Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
It’s not easier, just faster, and that’s only if someone who can answer your question happens to be on at the same time you are. Asynchronous communication does not require that, and has the added bonus of keeping the solution easily available for others to find by themselves rather than taking up someone’s time. So it is far more efficient. If you can’t find the answer to your problem after trying and genuinely need a solution right away, that is what live support is for.
And I think that a big part of why so many have moved their support to discord is the long standing (and annoying) habit of people trying to use only one tool for everything. Sure, you can use a hammer on a screw, but it’s not a good idea.
“Asynchronous communication has the added bonus of keeping the solution easily available” no, that’s not a feature of asynchronous communication in the slightest.
Forums can and do go down or get deleted, there’s nothing inherent to it that makes it stay any longer then discord messages.
I’ll keep banging this drum for those who still don’t get it, the problem is DISOVERABILITY. Discord does not make conversations in their version of forums or threads accessible to outside users and that is actually where it goes wrong. Nothing about real time discussion limits indexability its simply how discord decided to go and to your point, people want everything in one place so they use the convenience provided by discord.
You’re comparing apples to vegetables here. Sure, forums can go down, but not all of them do. Take Reddit, it’s been around a long time and many people use it for troubleshooting. As for discoverability, a lot of the time when I do a web search for a problem, it points to one or more discussions on Reddit. And that’s just one example.
I’m clearly talking about discord with the discovery point, and that is exactly what I’m saying lmao.
Also a bit of a stretch to call reddit a forum, it is similar but not the same, and we’ve already seen how reddit being a centralized service is a bad thing.