How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village? Will they be able to continually grow by adding more servers without destroying the community? Is that model more sustainable?
Nothing is worse than joining a Discord server and finding out it's enormous. You go to any given channel and the discussions are flying by so fast only people who are regulars can catch all the content but even then it's basically just noise.
Thread support was added to alleviate some of the noise problem but in communities that actually use them there's so many threads it's easy to lose track and everywhere else they're basically just strange ways of isolating yourself from the rest of the people in the community.
I'm not even sure what the point of a giant Discord server is. Like, I use Discord for organizing (online) activities, asking a question and getting it answered by a real expert, hanging out with friends, etc.
None of this scales, it's totally unworkable if you have 100+ people actively chatting, let alone thousands.
They can be useful as funnels into smaller, more intimate servers. During the pandemic, a couple of friends and I would play a fair amount of Among Us, which basically requires a full game of 10 people with at least moderate communication skills to be fun. You'd hop into one of these mega servers, join a voice call to fill in your missing players, and often times, if you weren't a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic, you'd end up being invited to a smaller server to play future games. Once such a server gained critical mass that they no longer needed to resort to randoms for extra players, these private servers would start only growing via mutual acquaintance.
I never would have found the smaller servers, where at this point no one's playing the game we initially met through but are all friends, if not for bigger servers meeting the need of that entrance to the pipeline.
Conversely, I had a YT snowboarding person I followed start a Discord server with a few channels for chat, meetups and equipment swaps. Really cool, lots of good discussion and the community was really welcoming.
I stepped away and came back like a month later.
It had grown so fast, with so many users, there were suddenly like 50-60 channels, it was unreal how hard it was to keep track of anything happening. Even the original three channels were completely overrun with so many discussions and chats, I couldn't keep track.
So I had the experience of joining a small server, only to have it blow up when I came back and I just had to give up and moved on.
> How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village?
Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small subreddits and you experience it through the prism of old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the algorithmic feed model.
I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to monetize.
Discord can be multiple things, for some it is just a teamspeak server (village), for others it is facebook groups for under 30s (city).
Both seem to work and people are able to choose. I think it is also important that reddit facilitates a very different model of interaction, a discord server with a thousand users can be extremely active and engaging, while a subreddit with a thousand people tends to be quite "empty".
I think that model is more sustainable, if we do assume that discord will sunset eventually I would guess two possible avenues. First one is feature creep - different communities want different features and eventually discord forms into everything app that new users find confusing. Maybe there is a new simple, cool, and hip competitor that takes off. Second one is rotting of each community from the inside by overwhelming them with information. I've gone through plenty of servers that I've fully engaged with, but that had grown too big. These servers are on permanent mute and I never read any messages because keeping up with the traffic is impossible. The result of this is that instead of keeping discord running in the background I switched to opening it only when I want to game with friends.
