Aside: I have ADHD, and finishing long tasks like writing is error-prone as a result. This draft is largely bullet point outlines, and I am publishing it so that I can share it even if I never manage to finish it.

Against Discord channels

If you were to log on to my personal Discord server and glance at the unhideable channel list side-panel, you would see one text channel, one voice channel, and nothing else. Many people find that surprising, and most Discord servers I see have an absolute plethora of channels, often neatly arranged into groups — as an example, one server I’m in has 43 members and 21 text channels arranged in five groups.

Before looking at the effects of using channels, and especially using a lot of channels, let’s look at why channels are used. Knowing the rationales for using channels allow us to ask if channels are serving their purpose, or what a feature designed specifically for that purpose could look like.

• channels demarcate topics, so that people can choose what to look at
  • but do you really want to draw borders around a fixed and unmoving set of allowed topics? second-order effect: having a #games channel and not a #movies channel discourages discussion of movies because there’s not a “proper place” for it
  • channels are used like this for a few reasons:
    1. categorization is tempting! “organizing” things feels good! but we must be careful to organize with a purpose, especially when we’re organizing social spaces and the discussions within them.
       • it’s easy to start categorizing innocently, and it only takes a few specific channels before users expect them for any discussion
    2. users see it in other discord servers and copy it without thinking
    3. few people expect the structure and feature of a messaging app to have a powerful effect on the way they socialize and communities form in it

Are channels good at that?

• discord servers are usually social spaces; I’m more interested in the people in them than the particular topics they’re talking about.
  • a group of people choosing specialized topics to participate in sounds more like a working group than a social space
    • a topic-based channel is basically a subreddit — fine for many circumstances, but not great for connecting with people as people
      • i like people’s personalities, the different ways they approach situations, their experiences, etc. a lot more than i like their engagement with a particular topic
  • and in that case, more channels is just more places to click before i can find the discussion
    • that makes channels burdensome in small discords (with only a few dozen active members) that tend to not have more than one or two discussions going at a time
    • contrast with slack channels, which look similar (sidebar on the left, names start with a #) but are explicitly opt-in — you don’t want to be in every slack channel in a workspace, and you usually don’t want to keep up with the discussions in all of them either.
  • when is it actually important to separate discussions or hide channels?
    • so that people can avoid certain topics (nsfw material, medical talk, etc.)
      • this is needed because discord lacks tagging, content warning features, consent screens except for nsfw channels (which, notice, require a separate channel), etc.
    • so that a particular discussion doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the space
    • to prevent any one channel from becoming too busy in large servers

What are the effects of using a lot of channels — that is, what happens when a social space has about half as discussion-slots as it does people?

• channels atomize discussion: most channels are rarely used

  • eventually, users expect a channel for each discussion topic & #general is abadoned
  • each additional channel inherently makes the rest of them slower and weaker; unlike IRC channels or Slack channels, each channel in a discord has exactly the same members, so each new channel divides the attention of all the members one more way
    • you can technically make channels visible only to members with certain roles, but it’s so much of a pain to manage i’ve only seen it done once or twice, usually as a way to verify that only trusted users have access to the server to protect against leaked invite likes

• channels make it hard to follow discussions.

  first, even finding out where the discussion is happening is difficult, because channels are opaque; discord doesn’t have any sort of “this channel is home to 50% of the server’s activity” or “10 people messaged this channel in the last few hours” indicator, so you have to go through each one individually and check. finding out where activity is becomes much harder when i have to scroll up and down a partially-hidden channel list (with an auto-hiding scroll-bar, so there’s no indication that it’s partially hidden) to see which channel is the source of a new notification.

  even once you’ve figured out which channel has activity, catching up becomes harder and harder with each new channel. here’s the rough process:

  1. open channel
  2. re-read a few old messages to remember context
  3. read the new messages to catch up

  steps 1 and 2 have to be repeated for each channel. especially when lots of channels are used with few people, there might be a half-dozen channels with a few new messages each, so time spent remembering the previous discussion (and context-switching, which is much harder with adhd) quickly begins to outpace the time it takes to actually read the new messages and respond to them.

  storing context for “where the discussion left off” is a lot harder when 40 people are having 20 discussions than it is when 40 people are having 2 or 3 discussions. it’s much easier to read a few, more-active channels.

“My server is too big to not have channels — you can’t usefully stuff a thousand people into a single channel productively. (As evidence, look at Twitch streams!)”

• discord just doesn’t scale well, because it lacks good threading and discussion-organizing features
  • and that’s okay, for the most part, because it’s an instant messaging app, not a customer support forum, not a wiki, not a documentation repository, not a zulip, etc.