Discord Face Verification Coming - Can We Make Forums More Appealing?

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Discord has recently started that they’ll be limiting everyone to restrictions they impose on teen users unless face verification is provided: Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally

Quite a lot of folks are discussing various alternatives from TeamSpeak, Matrix, IRC, etc.

Is there a way we can make forums appealing? I know discourse has chat rooms associated with channels, but I’m not sure if that gets the kind of rapid-fire communication or seems people thirst for.

Any ideas?

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I can’t say that bothers me as I don’t participate much on Discord. For it to be appealing to me, it’d have to support threaded discussions. Without that, I find it damn near useless.

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Discord does support threaded discussions, but they are a nightmare imo

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None of the discords I’m on seem to have any threading. They’re all free-for-alls.

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Either way, I am asking because there is likely to be some degree of exodus - I am not sure how much vs. folks that will tolerate such changes despite murmurings of leaving, so how might folks like us who enjoy forums make this format more appealing in contrast to a discord-alike?

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I feel like a combination of enabling discourse chat, having active topics, and awareness that this is even a thing would go a long way towards getting folks to use this place.

(I actually just set up a discourse forum for my own formerly discord community, and have not had very much success yet, so I will be watching this topic with interest.)

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Yeah, I have my own Discourse (discourse.tabletopadventure.games), and I am currently playing around with enabling the live chat section, but I also don’t want live chat to be the primary interaction point, for all the reasons outlined by many of us who prefer forums.

I also wonder how good Discourse is generally for the kinds of concerns and topics the tabletop hobby has. I don’t like the look or most of the UX or the like of old phoBB-stylenboards, I do think more successful hobby forums have very big general topics, and less intermixed “top topics” promotion that Discourse seems to do no matter which of the two (iirc) default displays you choose, which to me make it harder to delve into or continue older topics.

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I suspect (or, at least, hope) folks who would use the chat wouldn’t post topics anyway, and same the other way around. But I dunno.

Also feel you on the problems with this UI. But I feel it is the best available modern platform right now.

To add to the list of things to help improve adoption: awareness that it can be installed as a progressive web app with notifications and everything on mobile.

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NSR discord is pretty hardcore about threading in certain channels. As a result they are often called “heavy-handed.”

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I think forums promote a certain sort of engagement where chat promotes another. I also think there will perhaps be an exodus from Discord but I think the majority of people will jump to things like Stoat (or maybe Zulip). I am way more active on Discord than here, but that is a function of the people I play most with being mostly there. They’re more chat folks than forum folks.

What would you say are the upsides of forum over chat?

I think the primary reason Discord “won” for my group is that it is the place we have a video meeting room.

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Both @yochaigal and myself have written posts about this ( Bring on the Discourse | New School Revolution , Tabletop Adventure Games Community – Aboleth Overlords ), but here’s some things that I feel forums do MUCH better than Discords:

  • Posts are (hopefully) indexed and searchable. Discords are walled gardens - you can’t perform a search and find information posted within, and even if you are in a specific Discord server, there’s not a great way to peruse content even if you can search it.
  • Topics are threaded and contextual - you have a title to a topic, and the following posts (in theory) follow and build upon this topic. In Discord you have heavily interleaved, even if you use threading and heavy-handed moderation (like Yochai points out is a stereotype of with the NSR server).
  • Communication is slower, people (often) think more about what they are writing, and you have, at least hypothetically, higher-quality communication.
  • In relation to the above, I find that Discord mimics Twitter’s behaviors, and that you have way more “hot takes” and “dunks,” as that’s a quicker way to drive engagement. This isn’t to say that you do not have such takes on forums, I just think its WAY more common on Discord, and I even find myself tempted into writing more hot takes when on Discord.
  • Somewhat similar to the searchable topic - forums can create a canon of posts to link to. This can also be a downside, it was particularly noted that a forum like the Forge routinely stopped communication before posters would go read a big forum syllabus. But it is also a feature that if a topic is covered thoroughly, you can just link to a hopefully high-quality discussion about it, instead of going through another rehashing of a topic over and over again that often occurs on Discord.

This isn’t to say Discord doesn’t have its advantages, it definitely does, but it cannot emulate the benefits of forums, even when it tries (as is the case with threads). Also note that many of forum’s upsides may also be perceived as downsides, depending on what the user is looking for.

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Are there good examples of places where mixing high traffic conversations like in discord with slower ones like here has worked well? I didn’t realize discourse offered this. Are there discourses that tried it and had success?

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Discourse’s official discourse has lively chat in its community section, but I can’t think of another discourse that I am a part of that really uses it.

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