What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)
The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.
I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.
I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.
The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.
I host a Mattermost server for this purpose. It does what Discord does, just shittier, buggier, fewer features, and I have to pay a web host to have somewhere to run it. But it's -actually- private and our community owns the data, instead of whoever buys Discord next week.
I wish there were more self-hosting offerings to compete with Discord. RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix/Element all leave something to be desired.
Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that?
Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity.
The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural workflow to create a chat community around themselves that tie-in to their other social media.
I like Discord because it solved one of my longstanding complaints with forums: the perpetual forum-dweller who is an otherwise shut-in person who monopolizes the discussion and likely has other flaws that precludes them from being a voice of authority on a subject anywhere but in their little forum space.
Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
> Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent.
And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day.
I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a place that's structurally makes a community be run by close-knit group of people with too much free time.
oh I certainly have. We call them moderators often, but there are definitely power users who you will see comment on almost every post in a particular group.
And since we're on the topic of Reddit here: well, you will definitely see the abyss stare back if you look into how many subs the largest moderators run.
What's the point of chat rooms? Well... you see in the beginning there was only grunts and aggressive body language (kinda like how emojis are used today,) and then well, you know what just read the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_communication
I use Discord to talk privately with my friends. Sometimes I get answers there on specific communities faster, but I agree that the non-searchability is horrendous.
The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.
I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.
I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.
The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.