I don't know if it's my age, or just that I'm not really a "gamer" anymore, but I can't get into Discord. Every time someone invites me to a new channel I tell them that I'll join, but I'm just going to continue ignoring it. I do use Discord though, but almost exclusively as a VoIP app. As far as I'm concerned, it could be TeamSpeak or Skype or whatever the flavor of the week is for talking to friends. I'd actually prefer if it wasn't Discord, because I find the UI to be awful, but everybody has it installed already and I don't really care enough to make everyone jump through hoops just to talk to me. That and I'm pretty sure nobody would follow me out of Discord.

If you ask me, it's just not a good means of discussion, and that mostly comes down to the UI. Because it's constrained to a single window, you can't really talk across channels easily. You can't have a DM with a friend going while chatting in another subchannel. I mean, obviously those things are possible, you just can't have both conversations up at the same time. Wasn't that the reason we all started using graphical windows anyway? Imagine if, when Firefox came out with tabbed browsing (I know Firefox wasn't the first do this but stick with me here), you could only use a single window and could never pop one out? Tabs may never have caught on!

Originally posted by Girlydragon

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Personally I think one of the best ways to get a better experience out of timelines is to cut away the notion that you absolutely need to follow your friends or anyone else and heavily curate it to become a good experience, because the algorithm will not do that for you.

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That's an interesting concept to me. I tried doing it on Facebook--It started with getting rid of my uncles and parents and then moved on to people I was just less interested in interacting with. Now I definitely have a smaller timeline, but it's almost all spam. A few things from my friends and family, followed by a couple ads. Maybe that's just the way facebook is these days? I don't know, I kind of dip in and out of there about as much as I do here on Jul.

Originally posted by GirlyDragon

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If Discord was working like social media, it would when you start it up in the morning go "HEY, SOMEONE POSTED A MESSAGE IN #support-channel AND IT SEEMINGLY GOT A LOT OF RESPONSES, WANNA CHECK IT OUT?" and that would be an absolute disaster.

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So, as I said, I'm not much of a Discord user, but as I recall, that's actually the default behavior of Discord. Every time I join a new channel, I forget that I need to mute it or get hounded day and night about new posts. It's easy to turn that off, but it seems like Discord very much wants to be in the social media camp.

Anyway, enough complaining about Discord. Let me answer the question. I prefer forums. A forum is like a semi-secret club. I can get some level of anonymity, unless I post some details about myself, but also I'm represented by my unique username, avatar, and sometimes signature and layout so I can show my personality. I can post anything I want to, and if I don't have enough spoons to deal with an issue, well, I'll know not to click that thread because of the subject. (usually).

Originally posted by DarkWitchClaire

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traditional forums like these don't offer any incentive to post

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I think that's a good thing, actually (And to be clear I don't think you think it's a bad thing, just putting out my two cents). There's nothing making me post, so I only interact because I genuinely want to. An you're only here because you want to be. Nobody feels like they have to go to Jul because they'll miss out if they don't. Everybody just found this forum one way or another, either through friends, or searching for something on the internet, or because they didn't like the politics of that forum, and decided, completely on their own, that they wanted to be part of this community.

And I think community is where it all comes to a head. Consider how many forum friends you have on Discord, Facebook, Twitter, or wherever. You have those friends because you came here and met and a relationship grew. Now think of the friends you met on Discord or other social media. Sure, they exist, but those other mediums are really designed more for people who already know each other. And they're not really communities. They're just chat programs.

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