Using Discord: Brainstorming

As I mentioned in Fist Report 3.0, I’m did not run an #AskTheFist again in January and would instead like discuss the ways to use Discord. For those unfamiliar with it, Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for video gaming communities, that specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers.

The Dark Jedi Brotherhood has a Discord server but with our main club also living primarily on Telegram, Discord has been mostly neglected. What I’d like to see is a discussion on the merits and concerns with Discord as a communication platform. How can it be used to grow our community balanced against the ways to combat against concerns like “community splitting”?

I’m looking forward to this brainstorming session and if it is successful will be hosting more of them.

I’ll keep this short for now but I think that Discord is a positive growth vector. Its platform is built around finding other like-minded individuals and its built-in text and voice options give ease of use to many a gamer. There no longer a need to fire up a hangout to game together. Discord also lets you sort your internal channels conversations instead of it all in one big chat room. Lastly, it has better worldwide coverage. In summary, its principal merit is the fact that it is built for community growing and it has consistent coverage in more places around the world.

Now its time for the detractors. Yes, some do prefer discord to a degree that they will not use telegram or if they do it will be infrequently. Second, it does require a bit more setup for administrators. Third, its interface could do with some text optimization in some minor cases.

My take on it is that we should pursue Discord for what its good at and use it more for that purpose. Yes, it has the potential to cause a community split but we already have that with Email versus Telegram. Some members only have email and refuse to join telegram. No matter how many emails you send it doesn’t fix the fact that email users can’t engage in daily conversation. To help combat the community split problem, both sides of any platform need to start to use the thing they don’t use aka use both. This is a give and take on both sides. Some might say we only have to support telegram but that is narrow-minded because some people can’t even get telegram due to region instability for TG servers or phone compatibility. So, you should use both and see where the community settles. We probably also need to provide some “how-to” guides.

It’s possible they will choose one and not the other but that is the way of technology. For example as a society, we generally gave up communicating over email for instant communication long ago and gave it another role, that of official business and spam collecting. As such, I expect people will give Discord their own primary use case and even if that’s just frequent voice chatting that would be a win.