Anyone worried about the effect Discord and Slack are having on the internet?

[cheat_master30]

Not because they might pose a threat to forums or what not. Because for most sites I've seen, the Discord channel is usually used alongside an existing site's comment section or forums, in the same role an IRC chat room would have played in the past.

That's fine. Casual discussions about everyday topics (or random internet memes) don't exactly need to be preserved for all eternity.

However at the same time, I'm also seeing a lot of communities using these tools as there ONLY means of communication. For instance, a lot of video game speedrunning communities rely heavily on Discord to discuss strategies for beating games more quickly or share bugs and glitches used to sequence break stuff.

And that means that someone outside these communities will now find it very hard to search out said information. I mean, how do you use Google to search for information within an invite only community? You can't. What's more, if you don't know these communities exist already (which isn't exactly a given), it means you're left out of the loop when it comes to a lot of stuff necessary to do well.

So yeah, does anyone else worry about this? That a lot of good information is being lost due to the rise in invite only systems being used to discuss important topics?

 

[LeadCrow]

Discord is a modern evolution of IRC's paradigms. IMO its that protocol that needed to evolve so that realtime exchange doesnt get monopolized by any service.

As for wether it actually leads to witholding useful information from forums, I like to see it differently. It actually keeps a lot of idle talk from those, which may be a good thing if your site seeks quality activity more than quantity and its continued existence isnt critically dependant on maximizing quantity.

 

[Russ]

Discord killed our gaming community , although to be fair we haven't invested much time into it. We all just meet up on discord and hang out there, content is so easy to post on it as well but it's not organized information. I think with the right restrictions in place such as permission based chatting along with promoting content from your forum to the discord server it'll manage just fine.

 

[zappaDPJ]

However at the same time, I'm also seeing a lot of communities using these tools as there ONLY means of communication.

I'm seeing this as well especially but not exclusively in the gaming sector. I'm not worried about it, if these tools fulfil a need better than a traditional forum then I'm all for it.

 

[eva2000]

And that means that someone outside these communities will now find it very hard to search out said information. I mean, how do you use Google to search for information within an invite only community? You can't. What's more, if you don't know these communities exist already (which isn't exactly a given), it means you're left out of the loop when it comes to a lot of stuff necessary to do well.

Joined my first Slack only community for locust.io as support/questions are directed to their Slack community https://github.com/locustio/locust.

Interesting approach as I use Slack for my Centmin Mod project for private stuff myself i.e AWS Route53 healthcheck alerts, rss feed subscriptions, github project rss tracking etc and like how Slack has native mobile apps and desktop and browser based access.

I can see how depending on the topic, realtime messaging might be more appropriate but forum type search for me is important too. Slack can search messaging but it's limited to recent 10k messages for free Slack plans https://slack.com/pricing. And yes not being able to Google index the info is a concern for me.

 

[Optic]

Some of our community members created a Discord server and I was happy to help promote it by adding the widget on the sidebar. But over time this actually killed forum activity as new members would go straight to it and see the sparkly online list of members on Discord.

Tried to mitigate this by adding a web hook to post forum post updates to a channel and it helped but in the end I had to remove it (from an official capacity)

Another thing to consider is moderation... you now have another avenue you need to moderate and it's not easy to report chat messages within Discord, there really does need to be a moderator there whenever it's active.

 

[Soulwatcher]

I don't think that Discord is a bad thing at all. But what is bad is today's society attitude of instant gratification. If people have a question they want to find the answer in seconds. No one wants to wait for anything anymore and that is why Youtube and Discord are so popular.

I made my new blog/forum with the full intention of it being a blog and with a high probability that no one is ever going to post on the forum. And its for my own entertainment purposes only. If someone finds it useful that's a plus.

 

[insaneadmin]

I don't think that Discord is a bad thing at all. But what is bad is today's society attitude of instant gratification. If people have a question they want to find the answer in seconds. No one wants to wait for anything anymore...

Completely agree though to be fair instant response is something people would prefer over having to wait, but yeah I get what you're saying.

