Comment by quadruple
6 hours ago
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot? Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server? What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server? What are we doing here?
6 hours ago
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot? Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server? What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server? What are we doing here?
There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").
I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
2 replies →
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
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I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore
I'm pretty sure Clippy and Rover had a child and it got bit by a radioactive LLM.
There is a chance that it's actually a Microsoft Office discord that was rebranded to Microsoft Copilot.
They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".
It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...
(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)
I have been in similar groups, and trust me, there are a lot of very enthusiastic users sharing their tools, success stories etc.
I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.
I have Copilot through work.
I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
How do you do, fellow kids?
It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X
It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.
Sometimes they have good ideas, America's Army was pretty popular for a while for example.
In the late 90s/early 2000's, AA was lit. Really good competitive shooter for free.
Someone wanted to get paid to be a Discord mod.
For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.
It’s just another checkbox in someone’s performance review, no need to think too hard about it.
Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?