In all honesty, Discord is almost like taking a step back to the old days of AOL chat rooms, with way more features obviously. Discord has it’s uses, for certain. I am not anti-discord. But I am also not so uber pro-discord that I am blinding myself to reality.
I feel the same way. I respect the people who run discord servers, it is A LOT of effort and dedication to put in, but I will still chose the more structured setting of a forum every time.
I can see why companies choose to use discord. They don’t need to manage their functions. It works out of the box and outages are on a third party to figure out. They also can easily deal with outright abuse more easily.
For example, if Funcom decided to clamp down on abuse here (the threads and comments that just outright insult them) everyone would cry out they are deleting negative feedback (and this community has done this, especially under our volunteer mods who were quick about dealing with it). But if discord clamps down on it, it takes the heat off. Since insulting a discord user, even if they are a channel mod or owner or game developer is treated the same as everyone else.
If FC decided to use Discord over the forums, I wouldn’t like it much myself, but I would definitely understand why. Forums are sometimes decent at feedback, but most times they aren’t unfortunately.
Precisely! And I suspect that’s the real reason why we don’t have volunteer mods anymore. For every single time a mod made a mistake and acted wrongly, there are 100 more claims of abuse and censorship coming from people who don’t understand the concept of basic civility in discourse. Not to mention constant complaints about “censorship” from people who don’t understand that flagging is something forum users do and not a moderator privilege.
When it comes to moderation, the deck is always stacked against moderators, whether they deserve it or not. The moderators are will always be a tiny minority when compared to salty self-proclaimed victims they have to deal with.
Having volunteer moderators on an official forum must have proved to be too much of a liability for Funcom, and here we are: stuck with a forum moderated by a handful of community managers who most likely have to take care of other communication platforms, other games, and other duties beside moderation.
That said, the decision is still on Funcom. What they should have done is precisely what you said and clamp down on the abuse. Instead they chose to let the Path of Further Enshіttification. Switching to Discord wouldn’t lead us away from that path.
I don’t believe that is why they did away with the volunteer mods. From my understanding they still have a pretty decent relationship just no powers in the forums.
My hypothesis is that FC wanted to avoid issues with non-in-house moderators that other gaming communities have had with various controversies. I hope that makes sense because I really really do not want to go into a discussion about those specific events since its way off topic, and I mean for the forums in general, not just the thread. If you know what I’m speaking bout, you might agree.
But its more likely they wanted more control over the ones who handle that stuff, and what better way than use people on the payroll? Its probably a mixture of both those things.
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