further disciplinary effort would have been wasted. You just sigh and give up - but the channels are still constantly full of intimidating scolding.

So, your plan for a Support Community starts out with "just click the big plus button - congratulations, now you have a Discord", and it ends with aggressive automod, ruthless rules, and users being forced to pretend they agree to a TOS they didn't read, because you're trying to synthesize the upfront costs of joining a forum.

Nobody realizes it, but they're subconsciously trying to add that little hump of inconvenience to skim off the absolute riff-raff, the people who are only here because it cost nothing to be here. But they are not your community; they're just browsing.

If someone doesn't want to overcome a ten second wait for a verification email, they're probably only bothering you because, to them, your time seems to be free. People take free stuff that they wouldn't pay a penny for. In fact, if something is free, people will take as much as they can, simply because it's free.

On the other hand, if you make accessing your time cost anything at all, you will see a massive slump in new users as people go "oh, I guess I'm not really that invested," and wander off to do something else. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

It looks bad in the era of numbers, numbers, numbers that we live in, and if you've convinced yourself that the only thing that matters for your project is getting as much Engagement as possible then, okay, good luck with that. But as with anything else, the simple quantity of people who are interacting with your work is not a measure of who's going to put their money where their mouth is - whether that's actually buying something, or actually using it for a serious application, or spreading word of mouth and attracting more actual users.

And so, while Discord is a great fit for some purposes, I think it's an attractive nuisance. I think people tend towards using them even if they're a bad fit because they look like low-effort honeypots for User Engagement. I suspect that if you stand back and look at what actually happens in any given server, an enormous number turn out to not actually have much more going on than a typical forum, maybe even less. They might have 1200 users, sure, but most probably haven't posted since the day they joined, and maybe 20-50 actually talk on a daily basis.

And the trouble is... it's here to stay. Because we've normalized not logging in. At this point, I don't think you can get anyone to log into anything, ever again, unless they believe that "all their friends are there." Whether that's literal - as in a new social network - or figurative - as in "1200 users, wow, this must be a great resource" - the friction of getting someone to sign up has to be colossal in this foul year of our lord.

I don't think we're going to put the genie back in the bottle. Even those of us who viscerally hate Discord are not immune to propaganda. When we try to use a site and get a login wall, I think we all get more irritated than we did 10 years ago.

Our best hope is that someone will come along with a forum app: something that works basically like vbulletin, but is totally free, and uses a common login for every "server." That will suffer from the same problem - millions of new, awful threads posted every week, because it costs nothing to be bothersome - but will be far more tenable to moderate, since combing threads is easier than dealing with realtime chat. As awful as this idea is, we can only hope it happens, because I don't really see Discordification ending.

Footnotes:

1. Most of these problems also applied to IRC 25 years ago. Not everyone was logged into IRC at all times, but there were readily available ways to get into it in a matter of minutes without having to sign up or open your email client. In 2001, the primary support venue for most software projects was IRC - things actually got better for a while thanks to sites like Github, and today's Discordification is really just IRCification Phase II.

2. In this post, references to "you", "your time" etc. apply not just to you personally, but to anyone who has decided to represent you, e.g. the users on your forum, discord, etc. who are hanging around in order to help others. If something would be a waste of your time, it would be just as much a waste of your volunteers' time.

3. The github issues get closed without being looked at and requests diverted to Discord because the Discord server is now the squeakiest wheel that demands the most grease, and nobody wants to split their support effort between multiple avenues.

4. the google docs bit is an incredibly brutal takedown, and I don't know what OPs specific mental image there was, but my favorite read is that the individual in question is not a member of the project team and has no permissions on the github - they maybe aren't even in contact with the actual maintainers, so they've shadow-ITed up their own system for documentation, which is of course google docs - because again, they are already logged into that.