Discord versus other communication forms
Posted: June 28th, 2021, 7:41 pm
Let's get this out of the way first: Zero things I've disliked thus far about Discord voice chat. For voice, I like Discord as an option compared to TeamSpeak and others.
When it comes to text-based communication, I've only ever used Discord in context of various Battlefield 1942-related servers, and the communication was decidedly "low volume". Meaning there might be 20+ people lurking, but only ~5 actually talking, and things were easy to follow because there really wasn't more than one thing going on at once. Overall, it was enjoyable for text-based communication, too.
Today for the first time I visited the Discord of a site using it as their primary and only support channel. (https://uupdump.net/) And holy hell, what a hot fukin' mess. Both for those trying to get help, and those trying to provide help. Literally 20+ overlapping conversations going on at the same time, difficult to identify useful information even if your question had been asked or answered as recently as the past 5 minutes, and difficult to find useful information even though specific messages had been "pinned".
(They "pinned" an answer that a lot of people needed, but the context of "an answer to what? to which actual problem?" was still just as difficult to find or follow, because the context that led up to this answer was still lost in the deluge of noise.)
I guess that' still "the 100% text-based equivalent to what goes on in the voice channels." If you were trying to support those 20+ concurrent questions in overlapping voice conversations, it would also be chaos. And I suppose it's even the same thing that happens if someone tried to do it on Twitter or any other "non-threaded message" discussion service.
Just wanted to say, it gave me renewed appreciation for having the http://ea117.com/ site. And being able to have not just separate forums, but separate discussion threads. And being able to easily search and find those discussions weeks or months later, etc. Maybe someone can show me a better example of someone using Discord "as their only discussion site."
When it comes to text-based communication, I've only ever used Discord in context of various Battlefield 1942-related servers, and the communication was decidedly "low volume". Meaning there might be 20+ people lurking, but only ~5 actually talking, and things were easy to follow because there really wasn't more than one thing going on at once. Overall, it was enjoyable for text-based communication, too.
Today for the first time I visited the Discord of a site using it as their primary and only support channel. (https://uupdump.net/) And holy hell, what a hot fukin' mess. Both for those trying to get help, and those trying to provide help. Literally 20+ overlapping conversations going on at the same time, difficult to identify useful information even if your question had been asked or answered as recently as the past 5 minutes, and difficult to find useful information even though specific messages had been "pinned".
(They "pinned" an answer that a lot of people needed, but the context of "an answer to what? to which actual problem?" was still just as difficult to find or follow, because the context that led up to this answer was still lost in the deluge of noise.)
I guess that' still "the 100% text-based equivalent to what goes on in the voice channels." If you were trying to support those 20+ concurrent questions in overlapping voice conversations, it would also be chaos. And I suppose it's even the same thing that happens if someone tried to do it on Twitter or any other "non-threaded message" discussion service.
Just wanted to say, it gave me renewed appreciation for having the http://ea117.com/ site. And being able to have not just separate forums, but separate discussion threads. And being able to easily search and find those discussions weeks or months later, etc. Maybe someone can show me a better example of someone using Discord "as their only discussion site."