The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can “do it all” in terms of how people want to communicate.
It supports voice, video, and text.
It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.
It supports web, desktop, and mobile.
I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.
Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.
The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information' incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the chat app part of a support channel, it is not even a passable replacement for a website, or a wiki.
Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.
Maybe some users of Discord want the satisfaction of answering a question raised by another community member, but don't want the answer to be publicly indexable and searchable forever? In this case, Discord is working perfectly.
Good for them. While they are getting whatever social satisfaction they care about (which is fine, if you're an enthusiast, you can seek out whatever validation for your volunteer effort you want - I don't judge)...
I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten.
I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.
It supports voice, video, and text.
It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.
It supports web, desktop, and mobile.
I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.
Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.