A Discord Rant
Moin! A bit over a year ago, Discord introduced forum channels, those are channels that mimic the way a forum is usually structured: conversations sorted by topic, with an initial title and description. I guess I am a bit late to the party, but luckily I didn’t yet see so many forums on Discord—until I found the first one in my community list now. Other people have already written about why Discord should be avoided, but I wanted to put my two cents in as well and describe why I consider this a bad idea, especially for forums.
Discord requires the Discord client
Classic web-based forums can be accessed by any standard web browser. Discord is different, as Discord requires the official Discord client—either as web application, or as web application running in a separate browser.
This is an issue because not everybody wants to or can run the Discord application. If your computer is low on RAM, it might struggle with the beast that is Discord (I still have a hard time figuring out how they managed to market this very lightweight application for gamers, where performance and game FPS usually count). If you prefer to run free software, then you don’t want to run Discord.
Discord requires an account
Most web based forums at least provide read-only access to visitors, so you can read the existing discussion before you are forced to sign up. Discord does not allow that: not only does it require an account to do pretty much anything, you also need to “join” the specific community that you are interested in.
For some, this process might just be a bit annoying. But let’s not forget that this process forces you to disclose private information to Discord (to create an account), disclose interests to Discord (by joining communities that have something you are interested in), and even disclose your interest in those topics to other community members (via the member list).
Discord is not indexed
As a consequence of the previous two points, Discord is not getting indexed by search engines such as Google. This makes it hard to find information: if you search anything that is available on web sites, Google can usually find it. That works for forums such as ubuntuusers, StackOverflow, the Rust forum, forum-like subreddits, and many more.
If you are looking for something that exists in Discord, then search engines are not able to help you. You either need to join communities and use the Discord-internal search function, or be lucky and get a hint outside of the Discordverse in order to look in the correct spot. This makes it very hard to find information, unless you already know where it is.
Discord is not archived
This point is not crystal clear: web sites and forums can also disappear at any time, addresses can change, databases are cleared, … At least for websites, there are services like the Internet Archive that can easily take a snapshot, or even browser functionality that allows you to locally save a website.
For Discord, such services do not exist. Information must be archived manually, potentially via copy-and-pasting messages or at least taking screenshots, and most communities don’t have a publicly visible archive. Stories where the question is found years later are probably going to be rare in Discord forums.
Discord is a centralized service
Like with any centralized service, you are at the mercy of the service operator. If Discord decides that your account is suspicious, then there’s only a limited amount of things you can do to prove otherwise. If Discord bans you, you lose access to not just a single community, but all of them. If Discord changes in a way that you don’t like, or changes its policy in a way you don’t agree with, then getting away from it might be tough—you have become locked in.
Conclusion
There are reasons to use Discord and its forums: it’s convenient and it’s “free”. But there is also a lot of points against the use of Discord for forum-like media, and against the use of Discord for your main communication medium in general.
Information wants to be free, and if you can, consider alternative, more open, and more accessible solutions. Self-hosted software like phpBB and Discourse, providers that host a forum for you, or even fediverse communities can be good alternatives. The same goes for non-forum functionality, such as Chat, knowledge bases (Wikis) or even just static information (which can fit on a static website).
Discord started as a (voice) chat “for gamers”, but it has become much more since then. Now it is basically a social network that tries to incorporate as much functionality as it can, and the more we give in to it, the harder it will be to get away from it once it no longer suits us. And for people outside of the ecosystem, it is and will be hard to access, looking like a black hole for information.