Current Events > Old-timer website: *deletes their forums after 20 years*

(+) Yeah! (+)

*replaces them with a link to a Discord server*

The internet truly is dead.

Reddit is near useless in terms of structured communication. It's basically just a bunch of people yelling into an open square, with some small conversations here and there.

Discord can be a fine alternative if you have a small community, but becomes pretty useless once a server passes a particular user threshold.

Subreddit is good for random one-off questions / though-gathering, but not great for ongoing conversations.

IMO, a community should have both a forum-like venue and a chat-like venue if possible. Discord can cover both, but it isn't the best for the forum side of things. An actual forum and a Discord purely for chat seems like the way to go IMO.

I generally agree that Discord is great for like, 30 people

At 300 it is very shaky

At 3000 you may as well just be using a forum

Fourm by far.

Reddit be great for information, but the upvote/downvote system is abusable. Sometimes you get downvoted for stupid reasons and get your post hidden.

Discord is fine for in the moment discussion, but is awful for long term discussions. It's far too annoying to look back at what someone said earlier.

Fourms are also good for information, but you can also read past post much easier. If you say something controversial (But not against the ToS), your post isn't force hidden in most situations. There's no internet points to chase after.

Best of both worlds, sad to see them falling out of style.

Umbreon posted...

Fourm by far.

Reddit be great for information, but the upvote/downvote system is abusable. Sometimes you get downvoted for stupid reasons and get your post hidden.

Discord is fine for in the moment discussion, but is awful for long term discussions. It's far too annoying to look back at what someone said earlier.

Fourms are also good for information, but you can also read past post much easier. If you say something controversial (But not against the ToS), your post isn't force hidden in most situations. There's no internet points to chase after.

Best of both worlds, sad to see them falling out of style.

Nail meets hammer.

Discord also can't be indexed by search engines, so it makes finding information down the line much, much harder, if not downright impossible.

It'll never get better than this.

Umbreon posted...

Reddit be great for information, but the upvote/downvote system is abusable. Sometimes you get downvoted for stupid reasons and get your post hidden.

Reddit gets a bit boring when you see the same safe, milquetoast takes floating to the top of every single thread

Yeah, Discord is the absolute worst. It's a pain to search for information and you have to know the right server to even go to. I much prefer forums or reddit if I need information.

Forums, by far.

Discord is a fine alternative to a chat room/IRC and literally nothing else. If i need actual information on a topic, i'd take even a subreddit over having to wade through 5 years of trolls, gooners, cliquish bullshit, and mod meltdowns to find an answer to one (1) question. It's incredible how succinctly discord has managed to subsume all of the worst aspects of the both old and new internet with the usability of neither.

I actually prefer this. It's simple. Like how life should be.

Forum >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Reddit >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> discord

Discord groups for discussion is fine if you join day 1. Try to join a discord community past some random point and the cliques have already formed.

I think the optimal solution is obvious:
New forum but hand over the reins to new mods who never understood the sites culture or even purpose, and then ban everyone.

Reddit and Discord are complete trash. A forum is the only way.

The worst is when you are looking for documentation on something and all they have is "come to our discord server!" and it's like no, I'm not fistfighting a bunch of randos in a voice chat to get one small question answered.

Discord is also awful as a resource/archive, and it's sad that so many people are using it for that purpose.

As much as I complain about CE I still prefer this style over reddit. It's simple and better to navigate and read through.

I was into reddit until it got really popular and the comments all started to feel like they were either all copypasted or were just variations of the same common 5 phrases over and over. Felt like I was in a herd of bots as opposed to people.

Reddit vote system affecting your ability to post is stupid. If it was just pointless numbers wouldnt care.

I find good game setup banter help thru Reddit comments. But the endless nesting doll, click to show more sucks.

MapleStory has a shit ton of characters which require certain builds to maximize their performance. I check out the subreddit for it often and whenever there are questions about how to build a character, the answers are always "check out their discord", and there's over 50 fucking discords because that's how many different unique characters there are. I don't even understand how discord works.

Forums definitely serve a different purpose compared to a chatroom or a reddit thread (not sure what else to call the latter. Nested threads?) and shouldn't be phased out.

Forums definitely. Discord is good but it's a different thing. It's more of a chat room. So you can't just ask a question and come back a few hours later and see what people want to say about it. It'll just get lost with the flow

I think it depends what sort of community you are looking for and what exactly you mean by "small". I definitely think discord is the best for actually small communities. Just as a sort of rough guess I'd say... maybe 30-40 active users?

But past a certain size you get too big for the chatroom style and it's not workable anymore. I guess you can always just make a bunch of channels that mostly don't interact with each other but that feels a bit like dodging the spirit of the question. Also if you place high importance on being indexed by google or whatever (eg maybe you're a small core community that also provides useful documentation for many outsiders) then discord is not a very good idea

subreddit is definitely the worst because reddit does not provide temporal ordering of posts and is thus useless

Discord's interface is sensory overload though...there's way too many buttons, menus, and made-up terms that the app uses. Not to mention the upsell popups, non-intuitive ways of doing things in the UI, and then the chaotic and undisciplined rules/mods that a lot of servers implement makes it very, very unpleasant. That and the whole thing where Discord's privacy policy/terms of service are an absolute nightmare + leaks about how their staff can see everything + actively spy on servers.

doshindude posted...

Discord's interface is sensory overload though...there's way too many buttons, menus, and made-up terms that the app uses. Not to mention the upsell popups, non-intuitive ways of doing things in the UI, and then the chaotic and undisciplined rules/mods that a lot of servers implement makes it very, very unpleasant. That and the whole thing where Discord's privacy policy/terms of service are an absolute nightmare + leaks about how their staff can see everything + actively spy on servers.

Yeah, hate all that.

Even worse, it seems super popular and has hollowed out many other gamer alternatives.

I'll take seeing takes that I think suck over everyone posting in a fake ass way because they want upvotes (or their post to even be visible). And as mentioned Discord just doesn't work once it gets too big for anything other than the current discussion.