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superborbI briefly discussed some of this on twitter previously, but wanted to more long-form discuss, which of course means moving to DW!! Anyway, these are somewhat scattered thoughts, but putting it together + talking with people about it always clarifies my thoughts.
I like a lot of things about Discord! I wrote previously that it fannishly descended from the instant messaging programs of yore, and has similar dynamics as places with large group chats to mingle and meet friends and small ones to settle friendships. When it goes well, those are indeed both niches that I personally find essential to a ~balanced social media diet~.
The difference is as fandom increasingly moves to Discord-only, its weakness as a primary fannish platform becomes more obvious to me. There's two main problems IMO: 1) no way to call out important / top level discussion aka curation; 2) difficulty in propagating social norms and thus community feeling. There is also the 3) "difficulty in FINDING a server" problem, but I think that is far less structural.
1: Beyond the obvious difficulty in backreading a busy server, it's really hard to point out a specific message as important without resorting to dedicated 'low traffic' channels or such. Partially, this is a me-problem, as I am completionist... But I also think this means Discord requires an alternate host to serve as repository for longer or more polished thoughts. OR a server with a very strict and different culture than I've usually observed. I wonder if that would be possible with a long slowmode? (For non-Discord users, slowmode means a user must wait a mod-defined amount of time before sending another message, though edits are allowed on previous messages.) In contentious debate, having a slowmode set really helped cool tempers and force a more reasoned argument, but I've never seen it used to force longer thoughts.
Also, "curate your feed" became so central on tumblr, and caused problems on twitter, with its inferior curation tools, that I wondered how Discord-based fandom would deal with it. On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in?
2: Within a server, you're essentially all in one room with EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME. And this might work if the group can establish shared social mores, but that's non-trivial to do. One way that LJ had shared norms propagate is through lurking before having to participate; you can still do that, but it's much less interesting to lurk a conversation than polished (or not) public posts. Sure, messaging is probably a native way to communicate for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, but the norms of that messaging are wildly different (and have changed over time! I was reading an AIM log from LJ days and wow do I message differently now!)
This seems minor, until you have a disagreement and those norms suddenly clash over how you're supposed to resolve a conflict in the first place! One norm I've encountered often is the 'doubling down on shared opinions to distinguish in and out group', which I fundamentally disagree with. However, if you're trying to resolve a conflict and one party is used to seeing conflict as an in vs out group disagreement (and therefore looking for a common opinion) and the other is offended by viewing the world that way, this is not a path to success. Of course, I think the problem of 'how to disagree and still be in community' is at the heart of being a community in the first place, and not a Discord-specific problem.
On the less outright conflict front though, every community has people you like or dislike to varying degrees, and I've discovered that in a Discord server, when you're sharing a space that can't be easily filtered, perceived norms-violations irritate me way more than in any other platform or real life situation I've ever encountered. I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms?
3: It is unfortunately a really opaque barrier to finding servers; getting access to comms, even if it required an essay, or figuring out a crufty forum feels different than 'make friends and become cool enough to get an invite'. This problem becomes more difficult to solve when fandom is less active on other platforms, decreasing the ways you can make friends! Even worse, you can't easily lurk to learn the social norms beforehand.
However, fandom is just bigger now too, which means there are many more public Discords available, from which to splinter off. In some ways, it's a return to requiring active involvement in order to get access, instead of being able to passively consume from the firehose of public twitter/tumblr. It's harder to go track a specific person you think is cool back to their fannish home, but easier to find someone to chat with at all hours of the day. (And lead to friendships and new servers spawned. Ideally.)
I don't know! I don't think Discord is even a good primary fannish platform, but it does seem to be where people are moving, for better or worse. At least I find it more amenable than tumblr, which means I might not disappear until the next migration?
I like a lot of things about Discord! I wrote previously that it fannishly descended from the instant messaging programs of yore, and has similar dynamics as places with large group chats to mingle and meet friends and small ones to settle friendships. When it goes well, those are indeed both niches that I personally find essential to a ~balanced social media diet~.
