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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Discord has replaced a good forum in a lot of communities. A subreddit is free too and better for discussion. Most people say "Join my Discord to learn more about X" but really that information is just pinned at the top of an announcements channel. Everything else about that Discord is useless for most people. It just serves as a way for the owner to @everyone and push a notification out.

My Discord server is just a place for me and a few friends to post random stuff and voice chat. That's what it's good for.

Plus, the more Discords you join, the more you get spammed by hacked accounts running down the user list. That's another reason why I won't join a Discord for every single thing I'm interested in. I've never gotten spammed from subscribing to a subreddit or joining a forum.

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> I don't know why Discord has replaced a good forum in a lot of communities.

Low friction. Doesn't require any knowledge to get up and running so anyone can do it. Doesn't require keeping forum software up to date and all that jazz. Single account makes it trivial to join new communities, no need to set up yet another forum account.

Drag and drop uploads of images, videos etc makes it trivial to share content. Want a quick voice chat? No problem, just hop into one of the voice channels.

Reddit might have replaced the chat aspect, but they turned actively user hostile so not a fun place to be. And no trivial way to voice chat with people.

Discord ain't perfect, but there's absolutely a reason why it's so popular. Yes it started with gaming but it works so well for many other communities.

You summed up the reason. Recently i opened a Discord and Discourse forum to complement a community, both have different uses cases. Launching a discord server is hassle free with no cost, if you want to upgrade to more features just pay Nitro. Discourse you need the know how of installing it yourself or pay $100 month from Discourse.org.

It has replaced it because it's better. I'm tired of people claiming everyone else is crazy just because reality doesn't conform with their own opinion.

HN hates Twitter and Discord for some pretty odd or niche reasons. Meanwhile, they're incredibly popular with mainstream users.

I have plenty of minor issues with Discord's usability, but it's such a great service which allows me to dip my toes into dozens of different communities with basically zero friction.

It depends on the use case, and a lot of people use it wrong.

Discord is a good choice for a community hangout, to use for ephemeral discussions.

It is a poor choice for a support forum, because past responses are not searchable by the open web.

> Plus, the more Discords you join, the more you get spammed by hacked accounts running down the user list

FYI, There is a setting, per server and globally, to allow DMs or require preauthorization by friend-request.

Reddit is a pretty blatantly terrible, overreaching, and user hostile website. It's not great for realtime communication and serves an entirely different purpose.

It's like saying everyone on IRC should instead host a PhpBB instance for their communities.

Forums seemed dead before discord was a thing. I think Reddit and Facebook groups killed them off, and discord is what popped up after the fact.

My belief is that forum stakeholders do not want to invest in content moderation.

Spam posts need to be deleted, content needs to be checked, people need to treat each other well.

Contrast to discord, where if you find a spammer, just ban his ass. The spam message (or bad content) will already have scrolled out of view of most users ...

So it's just cost cutting from up above.

Most forum stakeholders and moderators do OT for free, in their own time. Calling them lazy is absurd. Lazy people don't bother running subreddits, discord servers and so on.

The moderators sure aren't lazy, I meant the stakeholders one step removed.

They see the costs associated with content moderation as too steep given the intangible benefits of running said forum, and cut the entire thing altogether.

I'll revise my earlier post.

I guess because reddit tends to gravitate towards big subrreddits that have been taken by their mods 10+ years ago and there is no space for newcomers. The Discord rush looks like a land grab race that will rot very fast as soon as the race is over.

That and Reddit isn’t real time communication. Discord provides better real time communication that Forms don’t always provide. Not every thread has active refresh the same way Discord channels do.

Discord is not real time communication, it's notification-based, asynchronous communication a bit faster than reddit, but mostly not like IRC.

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