It´s so confusing, is it more than a chat window with much too much users? How does anyone extract informations out of this mess? What was/is wrong with a normal Forum like here, where you have clearly visible topics and information presented in way that is easy to process for a normal juman being?
This shit makes me feel old, i assume i´m wrong about it and just don´t get it but i really tried. What am i doing wrong? 
You’re not alone :
Discord has always felt like a totally confusing mess to me.
While I can’t say I don’t understand or sympathize with the frustration, it’s here to stay I think.
For some context: I’m on the younger side of 2000s forums users (26), my dad was pretty ahead of the curve with the internet and showed me how to use and interact on forums from a young age. I was active on some console modding, game maker, and game specific forums before I caught the music bug in my late teens. (I’m mentioning this as I think growing up with both systems and getting on Discord early in 2016 gives me a unique perspective on the value of both)
I think the reasons communities have switched over are varied and complicated but my take on the primary reason is this: the internet is no longer “the escape”, it is “the place”. With this, the world outgrew forums before they could adapt. If Elektronauts never switched over to this “Discourse” front end and didn’t have such a unique & dedicated user base, I guarantee 80% of the users here would be posting messages into a handful of rolling Discord channels.
10-15 years ago me and my friends would log on to Newgrounds or Smash Boards to check out what’s happening in the community. It would be a chance to disengage from reality and see what other people in our little cult were up to before we returned to offline games & life. But today in a social media world that has fully embraced the internet, these spaces are one and the same with our mostly online lives.
Think of it like this: many years ago, there were a handful of devices you could dedicate 12 sub forums to for a few thousand people to discuss. But now there are 1000s of music making machines that all have hundreds of people that want to talk about just that thing. a system like Discord naturally had to bubble up and conveniently it took its existing user base along for the ride.
Thanks, i really appreciate your explanation.
What i still don´t understand, how do you get the infos you´re searching for in a dedicated Discord? Say i have a problem with Function X on device Y, would i have to go through thousands of messages or hope that the search function will come up with everything i was looking for? But even then i think it´s really hard to find on point information.
I’d separate the question into two:
I used it briefly for Midjourney generation, it’s nor longer a chat, it’s an enterprise platform for entertainment apps or sort of. Probably someone already created a DAW or Elektron emulator inside, who knows
I know this sounds completely ass backwards, but just ask, even if you think it’s probably been answered 100 times before. It’s generally that simple in my experience unless you’re asking something really specific or out of scope for a given community.
Everyone doing something besides playing games on Discord knows how unsearchable it is. But this isn’t its purpose. It is not a repository of information, it is an active hub of “experts” connected 24/7. Don’t think of logging into a discord server as waking into a library. You arent expected to be “quiet” in the ways you are in a library and to a lesser extent a traditional forum.
think of it more like walking into a virtual room full of curious shoemakers all busy making shoes. Many of the other shoemakers in the room will be much more experienced at cobbling than you. But generally 99% of the other cobblers are not just willing to answer questions and talk to you, they are actually excited and happy to take a quick break from their real life or latest shoe to do so. This is their little corner of the world where they can talk about every aspect of cobbling with others in real time. People don’t generally get frustrated with squeaky wheels in Discord servers like they do on traditional forums.
With this though, there are many poorly managed /structured servers. in good well managed servers, people will often pin certain messages pertaining to common questions or make repositories of useful read-only information. In this way, I can sympathize with not being able to find information or struggling to know where to post your questions. It’s not perfect by any means.
My issue with the likes of discord (also slack, teams, Zulip, etc) is that the emphasis is the current moment. Which makes it perfect for work for instance.
Whereas forums are very much about the structure imposed in the past (ok, changes over time) and preserve a dialogue from the start to the current moment.
For queries like how do I do X on product Y forums naturally provide an answer, go to the place for Y and you have the entire conversation, you may find your answer or you have a place to ask it.
On chats, you may well find the place for Y, but the emphasis is all on the current conversation, and you may find yourself just asking.
Horses for courses.
Is discord reckoned to be particularly bad amongst similar platforms like teams, slack ?
I’ve suddenly gone from not being on Discords at all to being in several Discords in the last few months, just because that’s where a few things that I want to keep up with seem to be located. I think it’s a bit cheesy aesthetically, and I don’t always know what is going on, but I don’t hate it. In a way it reminds me of my adolescent IRC days.
More broadly, I am pretty sick of increasing amounts of my communication and information being handled by a series of proprietary, commercial platforms but at least Discord isn’t operated by Meta or any other nasty tech giant.
This makes a lot of sense.
It´s not supposed to be some kind of database like a forum is, it´s about being in the moment, asking a question and getting quick answers. Approaching it this way it looks much better. Thanks!
Convenience, otherwise known as an appeal to human indolence.
For developers it takes away the need to maintain and administrate your own infrastructure.
For users it puts all your subjects of interest in one place.
For the rest of us it’s a black hole where information goes to die.
I found Discord confusing at first too, but I like it now 
(Of course it’s no comparison to Elektronauts.)
Elektronauts > Discord > Reddit (f… Reddit.)
Why Georgia? Why?
Yeah exactly. From here when conversations or special interest groups outgrow a single channel or community, they will usually fork out to their own server. Perfect example is the Monomachine server. The single #monomachine channel in the unofficial Elektron server proved to be too limiting for the userbase and so several years ago a Monomachine specific server was started.
This is pretty accurate to my experience with Discord and it’s honestly precisely why I dislike it. The pace is too quick on an active discord, and on slower ones it can take ages to get a response. I don’t want to walk into a room with hundreds - or possibly thousands - of people to ask a question. I want to find the information myself without getting either a dozen notifications or having to remember to check back because I turned them off.
I use it begrudgingly. I’ve gotten used to it and it has been helpful, particularly for gaming, but I strongly dislike it even after years of use. I think I’d hate it less if it was searchable or scrapable, I really hate the walled garden (although in the current age maybe that’s not such a bad thing).
Doesn’t matter if Discord is generally better or worse imo, it’s unquantifiably important X factor is it’s online gaming integration. Given how ubiquitous games, video calls, and voice chat have become it will remain the hub for community hangouts due to convenience. Say what you want about Discord but I’ve never used a better all in one video call/voice chat/screen sharing app besides maybe FaceTime but that’s apples to oranges.
But isn’t that supremely inefficient? Wouldn’t the same questions just get asked over and over, without the “repository” of information that a forum provides?
discord sucks when someone is trying to artificially generate a “community” around something. those servers suck for all the reasons listed above. authentic and organic communities that use discord tend to account for the issues listed above and handle them in whatever way works best for the community.
Yes, if you want a repository of information, a chat medium may be a poor choice.