 

[zappaDPJ]

But what is bad is today's society attitude of instant gratification. If people have a question they want to find the answer in seconds. No one wants to wait for anything anymore and that is why Youtube and Discord are so popular.

It's an inevitability and to be fair the quest for instant gratification has always been there. I remember having to travel miles to building full of strange papery things with words to get the same answers.

I think there is a problem but it's more to do with expectations of entitlement rather than instant gratification. The balance between give and take seems to be tipping towards taking everything without giving much back.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

Why can't forums offer instant gratification?

 

[MarkFL]

...I think there is a problem but it's more to do with expectations of entitlement rather than instant gratification. The balance between give and take seems to be tipping towards taking everything without giving much back.

I think you've hit the nail squarely on the head here. Most seem to want to eat the bread without helping bake it...and then complain that the bread isn't neatly cut into bite-sized pieces and spoon fed to them. I think it may largely be "old man syndrome" on my part, but most of the recent online trends I see don't interest me at all. I crave the more substantial experience given by forums.

 

[Soulwatcher]

Why can't forums offer instant gratification?

They can in a way, if you have a older large forum people can google what they are looking for and find it on your forum. How ever that doesn't mean they are going to sign up and post.

But if you have a new forum the odds of someone coming to your forum to ask a question or to look something up is slim to none. And I am not trying to sound discouraging I am just being a realist.

Because the internet internet is not what it use to be. Look at the offical forums for Xbox and PlayStation. There use to be 1000's of new posts every day on those forums and now today its just a fraction of what it use to be.

 

[Tatl]

Discord is a modern evolution of IRC's paradigms. IMO its that protocol that needed to evolve so that realtime exchange doesnt get monopolized by any service.

IRC wasn't just one service. It was an open protocol with hundreds of implementations for both client and server.

Discord is a closed, proprietary platform. While I agree that the user experience is better and I like Discord as a whole, I do wish people had just extended the IRC protocol and built open clients that provided the same benefits that Discord does instead of forcing us all onto a closed system.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Why can't forums offer instant gratification?

Or organization ?
Or useful information ?
Or something other than non-threaded threads ?

 

[Digital Doctor]

Chit chat forums should die.
They don't accomplish anything.
Discord is better for that.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

They can in a way, if you have a older large forum people can google what they are looking for and find it on your forum. How ever that doesn't mean they are going to sign up and post.

But if you have a new forum the odds of someone coming to your forum to ask a question or to look something up is slim to none. And I am not trying to sound discouraging I am just being a realist.

Because the internet internet is not what it use to be. Look at the offical forums for Xbox and PlayStation. There use to be 1000's of new posts every day on those forums and now today its just a fraction of what it use to be.

I'm going to make one hell of a busy forum out of this:
https://stingerforum.org

...and it started in January of 2017...

 

[Digital Doctor]

I'm going to make one hell of a busy forum out of this:
https://stingerforum.org

...and it started in January of 2017...

Love the Footer.

 

[highlander29]

Some of our community members created a Discord server and I was happy to help promote it by adding the widget on the sidebar. But over time this actually killed forum activity as new members would go straight to it and see the sparkly online list of members on Discord.

Tried to mitigate this by adding a web hook to post forum post updates to a channel and it helped but in the end I had to remove it (from an official capacity)

Another thing to consider is moderation... you now have another avenue you need to moderate and it's not easy to report chat messages within Discord, there really does need to be a moderator there whenever it's active.

In response to the OP, I suppose I am a little worried in one way but the advantage of the IRC type stuff is that people do get closer on those platforms. It becomes its own little community within a community.

We had Ventrillo for years because of the push to talk functionality in addition to chat. I looked at Hipchat and Slack and we tried Hipchat for a while but it died off because people didn't like sharing their email addresses. We shifted to Discord a couple months ago from Ventrillo. I have seen some decline in forum activity as a result and Discord has proven to be pretty popular. One advantage of Vent is that you had to install a client also there was a a slight barrier to entry for less tech savy users. Can you elaborate on what you did with the web hook and forum post updates? That sounds like an interesting idea.