Why is Discord so popular?

[Klapaucius]

I've been on a few different Discord groups now, and I have to ask: What am I missing? What is the appeal?  It just seems a very disorganized mess.  Why is it the place of choice for so many?  And why be there rather than here for KSP?  I am asking sincerely. Perhaps I am not taking advantage of its abilities or not using it properly.

[Nuke]

i don't like it. or any other piece of software or hardware that requires membership in the phone zombie cult. much like bad music, bad tv, bad movies, and now bad games, you can always make up for deficiencies in design quality with extremely good marketing. so this jack of all trades master of none proprietary communications suite has grown tentacles. there isnt a thing it does that cant be covered with irc, vent, various forum softwares and file sharing apps. it does all these things, poorly. 

actually

we should all be using cybico computers. 

[Superfluous J]

I'm on multiple Discord servers.

Some are well-managed and use all the features and are passable - almost as useful as a forum. Others are messes and not really worth my time. Never have I thought "This is better than a forum" and on all of them I've frequently thought the opposite.

[Jacke]

I think Discord got established because it made it very easy to have multiplayer audio chat that just worked.  It added in text chat and nice additions to that.  Since then it's grown.  But doing audio chat simply and well was what got Discord adopted by many people.

[Nuke]

24 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I think Discord got established because it made it very easy to have multiplayer audio chat that just worked.  It added in text chat and nice additions to that.  Since then it's grown.  But doing audio chat simply and well was what got Discord adopted by many people.

idk that it did audio chat any better than any other piece of software, both open and proprietary. the typical problem is people who dont know how to set up their mic right, and that effects every voip system. before that everyone was happy with team speak. 

Edited March 21, 2023 by Nuke

[tg626]

Depends on the game really.

When I used it for Red Dead Online it was good. My group (trail riders for the record, not some toxic raider party) could communicate without the whole toxic raider [redacted] hearing our plans, and when not using voice we could communicate fairly well in text.

Now, flip to a simgle player game like KSP, and its not so useful. In those cases it seems to jaut be chaos. Perhaps because theres no common anchor such as the shared MP game world? I dunno.

All in all it reminds me of AOL chat rooms, youtube live steam chats, or IRC all of which I find to be just chaos.

I have no need to "chit chat" with people digitally - if I want to do that, I talk to someone IRL. I don't mean that to be rude, if thats your thing have at it, but its not for me.

[HebaruSan]

The support for bots is kind of nice. The cloud software that CKAN runs would be hard to monitor otherwise, but when we started we dumping its warnings and errors into a #netkan-bot channel, suddenly we were able to keep up with what's happening pretty easily.

[Jacke]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

idk that [ Discord ] did audio chat any better than any other piece of software, both open and proprietary. the typical problem is people who dont know how to set up their mic right, and that effects every voip system. before that everyone was happy with team speak. 

Between different groups, I think I used nearly every major audio chat system, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, some of them over several versions.  All of them had issues, either setting up, things that would come up during use, or requiring a paid server in one way or another for any chat use.  Discord was a game changer: simple to configure, significant limits for the free server, rarely having issues.  Everyone I know that used audio chat soon switched to Discord.

[DDE]

19 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

It just seems a very disorganized mess. 

I think that's the point. It's chatrooms.

[kerbiloid]

Chaos wins. Entropy grows.

[lajoswinkler]

I hate it like poison. It is and it promotes literally what its name says - a discord. A disorganized mess that attracts and promotes angry yelling in the void filled with other angry yellers.

And the idea that people spend money on those "nitro boost" things... unbelieveable. It just shows you can put a turd in a can and someone will buy it.

(BTW, I love your nickname. It brings back fond memories.)

Edited March 23, 2023 by lajoswinkler

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, lajoswinkler said:

I hate it like poison. It is and it promotes literally what its name says - a discord. A disorganized mess that attracts and promotes angry yelling in the void filled with other angry yellers.

Don't blame the communication tool for issues that should be controlled by those in charge of each server.

Security, standards, and moderation are vital for any communication tool, like these forums.  It's why there's hard-working moderation staff like @Snark.  Because there's those who will do all sorts of wrongs if there's not someone who will deal with them.

I'm a member of several Discords who have great communities of well-behaved members who discuss many subjects, sometimes quite difficult ones, with a net benefit to all members.

 

1 hour ago, lajoswinkler said:

And the idea that people spend money on those "nitro boost" things... unbelieveable.

Any company that provides a "free" tool has to have some way to financially support that tool's operations.  I've not looked at Discord's in detail, but they've certainly avoided quite horrible monetization schemes I've seen elsewhere.

[magnemoe]

On 3/21/2023 at 3:23 AM, Jacke said:

I think Discord got established because it made it very easy to have multiplayer audio chat that just worked.  It added in text chat and nice additions to that.  Since then it's grown.  But doing audio chat simply and well was what got Discord adopted by many people.

This, most online game guilds uses it for chat, its also pretty easy to invite new people but I would made it much more intuitive to join. 
For games the security concern is low and you can easy add more information like guild events and have an text chat for an guild. 
Now we gotten some people trying to infiltrate discord to spy on us in PvP in Elder Scroll Online so if an new member you have to be in the run to join discord voice. 

[Nuke]

i think the big thing i dont like is that its displacing forums for developer-community interactions in some games. i had the exact same problem with twitter and for the exact same reason. and both inhibit verbose communication. 

[Ultimate Steve]

I have had mixed experiences with large Discord servers. However I find that it is very good for small groups, like a bunch of friends running a Minecraft server. Easy to set up what you want to be notified about, easy to share media, easy to switch between text, audio, and visual communication... Basically, actually convenient instant communication.  Easy to throw in bots for anything you want as well. Free (unless you want to send large files), no ads, web or desktop or mobile based.

TLDR, convenient way to enable multiple methods of communication and information dissemination for small groups.

[regex]

Not really impressed with it for a video game forum, especially one like KSP with a lot of people in that chat, and especially especially for a game like KSP2 which is in development. At certain times of the day it's just non-stop dumb meme spam. Even a slower video game server like the Minecraft Slimestone Archive isn't especially useful for the lay user to see what such designs offer because the scrollback is so odious.

What I have found it good for is chat on more niche topics like tabletop roleplaying games that aren't D&D. It's also a great way to hook up with my friends on a workday night and play such games for a couple of hours without all the transit and ceremony, the only way I've been able to keep a weekly game going.

So yeah, like others, mixed bag, but ultimately not a fan of it for a development forum.

Edited March 30, 2023 by regex

[camacju]

Discord is best for small communities in my opinion. I find it a lot easier to keep up with, for example, super-optimized stock KSP missions, because there's a pretty small group of people who actually does that and it kinda gets lost in this big of a forum.