The difference is as fandom increasingly moves to Discord-only, its weakness as a primary fannish platform becomes more obvious to me. There's two main problems IMO: 1) no way to call out important / top level discussion aka curation; 2) difficulty in propagating social norms and thus community feeling. There is also the 3) "difficulty in FINDING a server" problem, but I think that is far less structural.
1: Beyond the obvious difficulty in backreading a busy server, it's really hard to point out a specific message as important without resorting to dedicated 'low traffic' channels or such. Partially, this is a me-problem, as I am completionist... But I also think this means Discord requires an alternate host to serve as repository for longer or more polished thoughts. OR a server with a very strict and different culture than I've usually observed. I wonder if that would be possible with a long slowmode? (For non-Discord users, slowmode means a user must wait a mod-defined amount of time before sending another message, though edits are allowed on previous messages.) In contentious debate, having a slowmode set really helped cool tempers and force a more reasoned argument, but I've never seen it used to force longer thoughts.
Also, "curate your feed" became so central on tumblr, and caused problems on twitter, with its inferior curation tools, that I wondered how Discord-based fandom would deal with it. On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in?
2: Within a server, you're essentially all in one room with EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME. And this might work if the group can establish shared social mores, but that's non-trivial to do. One way that LJ had shared norms propagate is through lurking before having to participate; you can still do that, but it's much less interesting to lurk a conversation than polished (or not) public posts. Sure, messaging is probably a native way to communicate for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, but the norms of that messaging are wildly different (and have changed over time! I was reading an AIM log from LJ days and wow do I message differently now!)
This seems minor, until you have a disagreement and those norms suddenly clash over how you're supposed to resolve a conflict in the first place! One norm I've encountered often is the 'doubling down on shared opinions to distinguish in and out group', which I fundamentally disagree with. However, if you're trying to resolve a conflict and one party is used to seeing conflict as an in vs out group disagreement (and therefore looking for a common opinion) and the other is offended by viewing the world that way, this is not a path to success. Of course, I think the problem of 'how to disagree and still be in community' is at the heart of being a community in the first place, and not a Discord-specific problem.
On the less outright conflict front though, every community has people you like or dislike to varying degrees, and I've discovered that in a Discord server, when you're sharing a space that can't be easily filtered, perceived norms-violations irritate me way more than in any other platform or real life situation I've ever encountered. I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms?
3: It is unfortunately a really opaque barrier to finding servers; getting access to comms, even if it required an essay, or figuring out a crufty forum feels different than 'make friends and become cool enough to get an invite'. This problem becomes more difficult to solve when fandom is less active on other platforms, decreasing the ways you can make friends! Even worse, you can't easily lurk to learn the social norms beforehand.
However, fandom is just bigger now too, which means there are many more public Discords available, from which to splinter off. In some ways, it's a return to requiring active involvement in order to get access, instead of being able to passively consume from the firehose of public twitter/tumblr. It's harder to go track a specific person you think is cool back to their fannish home, but easier to find someone to chat with at all hours of the day. (And lead to friendships and new servers spawned. Ideally.)
I don't know! I don't think Discord is even a good primary fannish platform, but it does seem to be where people are moving, for better or worse. At least I find it more amenable than tumblr, which means I might not disappear until the next migration?
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Date: 2022-10-28 05:09 (UTC)(I'm also a completionist who gets stressed when I don't read every single message that got sent, so again, tiny server size is key.)
But naturally those small servers tend to be invite only, which brings us to your Problem 3, which IMO is the biggest drawback.
When fandom exists publicly in spaces like Tumblr or Twitter, we all end up in conversation to some extent. Even when you curate your feed, you hear about the discussions that are happening in other corners of the fandom and some content gets shared pretty widely. Whereas my main fandom server right now is invite-only and has tons of wonderful collaborative AUs we've brainstormed and written together, which will never see the light of day elsewhere. And while that makes people more comfortable writing them, I find it a bit sad as well, especially when I think of all the other stories being made that I'm missing out on because I'm not in the right secret server.
