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.
(first, disclaimer: I'm not trying to argue against any of the above points, just kind of putting my own thoughts out since I've been thinking about this too)
At this point I've resigned myself to just joining a project's discord, searching for an answer to my question, then either quitting silently or muting it and hiding it in a folder with other discords I don't participate in but might possibly want to reference again someday. My biggest problem with Discords vs searching forums for information back in the day is that I have to seek out a subject-specific discord server and join it to even find out if the information is there, as opposed to searching google for a problem and seeing results from various forums pop up.
Of course, at that point, often it wouldn't be the exact problem and I might have to register in order to use the forum search to see if there are any other discussions on the topic that might help, but at least at that point I have discovered a forum that's close enough in subject that the answer might be there, with Discord I basically have to do that step on my own.
I do feel like a key part of the 2000s forum-era was that IRC was also around and used, often there'd be both, eg the Bob and George forums and the Bob and George IRC channel were both active, and while the forum had a large amount of just random chatter, the IRC channel was much more of a "we're just hanging out in the same room sharing the same conversation" vibe.
Unfortunately google's searching also suck more and more as it's taken over by automatically-generated SEO bait, to the point that Reddit is nearly the only way to see people actually talking about stuff and getting advice from other real people in a way that's intended to be archived. Reddit sucks for lots reasons, both culturally and structurally (and each, of course, informed by the other) but I think it's especially hostile to a subreddit about some other entity like a company being run by that company, I'm thinking about when the r/Roll20 subreddit was up in arms over the mod team being Roll20 employees. So not only are sub-communities on reddit at the whim of whoever runs it, attempts for a specific group to intentionally cultivate their own community can backfire if it gets to a sufficient size that the users think they're owed a separate space.
I'm not even sure what the least-bad option would be... I guess I'm seeing a few different trade-offs for various solutions to this "finding information that someone probably knows already but I don't know who" problem.
- Public vs Private
Obviously this is the one people keep comparing between discord and forums - you can't see what's in a discord until you join, and in many forums you might be able to, but it depends on the forum setting, or you may see post info but not, say, attachments or linked information, without signing up. But the trade-off with being publicly visible is scrutiny, some people may be more inclined to use a place of discussion regularly if they're not being watched constantly, and the threat of someone linking to your post from some other site and going, "look at this asshole" because you had an opinion about dithering algorithms or whatever is ever-present.
- Fragmentation vs Centralization
Forums vs twitter/reddit/fandom/etc. Fragmented communities tend to have smaller discussions, are harder to search across multiple communities (especially with google being increasingly useless), questions are more likely to go unanswered but less likely to end up with a bunch of hostile or joke answers, and discussions can happen between a few people going back and forth between each others' points. Unified communities give you one place to search all the communities under their umbrella, but discussions are more likely to turn into a mass of people responding to get their take in or try to get attention without much of a back-and-forth. If one umbrella site gets big enough to be the central source, it's probably because it caters to a bunch of shitty people as well who might just make it insufferable overall (reddit, twitter) or has consumed alternatives through SEO and aggressive monetization/engagement-driving (fandom).
- Informal vs Structured
Discord vs Wikis. Part of why forums are so useful is they generate information by allowing people to ask questions, or just prompt discussions - while wikis tend to just catalogue available information (based on whims or formal rules about what is and isn't notable). I've never been "part of" a wiki team the way I've participated in forums and discords, but from the outside at least, it seems like discussions only center around what content should go in the wiki, either from someone opening a discussion around standards or what content to include, or from someone disagreeing with a page's inclusion or content and going to the talk page about it. It's not a place where questions are often asked, so it doesn't answer questions that the documenters aren't already aware of. And even if they know some information may be useful, documenting it in a formal way and matching a style guide raises the barrier higher for what's worth their trouble. On the other hand, the formality also makes it better organized, making it easier to find "official" answers if they are available, ie if you want to find out how much damage an enemy does, you could check either the enemy's page or if it exists some kind of "damage table" page, while a forum might require wading through other damage value questions, people comparing enemies' toughness without hard values, or anything else that involved the key words.
