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Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago by jherazob to c/technology

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Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:

why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?

simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:

garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project

provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress

provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project

forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website

if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project

a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water

I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I'd like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there's a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it's overstating the friction, am i wrong here?

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[–] ericjmorey 8 points 1 year ago (9 children)

what don't you like about the Discord UI?

[–] aard@kyu.de 17 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It is a web designers masturbation phantasy - fancy looking, but convoluted and impractical.

[–] skulblaka@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Maybe I'm just missing something here but I can't think of what part of discord's UI could be considered convoluted. It's a list of servers with a list of channels in them. You also have a list of DMs. End of story. Everything you need is right there in front of you.

It's miles better than any IRC client I ever used, which is the most direct comparison between Discord and "the good old days" of the internet. And I liked IRC a lot.

I understand having issues with Discord's corporate backing or having issues with how it's difficult to find files or specific posts. Because it isn't a forum, it was never really intended for that. But I think it's a bit disingenuous to say the UI is complex, convoluted and impractical, because it's actually none of those things. Discord has done its best to keep up with people misusing their platform as a forum, as they should, because that's what the userbase wants (even if they're using the product "wrong"). But the core functionality of what it's supposed to do is wide open right in front of you and is highly intuitive.

Do correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm curious to hear what people have to say about this. There's always a possibility that I'm some savant who is the only person in the world to intuitively grok Discord. But I very much doubt that.

[–] HelixTitan 4 points 1 year ago

I remember coming to Discord from Skype and it was definitely an adjustment. Discord wants everything in a server, so direct messages/call between users is a bit offuscated. Once you get used to that it makes some sense, but if you were a primary Slack/Skype/Teams users you might have some initial friction. I know I did

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