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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2650 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 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.

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