“Discord is both the holy grail of community management and the single most infuriating platform I’ve ever used.”
Discord is a name synonymous with gaming communities, a platform that has stormed to popularity since it’s inception in 2015. Over the past five years, it’s expanded to become the primary VoIP and IRC client, allowing hundreds of millions of people not just to chat and game together, but also finding it’s place as an essential tool to keep in contact; especially during the current Coronavirus pandemic. It’s clear Discord is a useful tool in more ways than many would imagine.
Discord is great. It’s something I use day in and day out to speak to friends, discuss the finer points of games with other members of the platform, and is also the platform my server uses as a forum for player engagement and discussion on behalf of Wargaming, the developers of World of Tanks. From the user’s perspective, it’s very difficult to not like the platform; so much so that on appearance, it’s a very strong contender for the best community platform out there, and the amount of customizability that exists in the form of the Discord API (Application Programming Interface) for bots makes the experience that much more enjoyable. It certainly takes up more of my time than I’d like to admit.
In my own experience of building Discord servers from the ground up, whether for University students or game developers, Discord is a dream to work with. The creation and building of a server is quick, snappy, responsive and gives many options for layouts and formatting, meaning it’s easy to create a unique identity and to create as thin or as fat of a server as you need to create the perfect home for your community, no matter what it surrounds. As a result of this, Discord has basically become the new ‘Messenger’ for savvy teens and adults who want a new collaborative, easily-accessible alternative that’s more fully featured instead of being built in to a larger platform and thus following the associated limitations.
However, as one of the moderators of a server that caters to 90k people and counting, Discord is both the holy grail of community management and the single most infuriating platform I’ve ever used.
Now hold on, I know a few seconds ago I was screaming “THIS IS GREAT” from the rooftops, but allow me to explain. As it turns out, Discord becomes more troublesome as a server grows, with more and more issues becoming apparent over time. For example, let me detail you four substantial issues with large Discord communities.
Issue #1: User Indexing
Indexing in this context is making a list of users currently on the server for search functions to read from; this allows us to see who is on the server at any one time. We have a LOT of people to track on this Discord, which makes it more important that this works correctly, apart from the fact that user indexing doesn’t occur past 1000 users. We are now at over 90,000.
For a moderator, this is a huge issue as it makes it difficult to find a specific person or group of people with certain characters in their name, for example. Luckily, our moderation bot (Responsible for muting, kicking or banning unruly users) helps us retain some of this functionality, however it would be better if Discord could just implement a working feature in the first place. Yes, it may be difficult to index 90k+ users, but Discord are a huge company with lots of resources that can afford to do this. So why don’t they? It’s just infuriating and arbitrary (a recurring theme with Discord).
Issue #2: Arbitrary limits
Discord lets you do a lot of awesome stuff. For instance, you can pin messages to a special list to refer back to, you can make notes on users by clicking on their name, and you can also add friends for easier messaging. These are all pretty useful features in average use, but why can you only make 500 notes, have a total of 1000 friends, blocked users and ingoing and outgoing requests, or the most annoying and arbitrary of all, have 50 pins?
When people are literally making plugins and bots to bypass these limits, there is a real issue. Discord could also afford to be much more open about the limits they impose, as you mostly find out about them as they become a problem, rather than them being properly documented.
Issue #3: The channels are alive.
So, the server I moderate has 234 channels. This is a necessity as we operate communities for multiple languages under one server; this is barely under the channel cap of 250 (!!). I realise we are pushing the limit, but why, of all the things, do our channels suddenly jump around? Arbitrary is the word of the day, and it describes this behaviour. It can happen ten times in an hour or it can happen once a week, but the fact it happens at all is an immense annoyance, and causes severe issues for us as an active community, as channels will often go to completely random places and confuse users. Many people have reported this as a bug, something to do with channel indexing, so why has it not been fixed in the months it’s existed?
Issue #i’ve lost count: The entirety of Discord Support.
With the issues we run in to, it helps to have a useful support team for when things go wrong, as they always do, no matter the quality of platform you’re using. Sadly, Discord doesn’t have this either! In almost every case, every issue we’ve had to report to Discord Support, no useful suggestions have been given, only promises to pass the issue to the development team for fixing. The fact that these issues have existed for months should give you appropriate insight on how that doesn’t happen.
The most egregious recommendation that’s made in every ticket is to ‘prune’ our member count. Pruning basically kicks inactive users from the server, and is an extremely insulting suggestion given that large servers often build their communities from the ground up over a period of years; with many bigger servers having been around since Discord’s inception. It’s also an incredibly important metric re. server performance and growth, even if pruning only kicks inactive members. Even regarding the Trust & Safety team, they are often found to be useless except in truly exceptional circumstances.
This is far from an exhaustive list of issues, but these are a selection of the biggest issues Discord has for bigger communities.
So, looking at all this, Discord. A yay or a nay? As it often does, it depends. What you have to consider as a fledging server owner is that Discord is pretty much the most popular IRC and VoIP program currently available (perhaps even the only viable one for non-business applications), which is in itself a huge pull factor. Couple that with customizability and the ease of use presented by Discord, it should immediately be a firm yes. However, going in to this, as you grow you should be ready to deal with a lot of pointless and arbitrary issues that shouldn’t exist. I’m in no doubt that another program will eventually do what Discord did to Skype and Teamspeak, the previous market leaders in group chatting and VOIP, if they do not do their absolute best to stay on top of their game, and I’m not sure that they are.
It’s inevitable that their throne will be usurped, but how soon depends on Discord being able to retain their users, which may already be a difficult sell given the current market of copycats and other applications that claim to do it better than Discord can. Only time will tell as to when this will happen, however. For now, feel free to Discord to your heart’s content; as aforementioned, it’s a strong contender for the best platform that currently exists, and luckily, the issues that come with it are solvable with a collection of bots and server templates, so as unfortunate as they are, they’re not a dealbreaker.
This has been an article surrounding Discord and it’s suitability for larger servers. If you’d like to see more articles in future, please consider dropping back in a few days or so to keep up to date.
AftershockMedia @ S.U. 