In the past few years, social media use has gained a bad reputation. More or less everyone is now aware that TikTok is ruining your attention span, and Twitter is radicalizing you into extreme ideologies. But, despite its enormous popularity amongst technology enthusiasts, there’s not a lot of attention given to Discord.

I personally have been using Discord so much for so long that the majority of my social circle is made of people I met through the platform. I even spent two years of my life helping run the infrastructure behind the most popular Bot available on Discord. In this article, I will try to give my perspective on Discord, why I think it is harmful, and what can we do about it.

A tale of two book clubs

To explain my point of view about Discord, I will compare the experience between joining a real-life book-club, and one that communicates exclusively through Discord. This example is about books, but the same issues would apply if it was a community talking about investing, knitting, or collecting stamps. As Marshall McLuhan showed last century, examining media should be done independently of their content.

In the first scenario, we have Bob. Bob enjoys reading books, which is generally a solitary hobby. To break this solitude, Bob decides to join a book club. This book club reunites twice a month in a library where they talk about a new book each time.

In the second scenario, we have Alice. Alice also likes books. Alice also wants to meet fellow book lovers. Being a nerd, Alice decides to join a Discord server. This server does not have fixed meeting times. Most users simply use the text channels to talk about what they are reading anytime during the day.

Crumbs of Belongingness

In Bob’s book club, a session typically lasts an hour. First, the librarian takes some time to welcome everyone and introduce newcomers. After, that each club member talks about the book they were expected to read. They can talk about what they liked and disliked, how the book made them feel, and the chapters they found particularly noteworthy. Once each member had the time to talk about the book, they vote on the book they are going to read for the next date. After the session is concluded, some members move to the nearest coffeehouse to keep talking.

During this session of one hour, Bob spent around one hour socializing. The need for belongingness that drove Bob to join this book club is fully met.

On Alice’s side, the server is running 24/7. When she opens the app, even if there are sometimes more than 4000 members of her virtual book club online, most of the time, nobody is talking. If she was to spend an entire hour staring at the server she might witness a dozen or so messages. Those messages may be part of small conversations in which Alice can take part. Sadly, most of the time they will be simple uploads of memes, conversations about books she hasn’t read, or messages that do not convey enough meaning to start a conversation.

In one hour of constant Discord use, Alice’s need for socializing has not been met.

The shop is closed

Even if Bob’s library is open every day, the book club is only open for a total of two hours a month. It is enough for Bob. Since the book club fulfills his need, he doesn’t want it to be around for longer. He has not even entertained the thought of joining a second book club, because too many meetings would be overwhelming.

For Alice, Discord is always available. No matter if she is at home or away, it is always somewhere in her phone or taskbar.

At any moment of the day, she might notice a red circle above the icon. It tells her there are unread messages on Discord. When she notices that, she instinctively stops her current task and opens the app to spend a few minutes checking her messages.

Most of the time those messages do not lead to a meaningful conversation. Reading a few messages isn’t enough to meet her need for socialization. So, after having scrolled through the messages, she goes back to waiting for the next notification.

Each time she interrupts her current task to check Discord, getting back into the flow can take several minutes or not happen at all. This can easily happen dozens of times a day and cost Alice hundreds of hours each month.

Book hopping

When Bob gets home, the club only requires him to read the next book. He may also choose to read two books at the same time, one for the book club and one from his personal backlog. But, if he were to keep his efforts to a strict minimum, he would still have things to talk about in the next session.

Alice wants to be able to talk with other users about the books they are reading. So she starts reading the books that are trending and get mentionned often.

The issue is, Discord’s conversation are instantaneous, and instantaneity compresses time. A book isn’t going to stay popular and relevant for two whole weeks, if it manages to be the thing people talk about for two whole days, it’s already great. Alice might try to purchase and read two to three books a week to keep up with the server rythm.

Even if books are not terribly expensive, this can turn a 20 $/month hobby into a 200 $/month hobby. In addition to that, if reading a book takes Alice on average 10 hours, reading 3 books a week would be like adding a part-time job to her schedule. All this, while being constantly interrupted by the need to check if new conversations have been posted to the server.

Quitting Discord

If you are in Alice’s situation, the solution is quite simple: use Discord less, ideally not at all.

On my side, I’ve left every server that is not relevant to my current work. I blocked discord.com from the DNS of my coding computer (using NextDNS) and uninstalled the app from my phone. This makes the platform only usable as a direct messaging app, exclusively from my gaming device, which I cannot carry with me.

I think many people realize the addictive nature of Discord, yet keep using the application all the time. One common objection to quitting the platform, is that there’s a need for an alternative: maybe we should go back to forums, or IRC, or use Matrix, etc… I don’t think any alternative internet chat platform can solve the problem.

The real problem is that we want to be able to talk to people without leaving home, at any time, without any inconvenience. But what we should do is exactly that, leave home and join a real book club, one that is not open 24/7, and one where the members take the time to listen to each other.

In the software community, we have also been convinced that every one of our projects needs to be on Discord. Every game needs a server, open-source projects offer support on Discord, and a bunch of AI startups even use it as their main user interface. I even made a server for Dice’n Goblins.

I don’t think it’s really that useful. I’m not even sure it’s that convenient. Popular games are not popular because they have big servers, they have big servers because they are popular. Successful open-source projects often don’t even have a server.