I've got to get something off my chest.
It is that I feel sad the way almost every Hive community and app says "Join our Discord".
Is this really all Hive is, a way to pull people off-site to centralised silos ?
Image by Benjamin Zocholl from Pixabay
So What's The Problem With Discord ?
I have two issues with Discord.
The first is purely personal; I find it a chaotic, confusing mess.
Each Discord server has anything up to several dozen sub-boards, and you have to check new messages on each of them which is a total time-vampire. I don't use Discord very much, so I'm aware that there may be faster ways to do a lot of things, but that's another point - I don't find the place at all intuitive. Perhaps it's my age, or just bias against Discord, but I really do think it could be simpler to navigate and use ! It's got plenty of powerful functionality, but how much of that is actually necessary or used by the majority of servers ?
The second issue is that it's a private company with an ownership structure which isn't publicly disclosed. The epitome of Web2 centralisation. They have centralised rules which they enforce, and I've heard of more than one user being banned for having opinions which were regarded as politically incorrect (I don't mean criminal activity, but there are laws to deal with that already in most countries). There's a difference between transparency and centralised monitoring.
Both of these together make me feel uncomfortable in Discord. In Web2, most websites and platforms actively discourage users from going off-site. Their goal is to keep users on the page as long as possible, because that's how they generate advertising revenue and collect saleable data.
Is There A Solution ?
Web3 is different and we have more freedom about how we do things. I'd love to see a situation where we have no need or desire to go outside Hive to communicate with each other (and maybe upvote each other in a meaningful way !)
It would be lovely to see apps within Hive that take the good things about Discord, dumps the unnecessary complexity and the bits of functionality no-one really uses, and grows some tools that help us communicate better internally.
There are a couple of things already in existence which might make a good foundation.
In PeakD, Spark effectively creates a chat board for each community you're in. It is there but almost unused; giving community owners and mods a few more tools could make it a genuinely useful piece of functionality.
I'm not a coder of any kind, but I also wonder if Threads could be forked and modified a little to be a useful Discord alternative and upgrade ? Linking it to communities, slightly changing the display structure to improve clarity and giving admins a few tools could create another useful tool.
So what do you think ? Am I just a crazy out-of-touch oldie, or are we genuinely missing an opportunity to tick off another box in Hive's growth towards doing everything in the social sphere ?
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