Discord revolutionizes online conversations with... forums

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So it goes full circle.

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Discord revolutionizes online conversations with... forums | Engadget

Discord, the social messaging service that helped to displace old-school internet forums, now wants to bring them back..
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Discord, the social messaging service that helped to displace old-school internet forums, now wants to bring them back. Today, the company announced Forum Channels, which are exactly what you'd imagine: A dedicated space to have conversations without the worry of a fast-paced chat feed. You'll find them right below your usual Discord channels. When creating a forum, you'll be able to restrict posting permissions and set guidelines for the conversation. Crucially, they'll also be compatible with Discord's AutoMod, which can help to clean up discussions. (Moderation was always the downfall of a poorly-run forum.)
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In the end it's just another internet chat platform, only on steroids without any threading, consistency or integrity to the flow of posts. I know I'm old but I'll take the laid back approach to a nice forum any day.
 
I never understood chat "replacing" forums. Chat has been around for a long time. Why did it take until the mid-2010s for forums to die in favor of chat? It's not like Discord really "revolutionized" anything. They just modernized the old school "chat room".
 
TBL said:
I never understood chat "replacing" forums. Chat has been around for a long time. Why did it take until the mid-2010s for forums to die in favor of chat? It's not like Discord really "revolutionized" anything. They just modernized the old school "chat room".
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Yeah, it makes me think AOL chat rooms. I couldn't tell you if I've ever actually used Discord, but it sounds like another thing to add to the long list of services that I guess gives people internet cred. Find me on Twitter...and Instagram....and Youtube....and Reddit....and Patreon....and Substack....and...
 
Countless evenings wasted in IRC. :D On the plus side, we had people from all over the world dropping in...heh...and we'd get someone with good broadband (at least 1Mbit!) to host the need for speed games. :D

No, don't miss the chat channels - while it was live, you also missed a lot of the conversation. (don't miss the drama either - kick + ban) ;)
 
Thread derailment possible here but, I cannot get into Reddit. It’s too big and unfocused or something, I can’t quite explain it.
 
It is funny that chat was a thing, and left, and came back, left __again__, and then became this HUGE thing in the business space with Slack, Teams

@Edd

Yeah, I don't engage on Reddit, I don't even really go to specific subs or anything, I use it just as a "read only" information resource, usually for some kind of specific one off research. Like I'll search, "Meross opener magnet mounting" and see what I get, then run the same search and add " ... reddit". Trying to have any kind of focused discourse seems impossible, and like just a waste of cycles to me.
 
fischersd said:
Countless evenings wasted in IRC.
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For a while all my real life friends came from IRC. I spent way too much time there.
Edd said:
Thread derailment possible here but, I cannot get into Reddit. It’s too big and unfocused or something, I can’t quite explain it.
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Same. Even if you manage to drill down enough to find a specific sub, it’s still too broad with too many people.
 
I also spent a ton of time on IRC. Man those were the days. Discord seems to have mostly replaced IRC for me, though I still have an IRC client permanently open and I'm in a few channels. I don't really have any issue with Reddit other than posts are too ephemeral. This is where forums really shine. I also spend a lot of time there. But chat most certainly cannot replace forums. I still would like to see forums make a comeback.
 
Edd said:
Thread derailment possible here but, I cannot get into Reddit. It’s too big and unfocused or something, I can’t quite explain it.
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Very much a free for all and not for everyone, even the most positive of posters will get shit on and you have to take your lumps. The other side of it is you can get real feedback from people and it helped me get my IG followers into the thousands, just have to balance it all out.
 
I am on discord for a stock that I am invested in. My son caught me on it the other day, and exclaimed, "You are on discord?!?" I could see that the coolness factor of discord dropped a few points in his eyes. :ROFLMAO:
 
Edd said:
Thread derailment possible here but, I cannot get into Reddit. It’s too big and unfocused or something, I can’t quite explain it.
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I use Reddit for a few very specific things (a page dedicated to a podcast I follow, another one dedicated to book recommendations, and another one for linguistics questions). I haven't really gotten "into" it though. There's no real sense of "community" like on a forum.
 
I find Discord useful for smaller communities, especially gaming groups that need/want voice chat, which was the original intent. I put one together for our D&D group. An old MMO group I played with has one. I am in a couple for 3D printing and retro gaming groups. It starts to get difficult with larger groups of people as the signal to noise ratio gets bad, like a busy IRC server. I'm not surprised they are looking to try to add structure to support those larger groups, even if it wasn't the original purpose of Discord.
 
TBL said:
I use Reddit for a few very specific things (a page dedicated to a podcast I follow, another one dedicated to book recommendations, and another one for linguistics questions). I haven't really gotten "into" it though. There's no real sense of "community" like on a forum.
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I think that's mainly just a side effect of the size of the platform. Reddit is enormous. Unless you're interacting with some really small subreddits, it's unlikely you'll run into the same users frequently making it hard to build any kind of connection with them. Even some of the larger forums are still small compared to Reddit and are still pretty easy to get to know other users more closely.
 
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