Disclosure: my full time job is working on a community product I love Discord, but if you are considering it for your community and your end users would potentially be able to collaborate, support each other, for the love of everything...don't use Discord. A thread 🧵1/7 #Discord #WebDevelopment - ThreadSky

patrickjoannisse.com • 39 days ago

Disclosure: my full time job is working on a community product

I love Discord, but if you are considering it for your community and your end users would potentially be able to collaborate, support each other, for the love of everything...don't use Discord. A thread 🧵1/7

#Discord #WebDevelopment

Comments

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

I'll jump straight to the TL;DR: Discord is fine if you want your community to be closed, hard to discover and casual. But if you are making a product or a service and you or your user would gain from discoverability and learning from each other/collaboration: please do not use Discord. 2/7

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

I've been a web developer since 2012 and a huge part of my job searching for things. I come across a problem and I need a solution or some documentation, I go to the interweb and search for something and usually there will be an answer or someone else asking the same question I have. 3/7

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

For a while I even worked in COBOL, which is a programming language from the 1960s and old forum posts from 2001 were the best. Because if I would search I would likely land on some old forum with the answer somewhere. You can't do that with a Discord (yet). 4/7

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

If your user or customers would search (or ask an AI or whatever), your Discord content is not gonna show up. It's not discoverable. This is definitely a feature, not a bug, for some community, but if you are a SaaS or a popular game developer where your customers could collaborate, it's bad. 5/7

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

Outside the fact that if I search for a game rule clarification or help to understand an error message and your Discord content won't show up on Google, searching inside Discord is just bad. This could be improved, but it still doesn't fix the discoverability problem. 6/7

patrickjoannisse.com•39 days ago

I really hope blogs, forums and open web communities like Stackoverflow survive and thrive. I can't rely on Jeremy Crawford's tweets for rules clarifications. Even with AI threatening the ecosystem, I still believe and find value in the web. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. 7/7

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply