Microblog Memes

you shouldn't use it because it's a black hole for information.

anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.

when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.

communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.

think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.

so many communities have already just... disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.

that's why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.

it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.

it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can't show you the contents, so you don't even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they've already been answered, and on and on the list goes.

discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!

there's a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!

so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don't talk to each other, or don't even realize they exist at all!

and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque "search" and "discover" algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.

it's top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.

discord is the bane of online social groups!

and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there's no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!