Yep. Discord is evil. Alienation, siloing people away in unsearchable little holes ruled over by petty dramatic tyrants constantly trying to poach more for their silo on subject x from the tyrants in the other silos to become /THE/ silo on subject x but never really succeeding for anything of even moderate depth/breadth.

Say what you will about how reddit murdered the internet forum and digg before it helped, at least it was and even with the API changes will continue to be searchable and scrapable across its entire breadth by search engines. You can find some 10 year old post on a technical subreddit for a piece of software with your exact issue with a simple search while also finding results from other subreddits with cross-over. You can’t do that with discord. It’s a FOMO machine, log in, check daily messages or risk missing out on the socialization/anti-social behavior of your peers.

Yet discord has and is continuing to increasingly take over from forums, contact pages, help pages, etc. IRC was open, scrappable, archiveable and was used for limited and rational purposes. It wasn’t intended as or used as a forum replacement so much as a live help channel, social space, etc. But Discord demands to be seen as jack of all trades and even claims to be master of all as well. With a forum inane chatter is removed, focus is retained. Someone who asks a problem that gets no answers has a decent chance of being discovered 3 days, a week, 2 weeks later by someone browsing the forums who has them. With discord, forget it, it’s scrolled past within the day or sooner if it’s a hyper-active channel.

And although secret and restricted access sub-forums have always been a thing, Discord has made it so any child who spins up and spams one of these and manages to grow it now has the power of creating secret cabals of loyal worshipers, privileging them and indeed creating two-tiered societies within Discords which lead to drama, strife, god-complexes, elitism, protected persons, etc. Again, all these things existed with forums but there were higher bars for entry and it enabled them less.

And drama, drama, drama. Forums can and often were archived. In discord it’s they said/other they said once a mod gets to and deletes something or sometimes even before as unlike forums which you can search with powerful search engines and other tools, if you can’t find it easily using discord’s lackluster search maybe you just give up as it’s lost days back in mountains of chat. Far from the quickly scrolling nature snuffing out disagreements it seems to make them all the more dramatic and explosive.

As much as I hope reddit implodes. If I had to choose I’d rather reddit live for another 15 years if it meant Discord were to implode next year as one is much worse.