One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord

mastermind@lemm.ee to Reddit@lemmy.world – 434 points –
One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord
theverge.com
115

I like the continued migrations from Reddit but Discord doesn’t seem like the best destination

Yeah, to be truly useful, a community needs to be googleable. And discord is certainly not that.

That, and the conversations move far faster there. Any remark about anything moves the subject further up, and you're essentially subjected to reading the comments section of the entire sub all at once when you just came for the memes.

Holding a conversation in such a large place would be near impossible from experience, no matter how many channels there are. It's just not going to be pleasant because it's not made for what they want to do.

Very large discords don’t work for chatting.

Discords with 100-300 people with around 20-30% active and 15% very active with 20% popping in occasionally for an hour or two and the rest just lurking seems like a good sweet spot for discord servers

Discord has threads now, works just like Reddit.

You can create a thread and people can comment on them just fine.

Edit:

Looks just as clunky as the rest of discord. Sorry, its just not the same.

Yeah, discords a mess. Its a fine voice chat app, but for everything else, its like using a phillips screwdriver on a flat head. Yeah, you can probably muscle it out, but it aint gonna be pretty and theres better ways to do it.

nah, it's like using a Phillips screwdriver on anything, there's better things in every way

As someone that’s used it for work, I don’t find it very different than the Lemmy UI at all

Understandable, it’s not for everyone. It’s a decent option for someone that already has a discord account and wants to leave Reddit, but at the same time doesn’t understand/want to joint Lemmy or kbin.

Fair point. I keep forgetting that's a thing, because I've genuinely never seen anyone ever use it aside from one single time just to see what it did/harass another user. And then immediately everyone went, "Huh. Neat," and lost interest.

Understandable, it’s pretty useful in the IOS Beta community for being able to see new features or bugs without having them in a general chat group.

I wad on a discord with 20 people. After ten minutes I left. How anyone had a conversation is beyond me

It's a skill those of us from the IRC days cultivated.

I'm glad I'm not good at it anymore.

you just gotta shout and hope they hear you

I think everyone really appreciates the occasional @everyone, helps folks remember they're alive and all

They actually added a feature/channel type not long ago that's supposed to make it more like forums or discussion boards, but it doesn't appear to be in wide use, most servers just use the standard text chat thing and it's a pain in the ass to find anything or keep up a normal conversation in there. I didn't even realize it was a thing until a month or two ago when somebody else pointed it out to me. It apparently didn't make a big splash at the time when it was released or they didn't make a big deal about it.

I don't think fashion advice needs to be googleable?

I could post a picture of me wearing a shirt and ask people what their opinion is and then everyone moves. Doesn't need to be archived on the net

Yeah, lots of stuff is temporary, not like IT where solutions posted and searchable could save thousands of people headache and time.

Yeah, I am pretty sure it is actually the opposite of helpful if someone digs up a fashion post more than a year old, at most. Men’s fashion doesn’t change quite as fast as women’s fashion, but fast enough that it’s a bad idea to look in the archives unless you know what was in style at that time is still in style. And if you know that, why look it up?

I'm very tech-literate but Discord has always seemed so fucking messy to me. So many channels and emojis and I barely know how to send someone a DM or add them to my friends list or whatever. How on earth are you supposed to keep track of anything?

it's chaotic as fuck and nothing like reddit / lemmy / kbin.

It’s buggy as hell on mobile too, the official desktop client is literally just an app with an outdated version of electron that has memory leaks easily

and discord will perform their own major enshittification stunt sooner or later

They’ve already started

The username change pissed a lot of people off (2015 account and still couldn’t get the 4 letter I had before) and they canceled nitro over it. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they lost money on this move.

Yeah, it seems they're beginning to head that way, with the nitro first and then the super emotes or whatever they're called. I suppose I can see, if it's server cost, but the unnecessary bells and whistles are beginning to bug me and it's only going to continue.

Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.

Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform, someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.

unlucky for discord they are the most easily replaceable platform of them all and there are already selfhostable clones

Yeah, many users of hardwareswap were not thrilled to hear they'd be moving to Discord.

I found it depends on the sub Reddit.

Discord isn't a good alternative, it's not the same type of social media site. Discord is more of a chatroom aggregator, while Reddit is more of a forum aggregator. While Reddit technically supports chats and Discord technically supports threads, in both cases they're clunky and not the main point of the site.

It's also centralized corporate-controlled trash, just like Reddit. I, for one, don't see the point in swapping one abusive overlord for another abusive overlord.

Discord is even worse, all the information there is locked behind a walled garten. No access without account, no way to google shit. I hate Discord, lol

Honestly with Voyager, it’s hard to tell this ain’t Reddit lol.

Yeah! Main difference for me: I have to sort posts way more by new than ever on Reddit to find new stuff. Active an Hot sometimes have week old posts in them. But that is a Lemmy thing and not a Voyage* thing. . . . . . . . . . . .

*It's still wefwef to me!

Sorting by Top 6 Hours or 12 Hours works the best for me I found.

Top/hour and top/6 hours are my go to.

I feel like perhaps wefwef was just a domain they had laying around and decided to use it. It was always a bloody strange name.

I guess that's what I like about the name: it's so different and strange. I started to use the Fediverse with different apps and wasn't interested in progressive web apps but tried out wefwef just because it sounded different. As of now I browse Lemmy 95% with Voyager and like it a lot! Would have never tried it out had it another name!

Just for everyone that was unaware, as I was - Voyager the new name of once was Wefwef. 😂

Indeed. Right now Voyager and Thunder are my two favorite ways to browse Lemmy.

And much less accessible, login required, phone number, a ton of system resources. And a privacy nightmare.

If people thought that Reddit's search was bad, they have quite the surprise waiting on discord!

Oh yeah, the search on Discord is abysmal. Especially considering that you can't use Google to help, Reddit at least was public facing so Google searches would often find Reddit posts.

Discord is such a terrible platform for large scale communication.

Nothing pisses me off more than looking for a support link and being told you have to go to a discord. It’s terrible to search, generally requires a bunch of hoops to jump through verifying you’re not a bot and almost never has the info you’re looking for anyways.

Plus Discord is a shitty company removing features from paid users (custom tags) and forcing changes to be more like Twitter.

Discord is great for making servers for friends. That's about where my use of it ends.

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It's /r/malefashionadvice.

So nothing has been lost.

If a bunch of 20-somehtigns wish to get advice from another bunch of self-important 20-somethings on what to wear they may as well fuck off to the moon for all I care.

Maybe I missed something, but what's wrong with guys talking about fashion for those that are interested in it? I'm not that into it myself, but I don't see why it would illicit this kind of a response?

Nothing missing, there is nothing wrong for some men looking for dressing advice. Some old men dress like teenagers.

As someone who didn't have disposable income until I was in my thirties, I had a lot of catching up to do and the people there helped me out a lot.

That's like getting kicked out of the home you grew up with to moving in permanently at a hotel, instead of getting your own home...

It's like you and your friends getting kicked out of a restaurant and then deciding to hang out at a shoe store instead of just finding a different restaurant...

Discord is nothing like reddit/lemmy/kbin.

What the fuck is wrong with those people and their fetish with Discord? It's not a forum, it's a fucking chat platform where you have to pay for fucking emojis!

From one centralised platform to another. Feels like poeple don't learn.

There is nothing wrong, it is their informed decisions.

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This is how social media sites die. Not with big protests, but people and communities quietly moving away. Reddit won’t die at once in an explosion; it will be a slow, quiet process. Same with Twitter.

Exactly.

The protest wasn't supposed to be about causing problems, it was supposed to be about making a point. That's what people who opposed the protests never understood. Including Reddit.

They kept saying "oh it'll calm down and then everyone will come back to the site", well, it did calm down, but only because people decided they couldn't be bothered with them anymore. Since there were always other options, people went there. (God only knows why that didn't occur to the likes of Spez)

'We started as a unique service and people flocked towards us when digg died. It won't happen again, as there is no alternative.'

