I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).
I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control.
So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public.
Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.
Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)
I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages.
Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.
I sympathize, but also realize that liking text message boards is an increasingly niche opinion as people are raised on Tiktok and Twtich 1and Instagram and whatnot. I'm not going to say "kids these days are too lazy to read", but it's clear that focusing on fast chat feeds and pictures/videos is a lot more addictive and monetizeable than text.
until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.
