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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2435 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you use discord?

I don't need, like, a literal user's guide. I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?

I grew up with AIM and online chat rooms, so i'm not a stranger to this sort of thing. But discord just seems so hectic and overwhelming. It's, well, discord in a literal sense.

Every channel I join, starts with this huge list of rules that I have to agree before I can even see anything. Then there's usually a host of hidden channels that all require separate hidden handshakes to enter. It's policed by mods who seem to take their jobs very seriously. Then there's so many different users, all spamming things at each other, and so many different notifications. It's literally impossible for me to read everything even from just one discord channel, let alone if I'm in multiple.

Bad experiences that I've had:

  • had been chatting with people on there for a while. Tried to set up a dinner to finally meet offline at an event. It got too hectic and we never managed to find each other.
  • had been chatting for a while with a different small group. We had our own subchannel led by a mod. The mod apparently had some hiddend drama with the admin (I have no idea what), got banned, and our whole group was kicked out. We all lost contact.
  • Went to a newly created channel where there was only 1 other regular user. We chatted for a bit about random stuff, then got warned by a mod for being "offtopic" and moved to separate rooms. We were literally the only people there.
  • in general just a flood of notifications and messages that I find incredibly distracting. I can't keep it open if I need to do anything else. I have no idea how some people manage to just sit on there all day and respond to everything.

I join Discord servers with a specific purpose in mind, not to hang out.

An Arma unit? I'll join to have buddies to play with.

AI related? So I can keep up with the news and shoot the shit.

IMO the best way to keep Discord pleasant is to not join public servers. It works best for small groups of people who know each other, like an MMO guild or similar groups of friends. I've joined large public servers before and they are kind of miserable.

well, i don't have any group of friends so... guess I'm doomed to misery lol.

You can make friends by going to a discord server about a topic you like.

I mostly don't. I belong to product discords so I can ask questions about their code's weird behavior. This works great for me but they've probably answered my question a thousand times and I can't google their previous response.

I hang out in writer's discords so I can sometimes get muted for a day for making a joke that tangentially references drug use in a channel that allows the presence of children. This is stupid but I'm not gonna get bothered by it. It's just easier to taboo whole topics of conversation than make intelligent calls about the difference between a joke that references something and corruption of the youth.

If I actually want to, y'know, chat with people? I either use my own server or a friend's server. It's pretty much the only way to avoid officious mods, big public channels wade through so much shit on a daily basis that anyone who mods one will eventually become trigger happy. For the notifications: If a channel gives me a notification I don't need literally once, I mute it forever. You're basically never gonna regret muting things on discord in my experience.

Yeah that first case is what frustrates me so much about the modern internet. it's all ephemeral, designed to prevent being google searched. I guess that's good for a quick private chat, but it's really annoying when you just want to ask a frequently asked question.

Seems like you gotta have friends to make friends... everything is like a job search now.

  • mute servers unless every single message on there is important
  • mute channels you don't need so they don't light up
  • mute categories
  • set notification settings on the server to "only @mentions" or none
  • don't join silly servers

This should be enough that you only see the big red (1) if someone addressed you directly or has the privilege to ping everyone.

I've been using discord mostly for keeping tabs on specific games' updates as well as a few thematic communities, as well as a personal friends' group. I have no recollection of any server being that silly besides, ironically, the motte/rdrama BotC server. If I don't need to watch a server, I don't even quit it, I just mute it completely and move it down the list.

That sounds like "the best way to use it is to not use it at all." But yeah I'll try adding more mutes.

the best way to use it is to not use it at all

Yes.

It's about curating what you actually want to use.

I mostly use it for three purposes:

  1. Voice chat with friends.
  2. Ask questions about software that I can't find the answers to on Stack Overflow.
  3. Receive updates on niche computer games.

And even for those two latter purposes, Discord is more annoying than useful most of the time. It's like 4chan on crack, with the lack of anonymity doing far more to encourage attention-whoring than to discourage shitposting. It is, as you said, loud, chaotic, nonsensical, a maelstrom of inanity, people screaming over each other, incomprehensible memes, an unceasing discharge of shitpost. It's a chatroom from hell, for zoomers. Everyone's an autistic transsexual furry and has a caricature instead of a personality. It's incoherent, anathema to attention span, outright hostile to any attempts at having a conversation. Anything that doesn't fit on-screen with the latest messages in a given channel may as well never have been written.

I hate it, but still use it because for many purposes, it's the only way to obtain specific pieces of information.

Its most-appreciated feature as far as I'm concerned is the option to mute channels.

I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?

Practical and not overwhelming: Do like I do; minimize your interactions with it, try to block out the most annoying parts while getting the information you want. Give up on it in cases where this does not work; it's never worth the effort of diving deeper.

Fun: Become one with the mob. Embrace the brain damage. I can't imagine there's a sane way.

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