He only forgot that when there is no alternative that is exactly what a company offers, people will either crate one or find something else that's either good enough or even better. Companies don't die because they do stupid things, they die because the users/customers are fed up with them. Just look at the banks, where people withdraw their cash and leave, digg that caused an exodus to reddit, Reddit exodus to kbin/lemmy and now even Discord.

When I look at R/CSRRacing2, the main contributer went almost silent after half june, the place to be now is one of the 2 discord servers. (even though I created !csrracing2@lemmy.world , which is totally quiet) The DIscord servers for that game totally embraced the forum function for the event info, but chat is used for the immediate questions. Biggest advantage, getting the same question over and ver isn't to bad, as they scroll out of the window fast enough. ;)

To loosely quote Jean Rasczak: "You're it, until you're dead or I find someone better."

I'm currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. There's a part about fiction where tell about how corporations and even nations are basically fiction. They only exist, because enough people believe in them. If people stop believing in them, their right to exist seizes to exist.

Nations are a way to determine which area each 'tribe' has and usually combined smaller tribes to a larger one.

I don't think getting rid of nations will limit the battles between them, I guess you'll get more as smaller tribes will warr between each other.

Corporations however, I think we can do without the huge ones. ;)

Discord even with forums category is not meant for discover new content and search.

F discord. cancer of the internet. it is even worse than everything facebook or whatever. also gatekeeping content behind a software of a very shady company + forcing phone number for registration are just so many "no go"

I mean, I think Discord itself is fine

I think how people are using discord as an info source is a huge issue.

It's a good form of Chat messenger, something you wouldn't want to index (99.9% of it would be spam)

But pretty much in 10-20 years we'll probably have a ton of communities have complete breakdowns because they stored all their information somewhere that doesn't let them take it with them when they leave.

Basically I think Discord is just going past what it was designed to do.

I don't think discord is the way forward. Lemmy on web is awesome but the app on mobile needs a lot of work to be remotely good.

I go to Discord for very different reasons than to Lemmy/Reddit. Lemmy allows any arbitrary number of parallel dicussions on specific topics, the same cannot be said for what's essentially a bundle of chat rooms.

There are already multiple mobile clients in development and they made quite huge jumps already.
I'm currently using connect on Android, but also Jerboa saw massive development progress - although I would wish, they would test their updates more, because there seemed to be always some kind of regression.
But didn't try it for some time now, maybe this already changed

Not a user of that sub, but I can't wait for crazy, anime avatar weirdos to start dunking on people, every disco server has em lol

They went to substack for their wiki/guides content and discord for everything else. Different. Maybe it'll fit their social model better than a forum kind of place. I prefer my local mechanical keyboard discord over the much bigger subreddit.

Good to see that r/accidentalRenaissance is moving to kbin/lemmy. Also seems like a good fit for them here.

Why not Lemmy instead?

A lot of people already use Discord. If you try to get people to move to Lemmy, the vast majority of them won't bother, and then you just have a version of reddit with about twelve people on it. Reddit thrives on scale and collective knowledge. If you're going to have a small community with three digits' worth of people, a chat service is the place to do it.

I'm part of a couple of private men's style discords... one of them is a great, small-but-not-too-small community, and the conversation is much better than anything that went on on /r/malefashionadvice.

For what it's worth, I'd still be happy to see @malefashionadvice or @malefashionadvice take off, but they're both dead, as is.

And Discord meshes very well with other social media. Reddit, Youtube and Lemmy communities all benefit from having Discords as well.

That’s a big one. Good for them but I do hope they find their way to a federated instance eventually.

I get that discord sucks but it works for them, who cares? Those verge comments, woo boy.

they'll be moving again in a couple of years

I need to stop reading the Verge comments. I always think there might be one worth reading, and somehow, when—or if—I find it, it’s just not worth the trouble of slogging through the others.