SEE EDIT 2. THESE ISSUES HAVE BEEN RESOLVED FOR THE MOST PART.
iddi01 wrote: ↑February 4th, 2024, 9:18 am
8
important reasons why Discord is bad:
1. Due to the easiness to post there (just hit enter), people don't think twice before posting,
causing "bad" stuff to frequently appear there, pushing the high-quality stuff away (if there even has any.)
2. Discussion there are so fast that they are usually over before anyone else could join in, and so fast that you have no time to think,
so you could easily say something that you regret.
3. Discord is really bad at preserving stuff, so you could write out a masterpiece and watch it getting pushed into the void by some chitchat...
4. Unlike forums, Discord servers are not customizable, especially without "boosts". They look exactly the same.
5. At any given time, only about 0.5% of people in the "online" list is actually online.
The rest is active on some other server you might not even have heard about.
6. Does any forum require you to buy a $10 "Nitro" to not limit your choices?
7. In history, Discord made many changes that causes thousands and thousands of people to complain, especially recently, and those changes are never reversed back.
8. Discord is forums' worst enemy. Countless forums are abandoned because of it. A few Discord users even said, "i wonder why forums still exist"
Expanding on 8:
I remember back in 2018, the main direction of information flow seemed to be from the forums to the discord. At that time, the epicenter of research was still on the forums. These days, the main direction of information flow seems to be from the discord to the forums. Now, the epicenter of research seems to be the discord, meaning that you need to be in the discord if you want to stay as up-to-date as possible.
I get that it is sometimes necessary to ban people, but consider:
1. A ban from the discord tends to have a larger effect than a ban from the forums, simply because you can still see forum posts when you're banned from the forums, but you can't see discord messages when you're banned from the discord. Patterns on the discord can't be accessed if you're banned from the discord, meaning that one source of information is completely locked away from you.
2. It seems to be much easier to get banned from the discord than from the forums. The two examples that come to mind right now are AlbertArmStein and Drone_Better, who both contribute on the forums. The place where the most information is created is the place where it is easiest to get banned. To be clear, I am not saying that we should unban everyone from the Discord. The bans themselves may be necessary, but they uncover a deeper issue.
3. Discord bans tend to be much longer than forum bans. The longest forum ban I've gotten is a day. The longest forum ban I've seen applied to anyone else is one month. As for discord bans? I have yet to see anything shorter than 4 to 6 months*, and they can go on for years. This ends up making the first two points even more severe than they already were.
In other words, the combination of discord bans being more severe in nature, more common, and much longer than forum bans ends up getting in the way of people who don't fit well in the discord but still want to contribute (AlbertArmStein, Drone_Better, et al.).
It is still possible to research on your own, but you can't build off of work you can't see.
I have decided to leave the discord because of this. The cost is steep for the reasons listed above, even if I wasn't actually banned, but by using the forums as my main epicenter of research, I hope I can at least partially reverse the current, by forcing my work to be crossposted from the forums to the discord, instead of the other way around.
Finally, I have asked (albeit very indirectly) about why people are banned from the discord instead of just being muted, which would solve all three problems. The answer is that even if you're muted, you are still able to DM people in the server, which includes potential harassment of mods. This isn't an issue in the forums, where you can't message anyone when you're banned, while still being able to read messages.
*There is one exception I can think of, but it isn't a "ban" in the usual sense of a ban. My main account was banned for about an hour at one point simply because it got compromised. However, I had asked the moderators to ban it using an alt account; if this were a "regular" ban, that alt account would have gotten banned too because of ban evasion.
EDIT: If I were to summarize in a few sentences, I'd say this:
The bans from the Discord server are not the problem. The Discord server itself, as it currently works right now, is the problem.
EDIT 2: Bans have been replaced with a jail channel for the most part to allow transfer of patterns in and out of the server. Actual bans are now being used as a last resort for things like harassment and trolling. Not quite perfect but that's a Discord limitation at this point, and we're doing the best we can do to replace the metaphorical lead boxes with glass boxes.
If anyone cares, I've started work on another (34,7)c/156 spaceship using the same reaction.