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Date: 2022-10-28 16:55 (UTC)Partially this is due to fandom just becoming larger, so it's not as easy to be having the same conversation due to size, but also because there simply aren't places that everyone goes. Tumblr gives that impression with its tags, but people can be seeing wildly different parts of the same fandom even in tags. Twitter doesn't even try: if you aren't following the same set of people, your view of what's happening in fandom is different. In that respect, Discord is no different, except that the different conversations are now formally separate.
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Date: 2022-10-28 05:11 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-10-29 02:35 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-29 14:29 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-28 16:55 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-28 17:53 (UTC)The idea of a slowmode Discord is quite intriguing!! I feel like it might be good in general but get in the way when enthusiasm picks up... then again, having next to no opportunity to take a step back when getting sucked into a heated conversation is also an issue.
I'm not sure if you saw the conversation
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Date: 2022-10-28 20:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-28 23:23 (UTC)This is a very concise description of that norm! I also am not a fan -- I've seen it so often lead to a group engaging in really stupid nuance-free conversations as a means of establishing and confirming the boundaries of the group, which seems to me a very disheartening way to use conversation. But of course you're right that 'how to disagree and still be in community' is a problem fundamental to being in community and not easy to fix in any context, but all the more in an online context where often your opinions are the main common ground you have with the people you're talking to ...
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Date: 2022-10-29 15:44 (UTC)And a good point that online, it's probably even more difficult to solve the problem, as opinions are even more central to interactions than they'd be IRL.
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Date: 2022-10-29 21:15 (UTC)And a good point that online, it's probably even more difficult to solve the problem, as opinions are even more central to interactions than they'd be IRL.
Yeah, IRL there's often a degree of "this person is part of my community whether I like them or not, I have to see them at work/in my neighbourhood/at family gatherings etc" and so even if you don't have shared opinions you have some incentive to learn to tolerate them ...
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Date: 2022-10-30 22:57 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-30 23:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-30 23:11 (UTC)But in practice, no, it doesn't really work that way... IRL, you might have a conversation or two with small talk on a shared neutral topic and move on to chatting with the next person, but Discord makes that 'moving on' difficult if you're in the same server.
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Date: 2022-10-29 10:15 (UTC)I don't have much to add except that I find both the entry aspect ("must get an invite/permission for any given server, and there's no masterlist of all servers") and the large-group-conversation stressful, in the senses both of social "what if nobody wants me around" and of "can't get away from this person who annoys me." Ironically the only aspect of Discord I find really usable is the one-on-one chat part, which could be just as well replaced by LINE or Skype or whatever--mutually acknowledged conversation which can be either synchronous or asynchronous depending on mutual convenience.
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Date: 2022-10-29 15:48 (UTC)It's kind of funny how the 'nobody wants me around' and the 'can't get away from annoying person' are issues with the exact same platform, but I kind of wonder if the experience of the latter leads to one feeling that the former might be occurring...
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Date: 2022-10-29 10:34 (UTC)I think I've been on the extreme of the experience, but the way this played out for me earlier this year has been pretty savage (it was, of course, within a very volatile fandom to begin with, which exacerbated things), so it's left me feeling pretty ambivalent about discord. The invisibility of so many servers, combined with the aftershocks of that experience mean that if fandom does shift there primarily I will probably disappear off the map for a while, until the fandom ouroboros gets around to reinventing LJ in 2028 or so.
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Date: 2022-10-29 15:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-01 12:49 (UTC)That's definitely what I'm hoping for... If discord is just icq all over again, then it won't be too long now!
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Date: 2022-10-29 13:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-29 15:52 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-29 19:41 (UTC)Plus like you I'm a completionist and any reasonably active server with more than like.... 6 or 7 people, probably, would be too much for me!
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Date: 2022-10-30 22:59 (UTC)And in a sense, even though tumblr/twitter allows for previous posts to be unearthed, it's very much not the norm from what I've seen.
