"join our discord" is the new "pinterest result on google." anti-information. your pursuit ends here. facts will not be found today. it's like if you asked someone on the street what time it was and they said "come into my church and take communion and I'll tell you"
discord is an organized, focused, hell-bent project to ensure that no! information ever! gets accidentally preserved. the purpose of a system is what it does, so discord's purpose is to lose things. "everything anyone has ever said on a topic" is the goal but they take what they can get
it used to be terrifying when the support / faq / help link on a website went to a forum. then they started going to wikis, and we all turned around and screamed at springy the spring sprite to take it back, we didn't mean it. we love zinc.
then they turned into discord links, and when we looked back at springy, we saw only satan
it's just an incredible one-two-three punch of "did you just tell me to go fuck myself?"
because you get part A: "almost everything we've ever said about our software project is in, basically, a 10 gigabyte text file spanning 8 years of conversations, many off-topic. here's a fulltext search. it replaces near-homonyms, so your search for the exact keyword 'CLOUT' will be silently altered to 'CLOUD'."
and part B: "you can't even look at it without loading it up in a separate program, possibly getting punted into a Welcome To Our Server process, having everyone on the server see your name (hope you weren't investigating something made by people who hate you!) and then having four people @ you the millisecond you join with generic welcomes (hope you don't have social anxiety!)"
and then part C: "if you gather up the courage to actually ask us for help after the fulltext search fails, we will insult you until you cry, even if you don't have social anxiety."
the best advice i can possibly give anyone is "every time one person joins your discord, one thousand people decide your project is off-limits to them and leave the page, never to return."
There are a few purposes that I love Discord for, but they basically all summarize into "chatting with my friends about shit." On top of ALL of the reasons above, which all resonate with me, there's some additional stuff as a creator and a critic. Seeing everything get walled off there has been brutal.
When I was in media, being asked to join a discord to get access to a game for coverage was always a net negative. Multiple times it led to weird shit from other members of the discord in question, either fans who had an axe to grind with me or peers in the industry who saw this as an opportunity to be weird about shit. More importantly: It really changes the power dynamic between publisher and critic in a way that's hard to quantify but the sense of attempted critic capture is very real. When you go and check out a game at an event, then leave it and share your thoughts, things are temporally discreet. In a discord, you're just like... there. And you know, the second a PR person shoots you a friend request, it's like, welp...
As a creator, it might be even worse. Discords can create a really incredible feeling when you release a project, similar to how a live chat reacts to a great moment during a stream. But the trade off is closing that moment off behind closed doors. Even just in the case of FatT, for instance, there was a time when a new episode drop led to a flurry of posts on Twitter and Tumblr. When we launched our Discord (which we've all now left at this point), and especially as that Discord grew, that activity took a nose dive. It became the place for the most active members of the community to talk--and as such, a lot of our word of mouth growth really dropped off. (This is part of why things like Secret Samol have been so incredible for us!)
Obviously, there's a lot of other stuff here (which I also have big biases about) around how conversations Work in the closed, fast-moving sphere of a Discord versus the more draft-and-send open air of something like G+ (RIP) or Tumblr, but that is more than I have time to unpack during the work day.
the thing with this is, search engines have gotten so shit and filled with ads or seo garbage that the shitty search and community experience with discords feels like a blessing in comparison. see this other post thread on the subject: https://cohost.org/amydentata/post/981816-i-expect-that-soon
discords are probably unlikely to get filled with bots full of fake chat histories, but also just saying that out loud sent a horrible chill down my spine. just little bottles of chatbots in servers. maybe just talking to each other. waiting for humans to text-generate sponsored content at.
there's probably a story there, and also a horrible prophecy for our future.
anyway, as always, we should all use libraries more. host game events at libraries. share your podcast with libraries- some even have recording studios for you to go and make your podcast there! these things not only should be done, but are being done currently and we should all engage with them more.