Whenever IRC comes along, someone mentions its lack of chathistory/backlog as a missing feature. Having witnessed what Discord have wrought, I am now in the firm belief that backlog - at least for communities - is an anti-feature. Because the logs persists between sessions, people start to post things there for perpetuity, a task classically reserved for bulletin forums.
Without a server-side backlog, the chat is fleeting, and everyone knows that, so to preserve important content, people know to save it somewhere else. This keeps the chat as it was meant to; a live chat, mimicking that of a human conservation, where nothing is recorded until someone makes the conscientious effort to do so.
Fully agreed, but let's not forget the psychological quirk of Discord moderators loving to divide the world into neat little boxes, so the mark of any established server is the myriad of different topic channels.
Every single community has become a silo with their own memes channel. It's like they emulate modern social media websites where they try to keep you engaged and in one spot forever.
I find it dystopian and power-tripping personalities trying to invent rules upon rules on their little kingdom is really not conducive to spontaneous socialisation.
Now, sorry, you cannot contribute to this conversation because you haven't fully read the rules on #welcome, didn't complete the captcha from our bot and, worse of all, you have not chosen a role for yourself.
Unfortunately it's worse than that now. It used to be that everything got siloed into channels, now things get siloed into the new forum system.
These forum channels don't automatically appear in the sidebar and you get no indication of anything new added unless you specifically follow the thread.
Moving into forum threads is a great way to kill a conversation, perfect even, honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the feature was added just so Discord could appear in "forum" searches. There's no way the feature was planned when it's so bad for conversations.
In any case the discord mod quirk of stomping on discussion inertia plus this horrible new forum system guarantees a conversation fizzles out immediately.
I'd rather software chats not be on Discord, but that said I've found the forum feature quite helpful for help channels. You get auto-search for the topic as you type out a title, and if you don't see what you need, you can turn it straight into a topic. It's a lot better than the old system of posting into a rolling scroll and hoping one of the regulars is around, and that you're not asking a question which should be in the docs but isn't (and therefore gets asked an annoying amount of times).
It's quite possible the communities I'm active in are using the forums feature wrong if it works well for a QnA/helpdesk scenario haha
Thinking about it that use case makes far more sense than what the communities I'm in are using it for (basically just dynamic #channels that anyone can create) - especially with how nobody is a part of the discussion by default. That does make way more sense for a helpdesk kinda setup rather than misc discussion threads.
> personalities trying to invent rules upon rules on their little
kingdom is really not conducive to spontaneous socialisation
Seems like a neglected area of research in UX/UI - perhaps an
opportunity for a good PhD or Masters: To what extent do software
paradigms enable/inhibit pathological/virtuous personality traits?
And no - not all software is a "neutral" blank canvas. Behaviours
cluster around latent or implied structures. Designers imprint their
own values on code, perhaps even unconsciously.
People just started to build IRC bots for notes and reminders. Or used IRC proxies to keep history while offline. All just hacks and gatekeeping the history to people who are not that tech savvy.
I recognise someone may not have been introduced to what I meant by what Discord has wrought; specifically Discord channels (including forum channels) are not indexable by search engines, meaning posts with important details cannot be uncovered by an outsider. Classic bulletin forums are public, and so obscure technical details shared there could later be dug up by a curious soul. It's not too infrequent to see a blog shared on HN, with the author complaining about how hard it was to find some details, because they weren't a member of an obscure Discord server.
The irony of the persistent backlogs for Discord means that a lot of this information is practically lost. Archive.org cannot preserve copies, so if the Discord server is closed or whenever Discord itself decides to call it quits, it's all gone.
Without a server-side backlog, the chat is fleeting, and everyone knows that, so to preserve important content, people know to save it somewhere else. This keeps the chat as it was meant to; a live chat, mimicking that of a human conservation, where nothing is recorded until someone makes the conscientious effort to do so.