“I will never go back, it’s way better on Discord.”
One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord
r/malefashionadvice, the biggest Reddit community still inaccessible in protest of Reddit’s new API pricing, is encouraging its users to congregate on Discord and view guides on Substack.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.
The new generation of Internet users simply does not search. Watch this exasperating behaviour grow exponentially with all the AI bots, GPT whatnots and LLM shenanigans.
Revanced did this and it's infuriating. I just hop in once in a while and ask the same dumb question because I can't be arsed to scroll up 200 posts to find the answer; just to underscore this point.
I must admit I’m quite surprised more subs that are closing shop these days aren’t at least attempting to move to Lemmy. It’s as if most of the mods are completely unaware of - or, for some unknown reason, are avoiding - the fediverse.
Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn't anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?
Plus, I've seen communities try this during the blackout. I didn't see the outcome for other communities, but on/r/Dota2 at least, people despised the suggestion because the discord already had an establish culture and that culture was basically shit.
So you were told to go take your activity and do it in a place of a different format, with different levels of topic focus, on a more personal level, in a place where you're basically an outsider butting in and the people there don't even really share an interest in discussing what you want (which was at the time a big tournament).
That's an astronomically terrible idea. And the worst part, not just did we have THIS website, we also had other forums (even the steam forum). I dunno what reddit mods have to be smoking to willfully ignore those in favor of a chatroom.
Thats not the problem. The problem is the usability. Making an account? Finding different communities? Find the right app? Everything really difficult. Thats the problem.
Discord is VERY different from link/thread aggregators/forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. I just don't understand subreddits that move to Discord.
/r/buildapcsales/ has an official Discord server now, and it just sucks compared to Reddit's format.
Also, Discord doesn't show up in search results for if people are trying to find an answer for something. And the search in the Discord servers sucks for this kind of thing as well.
Elaborating on /r/buildapcsales specifically with earlier comment:
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord actually has "Forum" channels that work like Reddit. You can create posts and search for them. So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
Not a fan of them moving to Discord instead of Lemmy, but anyway, fuck Reddit.
I didn't know about Forum channels, thanks for the heads-up. Are they crawled by search engines, though? I feel like with people deleting their reddit posts and moving to discord, it's already becoming a lot harder to find information online.
So if you use Discord right you could more or less recreate Subreddits inside a single Discord server.
I am part of some Discord servers that utilizes this. Downside is that it doesn't have comment threads which might be one of the things that made Reddit popular. Also, because Discord is more meant to use for chatting, people type a lot of non-productive stuff that you have to go through instead of filtering from top/best comments. Servers that have slow mode turned on (can only send a message every # of mins) to help still has this issue as well.
Aside from the "not searchable from the outside" thing, another HUGE point against it is no branching comment threads. It's all classic style quoting.
Plus, at least from the perspective of actual personal discord usage (as opposed to "official community" usage), the fact forums are not available unless if a discord server has a permanent open invite link on their server list and more than a certain amount of people gives the whole forum thing a bad taste. We just want to organize some stuff internally without opening up to people we don't know where they came from. But you can't even Boost to get access to the feature. We're active enough thay we're always getting access to new features months early compared to other servers, just not the stuff that's meant for schools and company "owned" servers I guess.
They probably already know how to use Discord, so they think that it's easier to migrate their community to a service that they already understand vs. researching an alternative, learning how it works, and then trying to migrate their community.
Also, a lot of their members are probably on Discord already, so you don't have to try to convince them to sign up for a new service on top of everything else I mentioned earlier.
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn't worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone's comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it's worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
Discord prevented 3rd party clients before it was cool.
If the objective is to avoid being forced to accept changes to software you use.. why choose another person with the same power over you rather than free software?
Same story with Twitter users going to Meta's Threads instead of Mastodon. Most people don't see privacy online as an important matter because it's non-tangible for them. They go with the "safe/popular" option only for the story to repeat itself later...
Because nobody really cares about free as in freedom. Speaking in hyperbole, of course, but you step outside of our tech savvy bubble for just a moment and it feels that way very quickly. As far as they're concerned, Facebook is free. Threads is free. Switching from twitter to threads is just switching from one shitty free thing to another free thing that they think will be less shitty. Of course it's less shitty now, they want users. Mastodon? Pleroma? Seems kinda confusing, what's a server? Is FB a big server? Yeah... Free software alternatives have some PR problems to overcome at the moment. Now if there could be a new thing, a killer app, that was free? That would be insane.
Isn't it? It somewhat-works in the browser but you don't get proper noise cancellation there nor quite some other features. Their native client is using an ancient version of Electron that, at least on Linux, leaves a lot to be desired. No audio-share, no proper Wayland support, no High-dpi.
