I’ve tried to use Discord, but it is just too disorganized and there are no threads of conversation, as there are here.
Discord actually has this feature and more. It’s a very robust platform. In my opinion, the TWiT Discord is still in a rudimentary phase that hasn’t yet realized its potential. I needed to stop paying to save money, but if any TWiT PTB reading my comment wants to give me a shot, I’m declaring my candidacy.
Warning: 6am and I haven’t been to bed yet stream of consciousness follows.
With the right amount of settings, regulation, and lead-by-example tone-setting, Discord can work like a powerful forum as well. It, in fact, does have threads that can spin up and spin down as needed. For example, a channel can exist with the permissions set to allow only thread creation, and that channel serve as a launching point and archive for each separate thread. Roles can be used like major topics that users can opt into getting notified about.
I have quite a few Discords that work like active community hubs, not chat rooms, and it’s a fun, flexible platform. I’m sad that it’s not more open or federated, but neither was Twitter and still many of us here had a lot of fun on that platform, in the early days (when we bent it to our will and made it become what we needed).
The main thing that I would want to see happen on the TWiT Discord is for the channels to be evolving and refining more often. Perhaps a more dialed-in setup would be to pair down topic channels into one primary topic channel where threads are encouraged to be created instead - so the channels provides a bird’s eye view, and the threads are where you can zoom in. Maybe that “jumping off” channel is what’s needed to spur engagement. Or maybe it’s a terrible idea. But the idea is to be aware of all the features and creative ways to use them, and then utilize them in an evolving fashion, with energy.
It was me who suggested to Leo the idea of a different channel for each show and make sure that the current (live) show is easy to get to by placing it in a “live” category. I still think that’s the right approach, but when I proposed that, in my mind, the idea was that it would extend the “consciousness” of each show beyond its live period, by fostering “mini communities” of each show in their own channels - where perhaps the hosts participate throughout the week as they drop in their in-progress show notes or links or PDFs. (Discord has a good search feature that could recall them later. eg. “from:user has:link” or “from:user has:file”.) Last I was in there, the show channels hadn’t realized this potential, but I think it’s there.
I also think a voice channel where the broadcast audio is piped in but people are allowed and encouraged to speak over and around it, would be a worthwhile experiment to see if people enjoyed it. You’d still have the text channels for typing along with the show, but the concept of voice talking with your friends while watching TWiT together is an interesting one to me.
Finally, I think Twit’s Discord has a potential to pull in listener demographics that advertisers like, but it needs to be introduced to the community as a destination, not a feature. In other words, instead of people getting home and turning on Twit or opening their podcast app, they should want to open Discord (where there’s also TWiT - either live, or with Twit On Demand links ready to go in their own channel) because there’s almost always something happening in the Twit Discord server. A team of active power-users/moderators would be key here. There are many engaging online activities that can build a community that likes to hang out together. Gaming is an obvious choice (including casual gaming with free games), but there are others too.
. I agree that it would take a more robust push to move the Discord to the next phase of its evolution and take on more roles for the community. I think that effort is somewhat hobbled by the fact that it is only for Club TWiT members, and there is this split between the Discord and the forum.