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Date: 2022-10-30 04:15 (UTC)I don't find the access thing so much of an issue, being someone who used to get manga off IRC (ha, really showing my age there). And trying to get into locked LJ-style comms was, and still is in some fandoms, a bit of a rite of passage. So that's never really been an issue for me.
The problem for me with Discord is definitely backreading. I don't have reading completionism, after being in a very active Tumblr fandom. However, the problem is that I don't log into Discord for a few days and it's just red blaring unread badges everywhere. I've muted almost every channel on the few Discords I am on, and even still I dread logging on. And because Discord is a "messaging" app, I feel like I am expected to keep up. (Never mind when rules changes can be found on some random channel and you don't see it until days after you join the server. Not great when the rules say you may kicked if you don't read the rules.)
The thing I liked about old-school IRC chatrooms is that you weren't ever expected to have read a post from x days ago, because that history was completely unavailable. If you dropped in, you could ask someone on the channel to catch you up and they would! Whereas with Discord, there's this expectation that you should scroll up and also keep up with dozens of channels on each server. IRC only let you be in one channel at a time! (Also, IRC channels would just set welcome messages that told you how to find the rules =_=)
Also, with LJ-style comms, once you joined, you could browse backwards for historical content/discussions. And although Tumblr is much worse for this, in Tumblr-primary fandoms, there are "Tumblr archivists" whose blogs serve the same purpose. In the Tumblr-primary fandom I'm in, people often do only make their own posts for top-level discussion; off-the-cuff thoughts tend to be in tags. Backchannels like Tumblr DMs and Whatsapp group chats are where people will sort of hammer out their thoughts before making a "top-level discussion" post.
So in some respects, I feel like Discord combines the worst of IRC with the worst of Tumblr/Twitter. I've made my peace with missing out on content like translations by not being on Discord.
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Date: 2022-10-30 23:07 (UTC)Most servers I'm in have a dedicated rules channel, and I feel like putting them in random channels is definitely a disaster waiting to happen!
But yeah, the inability to scroll back for historical discussion is very annoying. Someone off DW mentioned that in their server, they have a dedicated channel that tracks threads/conversations in the rest of the server, which seems like it'd work, at the cost of a lot of manual work. (Which I guess tumblr archivists would be doing similar amounts of work, so maybe not that different?)
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Date: 2022-10-31 00:40 (UTC)I only ever used MSN/AIM etc for IRL friends so I wouldn’t really know, but IRC had the feel of wandering into a room at a party, taking a few free snacks from the side table, chatting a little bit, then wandering back out.
Someone in my fandom was writing a daily news digest on Tumblr for a couple of years there, but stopped because it was a lot of work. Most of the archivists that are still active just tag very thoroughly, so I always know how to find a specific event or topic on their blog. So I think it’s possibly still more work than on Discord?
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Date: 2022-10-31 00:50 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-02 01:26 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-02 22:38 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-02 16:27 (UTC)Also just wanted to share that Discord and Twitter have burned the discourse and the hot takes out of me. I'm very happy with Twitter's Circles feature, but I can't even really be salty on it anymore because I'm tired hahahaha. I was actually wondering if there was a way to mix Circle with Spaces? Like a closed podcast/discussion session? I've actually seen people in cdrama Twitter host discussions in spaces, but haven't gotten to listen in to any yet. Otherwise, I really do like Twitter as a social blogging space! Except now I feel like I have to censor so many words because in case of randos searching specific terms. I can't stand it as a discussion platform, though. And the QRT feature really does make me see the worst in people, I hate it.
FWIW what I enjoy most about Discord as a social platform is that it's likely the platform I feel the least pressure to check or respond to (unless it's a 1-on-1 DM)? Twitter makes me feel that immediate responses are more expected, even though I keep to a very small radius.
