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by tikkun 1100 days ago
The meta-answer is that:

Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use.

If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).

With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.

I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that).

This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.

The two things needed to break that network effect are:

1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content

2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)

1 comments

I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't feel real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the character of groups that try to migrate. I don't say it'll be objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind of participation.
Agreed, I think Discord is substantially worse. I do think it's the best of a bad set of alternatives, though.