There are quite a few amateur GitHub projects with patches and repacks to show how things should be done.
If a client is only good on Windows, then it is not that good. Remember Skype?
Is this really a hot take? Discord is awful for anything but active discussions in the moment. Trying to retrieve any information from the past on a Discord server is infinitely worse than even Reddit's (commonly mocked) search function.
Discord is just a very different platform compared to Reddit. Personally I feel like Discord is amazing to stay connected with friends and other small communities. But it's simply not made for large communities the way Reddit is. Or was.
I would disagree on the grounds that this will functionally just break up the community, which is the best outcome. People will get bored and move on to the next thing, and both reddit and discord will lose.
I personally just don't get Discord and find it very annoying when it's the only means to communicate about something. And it certainly doesn't feel like a good replacement for Reddit due to the many reasons mentioned in this thread.
Protesting a walled garden blocking third party apps, by moving to a walled garden that never allowed third party apps, is one of the stupidest things I've seen on reddit.
I'd also like to mention meta too with how some instances have been open to hearing them out. It's like people went and deleted their reddit content because they didn't want to add value to the reddit platform for people to find through search engines and interact with, but then they are fine with provoding content that can be engaged with for Zuckerberg over Spez? Call me crazy but Reddit is still way better and preferable to providing content for their userbase to interact with than Meta.
Not only is Discord a bad replacement for Reddit, it is another monolithic platform struggling to find a business model. The enshitification of Discord is real, and is going to get worse.
I disagree. Discord is one of the only non-federated social platforms resisting enshittification.
Back at the very beginning they said that any monetization they offered would be optional add-on purchases (not ads) and that those add-one would never involve removing the existing core features to sell them back.
Almost a decade later and they haven’t show any indications of straying from that promise.
Resisting enshittification seems a bit stretched, just a few weeks ago they made the username case worst by going back to traditional unique usernames instead of discriminators allowing anyone to have the username they want. They also tend to change the whole UI/UX every few weeks it seems, 2-3 months ago, swiping would reply to a message instead of opening the members list, etc. I'm still using it to keep in touch with friends and school, but I would ditch it in an instant if I could.
Getting into keyboards then finding out that to find the source for firmware requires joining a Discord channel is so annoying. For those type of things wish there was a XDA forum equivalent for keyboards.
Same here. The sub is private now so i can’t check the members figure quoted in the article, but if correct, subredditstats.com puts it near the bottom of the top 100. So ‘one of the largest subs’ seems a bit of a stretch.
There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas. Probably in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again.
From one platform they don't control to another platform they don't control. See you in a while when Discord pulls some bullshit and everyone will be looking for an alternative to the alternative.
IRC was a lot of fun back in the day. The other day I jumped on undernet using a web portal. Oh yeah there were people there but it was quiet as could be. I jumped around a couple channels like my old hangout #Florida and nothing. I may try again another day.
I clung to IRC as long as I could, but it basically became a troll haven for the last 4 people in the channel, just all trolling each other. I had such good, deep conversations on IRC once upon a time. And in a way that can't be replicated in this era.
Ugh, I don't know why but I find Discord incredibly confusing to use. I've joined plenty of different communities for game mods and android development and I can never find anything that I'm looking for. The UI is so busy and anything useful that gets posted is quicky pushed out of the way for comments. I really don't understand how a reddit community would be able to move there in the first place.
Discord is also at least 2 completely different experiences IME. If you're in a niche server, it can sort of work like reddit with threads etc, because there's like one reply every 30 minutes to a day or 3.
If you're in a busy community it's clearly not at all like reddit, and is like all the huge chat rooms of the past and range from immediate interaction time waster to completely unusable for anything except watching text fly by.
Second post of this I've seen in a couple days so I was curious and joined it. It's very active and I'm going in thinking that it is a good move. Active conversations suits fashion advice IMO.
Considering the numerous comments I've read in the last few days saying something along the lines of, "What!? Cargo shorts are out of style? I'm never giving up my cargo pockets!"
I'm guessing that currently there isn't a lot of overlap between those two communities. But I'm hopeful that a MFA and a Frugal MFA take root here soon!
While it's not ideal for most subreddits, I do get why they do this in general. A lot of subreddits prior to the API protests already had a Discord server where the community would congregate. I was already in r/deadmau5's Discord server during the COVID pandemic, and it used to be the official Discord for electronic musician deadmau5 and his label to the point where he and his label signees would actually talk in there. That was changed after his management decided to try integrating crypto/NFT shit into it which the owner of the server disagreed with, but the point still stands.
I saw yesterday that /r/hardwareswap has stopped using Reddit and moved to Discord, makes sense since they used the API a bit for confirmed trades and the likes.