Something I’ve always wondered is peoples reasons for using both discord and forums. They are both different platforms so I guess I could personally boil it down to Discord being more social.
However, there are edges I think forums have over discord, for example the different categories on forums and how they’re laid out can make things far easier to find and see. Plus it’s easier to keep track of discussions!
We were discussing this as staff members when considering why the Forums weren’t as active as before. Personally, I don’t think we’re playing to our strengths as much as we could be.
When I was thinking about Duolingo closing its forums, it struck me that I really didn’t want to use the Discord server that much.
Don’t get me wrong! I love Discord servers! However, they’re arranged so that the most recent things show up first. It just seems like people will ask the same questions over and over again because who’s going to scroll up 3 months to the last time a person asked that question? You can’t pin everything!
Forums are much better for having topic-based discussions because you can search by topic. Plus, the threads tend to stay mostly on topic. That means that you can contribute hours later because people won’t have moved on massively like they would have in a Discord server.
You could really want to say something about Mary-Sues or genders in French and then feel bad replying to people when they’ve moved on to werewolf fanfiction or french bread. If people change the topic like that in a forum, they change threads. So, you can contribute even if you’re in a different time zone
I agree 100% with this.
Discord is more like a chat room, for people who wanna just chat with their friends or whomever is online at the moment, about anything and everything. This is great for people who belong to a friendship group, or that wants to meet new people to chat with. However, it could also lead to FOMO if a person isn’t online when a hot, popping conversation comes up that they want to take part in and can’t, because it happened 4 hours and 400 messages ago.
I personally enjoy the forums much more, because they are organized by topics, so I feel that I can talk about whatever I want without worrying about being in a chat where everyone is talking about something I don’t have much to say about. Plus, if you want to reply to a post from a few months ago, you can, as long as the thread is still open, and you can add to an interesting conversation anytime. Let’s say that there was a thread made back in January about a topic that wasn’t really relevant to me back then, but now it is, so I can just go to that thread and put in my two cents because it’s still open, and people will still see it.
I am more on discord than the forums, mainly for the versatility.
While it does have some drawbacks like no specific topics and stuff which can be hard for language learners, in more beneficial severs for langauges they often have natives or experts that people can ping for help understanding a grammar point or a document/pin with a bunch of resources to look through. Honestly I just join the country server’s of the language I’m learning… I’ve come to realize that my Spanish isn’t really great and while I’m literate I need more practice but I just explain it’s hard for me and the people in the server are accommodating and correct my dumb grammar mistakes.
It’s kinda similar to the forums in that you can chat with a bunch of different people with a variety. You can servers based in like 20 different countries.
You can have a bunch of channels or threads and there’s a bunch of variety. Often in a good server there’s hundreds of online people so in a moderately popular server you’ll never be bored. I think people like the layout of the servers and how discord itself works. The UI / UX design is just miles ahead in my opinion which has nothing to do with the company hosting on the forums itself it’s just how discourse works. Also there’s a lot of customization, although for a price, but people love nitro and customizing their profile, etc.
The voice chats are also pretty great and people can host classes, lessons, games or just talking. I mean I’ve been on discord since I was in 6th grade which has been a while so I really do like it haha.
I think the forum have some benefits though over discord. You can do lengthier roleplays on here, there’s a larger character account allowing for more detailed posts, interactions and more meaningful length conversations. It’s also more organized in a sense for roleplays and lengthy discourse. You can immediately jump up to the OP post where links, resources and more are.
It’s more moderated and whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on who’s hosting it lol. That’s why you got a specific type of discord, “toxic servers” which is toxic like the name suggests in the sense of low moderation and a lot of out of pocket stuff happening haha. A lot of discord servers aren’t very well moderated unless they’re learning servers or an official company’s server. And also it’s harder and less beneficial to raid the forums than to raid a discord.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with myself I do feel the need to say the only forum platform I think is actually good to use is reddit. Literally thousands of people use it and there’s a subreddit for literally everything. It gets a bad rep but if you join some good communities you won’t have a bad time.
I agree; even though people can be pretty rude and trigger-happy with downvoting, I haven’t had too bad of an experience, except for a few times, but it’s no different than people who will start fights in YouTube comment sections. I’m mainly on the Episode sub, Post Malone, and Lil Wayne, but I’ve occasionally posted on a few other subreddits.
I like the forums as it feels more of a community. I use it mostly that way, on threads or just reading stuff. Discord for me personally I only use it to have 1 on 1 conversations with others, in that way I think discord functions better for me personally.
