One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord r/malefashionadvice, the biggest Reddit community still inaccessible in protest of Reddit’s new API pricing, is encouraging its users to congregate on Discord and view guides on Substack.
Hot take but this is worse than them just staying on Reddit.
Is this really a hot take? Discord is awful for anything but active discussions in the moment. Trying to retrieve any information from the past on a Discord server is infinitely worse than even Reddit’s (commonly mocked) search function.
Discord is just a very different platform compared to Reddit. Personally I feel like Discord is amazing to stay connected with friends and other small communities. But it’s simply not made for large communities the way Reddit is. Or was.
I’m glad they’re leaving the old site, but Discord serves different purposes and isn’t a replacement. I’d recommend they start a Lemmy community.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.
I agree that Discord is a bad replacement for web forums, but you can search in any server that you belong to.
that you belong to
This is the issue. You need to log in, and join the server in order to access this information. Idk if it is still true, but there was a limit to the number of people who could join these communities. Which further complicates access to this information.
Thought the same when I was reading this, weird they wouldn’t migrate here, unless they are unaware of the Fediverse
Discord is not an appropriate replacement for Reddit.People are only saying it is because it’s popular.
I don’t understand why some are migrating to discord, it is not a reddit alternative in any way shape or form
Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn’t anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?
Discord is VERY different from link/thread aggregators/forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. I just don’t understand subreddits that move to Discord.
/r/buildapcsales/ has an official Discord server now, and it just sucks compared to Reddit’s format.
Also, Discord doesn’t show up in search results for if people are trying to find an answer for something. And the search in the Discord servers sucks for this kind of thing as well.
Elaborating on /r/buildapcsales specifically with earlier comment:
Using the search in the subreddit lets you see what the price is usually on sale at, and around what time of year. Sometimes the current sale isn’t worth buying. People would comment in the threads mentioning that.
You can also read everyone’s comments on that specific product in either the current thread or the old ones to see if it’s worth buying or not for yourself.
Do note that a lot of these have 30-100 comments that are helpful for users to read.
I’ll just drop this here: [email protected]
I personally just don’t get Discord and find it very annoying when it’s the only means to communicate about something. And it certainly doesn’t feel like a good replacement for Reddit due to the many reasons mentioned in this thread.
How tf does that make sense?
It doesn’t!
Not only is Discord a bad replacement for Reddit, it is another monolithic platform struggling to find a business model. The enshitification of Discord is real, and is going to get worse.
I disagree. Discord is one of the only non-federated social platforms resisting enshittification.
Back at the very beginning they said that any monetization they offered would be optional add-on purchases (not ads) and that those add-one would never involve removing the existing core features to sell them back.
Almost a decade later and they haven’t show any indications of straying from that promise.
Resisting enshittification seems a bit stretched, just a few weeks ago they made the username case worst by going back to traditional unique usernames instead of discriminators allowing anyone to have the username they want. They also tend to change the whole UI/UX every few weeks it seems, 2-3 months ago, swiping would reply to a message instead of opening the members list, etc. I’m still using it to keep in touch with friends and school, but I would ditch it in an instant if I could.
I agree with the username change and I wish they had changed it earlier. If you’ve ever tried adding friends on using the old names, you would know how painful it was and how much better having a “normal” username is.
Anyway, whether or not you think those are “good” changes, I find it hard to argue that those specific changes could somehow be interpreted as driving shareholder value at the expense of users.
I’ve used Discord since 2016, never really had issues with discriminators but I can understand how someone new to this concept can have a hard time to grasp how it works. I think Discord could have explained it better instead of removing it.
Fair enough, I saw enshittification not only as driving shareholders value but also the user experience. Discord keeps making questionables UI/UX changes. I’ve found less enjoyment using the app the past years.
It’s not just about understanding, it’s about being harder to remember. Can you honestly say you remember what your discriminator was without having to look it up?
And even if so, do you really expect that most people would remember it without having to look it up?
The reality is that most people aren’t going to remember a 4-digit number that they didn’t pick.
I have to add people every week and never had a single person that knew their number. If it wasn’t for the “nearby scan” feature, I imagine a lot of those people would have just said “fuck it,“ because looking up the number is so annoying.
But people are used to remembering a username they chose, especially if they can reuse the same one (or two) in multiple places.
I’ve never really though about this aspect, it’s been easy for me but that doesn’t mean it is for everyone. Most people I added over the years where already on Discord so it was as simple as clicking the invite button. Never had much trouble IRL too because they were pretty active on Discord and knew their discriminator, or I would simply give mine.
Even if I’m still a bit sour about the change, I can totally see why it would be easier for most people.
Anyway, my initial comment wasn’t to bash you or anything. Clearly, my exemples weren’t the best. I now have better outlook on this username change. Thanks! 🫠
haha - male fashion advise is one of reddit’s biggest communities?
Discord prevented 3rd party clients before it was cool.
If the objective is to avoid being forced to accept changes to software you use… why choose another person with the same power over you rather than free software?
At least their client isn’t hot trash like reddit though 😂
Isn’t it? It somewhat-works in the browser but you don’t get proper noise cancellation there nor quite some other features. Their native client is using an ancient version of Electron that, at least on Linux, leaves a lot to be desired. No audio-share, no proper Wayland support, no High-dpi.
There are quite a few amateur GitHub projects with patches and repacks to show how things should be done.
If a client is only good on Windows, then it is not that good. Remember Skype?
I game on Linux and discord worked fine for me. Anyways this isn’t really an apples to apples comparison. The reddit client crashes a lot and injects ads in the feed and lacks all the nice stuff of 3rd party clients.
I was on discord for 3 days. It was awful. A dumpster fire is, by my definition, still hot trash.
If you’re gonna say it’s bad you could at least explain the reasoning
That’s fair. I used the mobile app, so this may differ for any other user access points. It kept trying to read data that I have already denied, like location and access to sms as two examples. It also kept crashing at odd places. I’m sure there was a pattern, but I didn’t stay long enough to extrapolate it. Now, I know that the network is useful. However, at least at the time, the app was garbage and I had had enough of the leaks (as per my firewall) it was causing on top of the already privacy invasive defaults. I don’t shame anyone for using it, nor do I think it’s “the devil” or whatever. However, I do think the UI for the mobile user at the time was absolutely unacceptable as the official app, and the fact that the mobile web page almost forced you onto the broken app was also unacceptable. As I only ever used it for one community, I didn’t spend much time to find an alternative (if one even exists), and maybe that part’s on me.
Moving from one company that monetizes you to another. Not the brightest idea.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee. I know it’s in Texas. Probably in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.
from bad to worse
