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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2880 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 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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