Tumblr is actually my favorite post-LJ platform—it's so lurker-friendly and un-stressful! I love sharing and reblogging images and links, and going through my tags for inspiration! And I like GIFs and pretty images! But I hate how it looks now, lol. And I think in the 10-ish years I was active on it, I only made like... 2 friends, but none that I was close with.
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Date: 2022-11-02 22:43 (UTC)Yeah, an annoying thing about twitter is that it's used by way more people, which is perhaps why fandom is shifting towards more closed spaces again.
That's interesting, because I think a lot of people feel pressured to have immediate convos on Discord! But I kind of feel like you too, as long as it's not a super busy server, you can reply hours later to continue the convo usually... But I also don't feel pressure to respond to twitter immediately. ^^;
Tumblr just doesn't work for me... I guess I don't really want images (or to go through tons of reblogs when I just want to see what my friends have posted), but the difficulty in talking with people makes me not want to bother to try.
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Date: 2022-11-03 04:44 (UTC)Twitter is really just so annoying bc other than 18+, FUB-free, and DNI labels at your profile, there are no rules?? 😂 I literally just made the mistake of having a convo with another person under a mutual’s QRT, and being politely asked by the mutual to stop the convo. 😂 ALSO I FINALLY understand your frustration about not being able to selectively mute replies from strangers only 😂
I feel like I have a soft spot for Tumblr because I was there at the very beginning where it was used for blogging, and I followed bloggers! Interaction tools have improved since the days we had to manually insert Disqus codes, but you’re right, it was never a good platform for interaction (and I hate talking through reblogs), but I might have liked it that way.
And I saw you mention above that maybe blogging might catch on again because of substack! I think it will only work for people who have an existing community? On my part, I miss social blogging, but my ability to read text posts has kind of died ever since I shifted from desktop/laptop browser to mobile. :’) However, I do read the newsletters of a designer who’s taken to sending e-mail updates about her life in lieu of blogging, but it’s probably because they’re designed to be visual- and mobile-friendly. XD
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Date: 2022-11-03 22:46 (UTC)OMG that mutual could have just untagged themselves from the convo. Unnecessary!
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Date: 2022-11-07 13:13 (UTC)Re: untagging - I was having a conversation under their thread, so I think the only way for them to stop new notifications from popping up was to mute the whole thread! Or, politely asking one of us to stop replying, lol. Come to think of it, I've never tried freezing a thread by using the features that limits the replies. Now I wonder if this entire convo is moot now that the platform may stop working altogether haha (I hope not! Though the atmosphere has been very pessimistic because of the uncertainties)
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Date: 2022-11-08 01:41 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-05 03:35 (UTC)I think it's the perceived immediacy of the conversation plus the inability to get away - like you can try to mute the channel but then it takes a conscious effort to unmute it (there's no way to set it on a timer). That and there's no way to straight-up block/mute on discord - even blocking shows you "blocked message" which means you're still aware the person wrote a message, and there's no way to just block or mute in certain channels either.
I do use discord regularly and don't mind the chat format that much, but I find it difficult both as user and moderator to maintain an atmosphere with shared (often unspoken) norms, even with extensive rules laid out.
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Date: 2022-11-05 17:34 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-05 18:34 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-04 23:09 (UTC)I find that Discord servers just don't work for fandom for me, though I love Discord for friend group-chats. A slowmode Discord sounds fascinating to me (maybe similar to the message boards of old?).
On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in?
Yeah, come to think of it, that's a weird shape! I've actually never managed to block anyone, personally, especially since they can find out that you blocked them via reacts. I usually just mute the channel and come back later or leave entirely.
I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms?
Add me to the list! There's no way to gracefully break apart into a smaller group in the same channel or walk away, and if one person changes topic, we may just be stuck there. And not paying attention requires more effort (especially as someone who naturally backreads). To me, everything in a channel feels like it's talking at me but not necessarily to me. And I tend to check Discord during downtime, which means that my patience may just be shorter than usual...
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Date: 2023-04-06 16:39 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-06 21:26 (UTC)Maybe it works better for a single opt-in channel?