An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
For people who use discord a lot (and to be totally honest, I’m one of them, I even ended up changing the liftoff theme colour to the old discord logo colour by instinct) it feels like it’s just as easy to use. But you’re right, it’s not a replacement, and it can be hard to keep up with no easy way to scroll through feeds or anything similar, no matter how much discord tries to implement them. It will forever be, at its core, a messaging app.
So I think it boils down to how used to using discord you are. If you’re going to discord to replace reddit, you are bound to be extremely disappointed by the results. It’s not designed to do that. And a lot of people aren’t realizing this.
As I saw it, Discord is a replacement for IRC (for text) + Mumble (for voice), and they succeeded despite problems all proprietary platforms share. Now, I can understand subreddits (or communities now) having a chatroom like Discord for contingencies, but replacing forums?