One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord r/malefashionadvice, the biggest Reddit community still inaccessible in protest of Reddit’s new API pricing, is encouraging its users to congregate on Discord and view guides on Substack.
Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.
Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.
I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.