mari's Scratchpad

Leaving Discord Behind

• Posted by mariteaux on July 10th, 2020 filed in Strong Opinions
• 4 Comments »

It’s been six months since the last full Somnolescent Discord backup, so here I am, at it again:

I used to be a huge fan of Discord. I initally found it back in the early days of 2016, after some of my high school friends pushed me to join it. (Ironically, I don’t think I was ever in a group chat with those specific friends, just DMs. Weed-smoking band kid Dota people is about how to sum them up.) At the time, I was used to two options: Skype, which was horribly clunky and slow but at least made some attempt at a featureset, and IRC, which was pleasantly nimble, but utterly featureless.

Discord combined the best parts of both of these services with several other improvements. Servers (which should’ve been called “guilds” like they are internally, it’s way cooler) were like group chats on steroids, and they could host entire communities. You could segment out topics into different rooms; Somnolescent used this to good effect with our “personal hells” (anything-goes rooms, one per person) and the project rooms, which could then be sorted by if they were being worked on or not at the time. It was practically built to save chat history and make finding it a breeze, something Skype was abysmal at. Voice chat felt far less clunky than on Skype. It felt unified across my phone and my computers. It was never without its issues, but it always made the most sense.

Cammy history was built on Discord. The entire Valve Developer Union project happened because some kid made a Discord server, and VDU died in a Discord server all the same. Most of the Neocities happenings happened on Discord, in different servers, in various DMs. Inviting dcb and Caby into Somnolescent felt like a major event, and it gave us a hiding place away from the mess going on around us. I bought Nitro for a bit.

Yet, as I write this, the Somnolescent Discord hasn’t been touched in days. The only time I ever really open it is to talk to NewHouse. It’s something I either hold in disgust or mourn, not celebrate. I’m not sure if in six months, there’ll be anything more to back up there. It’s not that Somnolescent disbanded, it’s that we diversified, and Discord feels less necessary than ever. What happened?

Well, it’s not Discord the platform. The service itself stayed decent; people have always had complaints about supposed spying and about Electron, but given that I’ve had Electron apps literally bleed my system memory, Discord’s implementation never felt too bad. Is it Discord the company? Partially. It’s becoming increasingly clear just from using the app that that Discord isn’t exactly financially solvent, problem being, nothing warrants giving them money. Server boosts are mostly completely useless aside from a serverwide upload size boost and maybe the extra emote slots (because people on there can never get through a sentence without them), the Discord game store crashed and burned like a British Dasani launch, and Nitro is just what you get when you want to terrorize your friends with rainbow blobs.

Aside from the slow encroachment of obnoxious microtransactions, though, it’s the politicking. Discord is becoming bolder and bolder with its woke-as-fuck stances while it quietly tries to forget it has literal furry pedophiles on staff. Have you ever looked through a Discord server list? It’s an enlightening browse. All these absurd “chill” servers (never trust anyone who describes themselves as “chill”), meme servers, and tiddie servers. So much fucking porn. And this is the service that wants to tell me about the correct political views to have, that wants to play arbiter of what political views are allowed on it? I don’t think so.

I think the worst part are the people. Listen, millions of people on Discord, some of you are probably alright, but in servers? Good lord, don’t go in public servers. They’re either so ridiculously busy you end up faceless among a sea of other nobodies, or they’re filled with the most borderline, attention-seeking, aggravating people imaginable. The last straw for me was in a server I was genuinely fond of, where most all the regulars actively admitted to me in a conversation to being in favor of destroying stuff “for a good cause”, one of whom had spent the previous two months pinging the server owner over and over trying to get me banned for making off-color jokes. Fuck this app.

I banged my head against the wall in three different writing servers, desperately trying to find someone with a clue as to what they were doing. The mods are universally cucks, most people were inactive (good community), and the few I saw active day-to-day often wrote nothing. People treat these servers, at best, like advertisement servers. There’s no community to speak of. People don’t want to become better at their medium of choice. They just want to post whatever shitty poetry they wrote that day and get asspats for it, if that. When the most action that happens on a server happens in some mod’s “agree to our rules or you can’t come in~” room, there’s a problem.

This is the mentality Discord servers breed. The mods all have personality disorders, these irrelevant, narcissistic helicopter jannies who want to make sure everyone falls in line with the server rules they have very neatly and clearly delineated, yet no one bothered reading. The active users are all miscreant shitfucks who want to ruin your day, or have the most genuinely shit takes on every hot-button topic no one asked them on. But I repeat myself. (Or they’re talking about how much their mom sucks in a vent channel. Again, no one asked.) Most everyone else is inactive, only there to hover in case a new version of Dolphin comes out. After all, fuck having a news feed on your website, right? Centralize everything in your Discord server! What could possibly go wrong.

Yes, I’ve met longtime friends on this app. I’ve also met some of the least pleasant, openly manic-depressive, easily bullyable people to have ever lived through it. A lot more of them than friends.

So fuck it. IRC and Escargot seem far better fits for us, the former for group chats that filter out the bad eggs by way of laziness (how many zoomers even know how to install programs at this point?), and the latter for instant messaging that isn’t that much worse than Discord’s. In some cases, it’s better, like being able to have custom personal, even animated emotes without having to give China your money. I still keep Discord around as a just-in-case backup measure, but I don’t miss it much.

I see more and more people shady on what good Discord does these days, and to that I say: diversify. Get your friends on other apps and have a backup. The age of communication does a whole lotta good when all your shit can get destroyed by one mod who forgot to take his Lamictal that day.