Musings on Discord

Love:
- Acts as an external brain for the combined Manifold core team + community
  - Makes understanding our teammates and users much, much easier
- Helps our power users get to know us as people and buy in to a shared culture
- Counterfactually responsible for Manifold’s existence (I first met my cofounder James through Discord!)
Hate:
- Quite distracting, productivity drain
- More writing on Discord means less writing on Manifold itself
  - Especially among the core team & power users (who is precisely Discord’s most active userbase)
- Rewards fast engagement over thoughtful, persistent content
  - Also rewards people who have lots of time to spare
- Badly indexed, not googleable, hard to search through history
- Internet anonymity culture instead of real names

Discord defaults open, Slack defaults closed
Discord : Rationality :: Slack : EA
Discord has mostly superior product offerings for a large community of users
- Events, Stages, role-based permissions, etc
Discord has more of a chill, gamer vibe vs Slack, which angles for the enterprise
Slack has more integrations with business-y things (eg with Airtable), to my annoyance

To get a new server off the ground, you need a mix of:
- leading by example (aka posting a bunch in the way that you want others to post)
- some attempts at moderation to facilitate good conversations
- directing more activity at the site (for example, Manifold discord started with me + James + Stephen chatting there. And then we directed people there for bug reports, etc)
#kudos channel — harness people’s dopamine addiction for good, by creating a space to quickly shout out nice things
Channels where anyone can post but only some subset can read
- My theory is that very little content needs to be private, but channels with few members are important for
- I’ve experimented with this a few times, eg #grantmakers-corner in Manifund and the current #trustworthyish channel on Manifold
#austins-field-notes channel — a place for one person to write random musings
- this one is more experimental, but Keri and Saul swear by it and it lowers the barrier to musing about random things
  - I think a few startups adopt this as a best practice (similar to 1:1s)
- I worry this will end up competing against Notion as the place for me to leave quick thoughts
  - I guess my ideal platform is a Discord/Notion hybrid…

I might be on the hook for too many of these at the moment :P
- Alternatively: “when should I kill a discord server?