Comment by the_af
3 years ago
> and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough
Splits are happening in small-ish communities too. People don't know why, but they have to have Discord, facebook, reddit, etc. And if you join all of them -- which you often do in case they are similar but not exactly the same ("Why are you asking this? The answer was posted to the facebook group! Oh, but we are in Reddit, never mind, here's a link to fb") -- you'll see some of the same people in all of them. The one caveat is that the "owner" of the community (say, the game devs if this is about a game) are likely to be more active in only one of the platforms; Murphy's Law dictates it likely won't be in the one you prefer.
Which really raises the question, if (almost) the same bunch of people is posting in Discord/fb/reddit/whatever, do we really need all those platforms? What purpose do they serve?
But indeed it's doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. You have no control. You can be sure someone will create that goddamn Discord.
Yeah, the best you can do (as the "leader" or dev or whatever) is pick ONE and stick with it religiously. And "reddit" is probably the best of the worst available, at least it can be linked from elsewhere.
But for large groups of the world (who are not 'gamers' or 'computer literate' or whatever) Facebook wins because everyone has Facebook.
No, again, the best is no platforms at all, so probably phpbb forums (or maybe as other have suggested, newsgroups ?)
> probably phpbb forums
I loved phpbb forums! I felt in control. Sadly, every community I was part of has moved on from there. One private community (I'm talking fewer than 15 members) I belong to moved to Discord.
It went like this:
"Hey, let's have a Discord"
(me) "But I don't wanna."
"Yesss... it's optional, the forum won't cease to exist and you can opt-out of Discord".
Current situation: the phpbb forum is all but dead. All of the activity happens in Discord. For no good reason, except that people who are online and chatting 24/7 like it. I don't. The forum has died for me.
Rinse and repeat for many other communities I used to enjoy (sometimes it's not Discord but facebook groups, with their absolutely aweful usability which is miles worse than phpbb, but you get the idea).
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