The Discord Trend

[Dark Jaguar]

Kotaku posted a little opinion piece on this, but I've noticed the trend too and not just for "official" forums.  So very many keep pushing to just remove forums outright in favor of Discord.  There's a number of problems with this.  First of all, at Discord's whim, the whole place can just vanish, or all of them can.  This goes back to the trend towards monopolization so many industries are undergoing, but heck discussion forums are barely an industry.  It's just not a good idea to tie so very many discussions to a singular company who could just vanish one day.  Heck, Discord's dead if ever phone companies all get their act together and implement the old "party lines", complete with UI hooks for modern cell phones and establishing "rooms", right into the telephone standard.

But, then there's that other reality.  I can't find anything in a discord chat room!  Forums specialize in everyone creating individual threads for every little avenue of discussion, where Discord, like chat rooms, is designed to congeal everyone's thoughts down into a small handful of massive threads.  The "searchability" is pretty much nil as well.

Forums still have a very important place, and the worst situation there would be a buyout, as happened with Nintendoage.  THAT was devastating.  All that research and all that information for collectors just deleted overnight by greedy scam artists so they could use that ignorance to artificially inflate prices in their current scheme.

https://kotaku.com/discord-forum-message...1850393695

[Weltall]

It would be an awkward time to announce that we're closing the forums and moving over to Discord!

Seriously though, while Discord doesn't do threads well and it's hard to search, I can't really point to impermanence as a flaw it has and forums do not. Many thousands of my forum posts are nothing but memories in my head because the forums just died and went away.
I treat it as a chat room slash temporary way to make images accessible on multiple devices. The few other forums I still visit have an accompanying Discord server, which is probably the way to go.

[Dark Jaguar]

It would be an awkward time to announce that we're closing the forums and moving over to Discord!

Seriously though, while Discord doesn't do threads well and it's hard to search, I can't really point to impermanence as a flaw it has and forums do not. Many thousands of my forum posts are nothing but memories in my head because the forums just died and went away.
I treat it as a chat room slash temporary way to make images accessible on multiple devices. The few other forums I still visit have an accompanying Discord server, which is probably the way to go.

Well, it comes down to this.  A bunch of individually hosted sites are more resistant to shutdown than every single site being on a single server.  If discord goes under, which as I mentioned above it absolutely 100% will the very instant telephony tech is upgraded to support modern "chat room" features, then every last one of those places goes away.  And yes, we've lost things too, but since the site came back later, we've managed to keep pretty much everything made past that point pretty well, and sites like archive.org have gone a long way towards keeping that even more permanent.  Archive.org can't even touch discord discussions however.  Further, we run this place ourselves and aren't subject to the arbitrary whims of whoever's running Discord, so we won't be hit with TOS violations and completely closed down because their AI took something out of context.  Mind you, I'm not some "free speech absolutist" and am perfectly content banning some racist who decides to join and spread their hate, but it's better when things are kept relatively small and easier to moderate by actual people like us!

...

Though these days we're certainly a bit... TOO small, that's for sure.

[A Black Falcon]

I never used to like chatrooms much, but I admit it, I use discord a lot... so yeah, while I do dislike people shutting down their forums for Discord, there are a few Discord servers I'm in a lot. Heh.

I treat it as a chat room slash temporary way to make images accessible on multiple devices. The few other forums I still visit have an accompanying Discord server, which is probably the way to go.

Yeah, we used to do chat in MSN Messenger or IRC.  The modern version of that would certainly be Discord.

[Dark Jaguar]

I never used to like chatrooms much, but I admit it, I use discord a lot... so yeah, while I do dislike people shutting down their forums for Discord, there are a few Discord servers I'm in a lot. Heh.

I treat it as a chat room slash temporary way to make images accessible on multiple devices. The few other forums I still visit have an accompanying Discord server, which is probably the way to go.

Yeah, we used to do chat in MSN Messenger or IRC.  The modern version of that would certainly be Discord.

Just to be clear, for what it is it works great!  I'm not going to say people shouldn't use discord as a chat room, because it does a great job at that.  IRC I prefer on certain grounds (namely that it isn't owned by a single company and is an open standard), but Discord is far more functional and fairly easy to set up in comparison.  (ICQ used to be a pretty good implementation of IRC, but now it's owned by some sketchy Chinese company so I trust that particular instance of it far less than I trust the likes of Skype or Discord.)

This whole diatribe was just a complaint about various companies failing to recognize the difference between what a forum specializes in and what a chat room does.

[Weltall]

It would be nice if Discord "servers" were something you could set up and operate entirely on your own actual server. That, I think, would solve most of the problems you've mentioned.

[Dark Jaguar]

It would be nice if Discord "servers" were something you could set up and operate entirely on your own actual server. That, I think, would solve most of the problems you've mentioned.

It'd be a big part of the solution at least, but there's no way Discord will ever do that.  "Owning" the platform is a big part of their business model.

[Weltall]

It wouldn't surprise me to see it become an offering some day. For a yearly fee, you can host and operate a truly Discord server, connected to the larger system for updates and security, but self-contained and operating entirely on your hardware. Not only is that a service some people would pay for, it would also reduce operating costs to a degree, while still having a captive audience which can still be served paid ads and services. 

Sometimes tech innovators miss the obvious things.