[dan_can_code]

For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.

[nativeit]

I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.

[nativeit]

Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.

[9283409232]

Users are worryingly hostile to developers.

[thoughtpalette]

If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.

[Arelius]

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?

[thoughtpalette]

Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.

My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.

[9283409232]

> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.

[squigz]

Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.

[kevinsync]

I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers

[squigz]

Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)

There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P

As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.

[nativeit]

I'm gonna give it up for that one. Nicely done.

[agumonkey]

oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)