Why is this forum being abandoned for discord threads?

[LeoCop 90]

Over the last weeks/months, i noticed that many threads here are becoming almost dead because everyone seems to be posting on discord.
While i recognize the appeal of being able to talk directly with people and receive immediate answers, i think this is a very very bad change. Discord cannot replace a forum in any way, because a forum is basically a huge collection of informations and knowledge that is available to everyone.
Years ago, when i first picked up some decks i still play (goblins, elves, painter) i went to the threads and read hundreds of pages before actually starting to play. This may seem a waste of time, but really it was a source of knowledge that cannot be substituted in any way, since i learnt about weird card choices, gameplay scenarios, sideboarding, etc. from the perspective of a lot of different people.
Now imagine someone wants to start to play legacy in the next years. While the threads here might still be updated, very few people will actually post in them and a lot of knowledge will get wasted. People will go to discord and ask questions, but they'll never be able to get a deep, detailed analysis of a deck like the one provided by years of posting in a forum.
So this is just a rant that maybe doesn't have a reason to exist, but i jut wanted to let you know that i think discord is bullshit compared to this forum

[non-inflammable]

So this is just a rant that maybe doesn't have a reason to exist, but i jut wanted to let you know that i think discord is bullshit compared to this forum

right there with you brother. i'm always reading threads just to stay current and it seems there is less to read :frown:

[H]

right there with you brother. i'm always reading threads just to stay current and it seems there is less to read :frown:

It only dies if we let it. Honestly, it might be for the best, if we can keep "good" posters here, who want long-form, thought out content, rather than instant gratification seeking, low attention span types.

[Cave]

It has something to do with book culture vs internet culture I think. Forums are a relatively slow tool to communicate: it takes some time to write a well thought post, and it takes time for others to answer. While TheSource's moderators are applying netiquette in a relatively loose and friendly way (I was in forums where mods used to lock threads with a deck list and just one paragraph of content by writing aggressive stuff like "List+insufficient comments=locked thread. Try again") it seems to me that the point is still valid. Navigating a thread is like going through a book that contains the amount of information that is the sum of all the knowledge that every poster put into that specific topic. If you need some specific information it can be tough. I'm kind of a bookworm and I don't mind reading a whole thread looking for that 1-1/2 year outdated sideboard guide for Eldrazi Stompy, researching for old ideas to see if I can get something from them. However, a lot of people can't be bothered to do so.
On the other hand, we have accessibility: you get invited to discord, enter the general channel, find a good player, type "hey bro, sorry if I bother you, what's your sideboard like?", and you get the information. It's not a mistery that books are selling less and internet videos are becoming the source of knowledge of choice for many people. Although perhaps not so deep, it's easier and faster.

That, and, well, sometimes the quality of posts in here makes me wonder why the reality of this Universe doesn't allow the possibility of unseeing things.

[pettdan]

I also find it a bit sad that so much discussion is moving onto Discord, I expected it to be an overreaction due to the allure of the novelty and that posters will return here for more quality content and in-depth discussion eventually. But that remains to be seen. I don't think Discord has a good search function, and that alone seems like a huge disadvantage, on the other hand you can have subthreads which makes discussion easier. And it's a more social interaction with better user interface, but this is probably obvious.

I think a main attraction of Discord is that your information is less available to everyone. If you spend a lot of time and effort polishing your strategies, you may not want them to be widespread knowledge before you even got to try them yourself. This may seem insignificant but I find people admitting to this every now and then in various forms.

[mistercakes]

i like the forums. discord is better for creating more of a friendship between users. forums are better for the content.

[JackaBo]

I agree and I find the discord exodus very sad

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Discord servers allow for more contoured discussion. You can have an area for discussing decklists, discussing the decks place in the meta, and one for matchups. It’s also much easier to share content, and more importantly, goof off on when you’re supposed to be working (incidentally..)

[haganbmj]

Discord allows for more stupid discussion.
People spend less time thinking about their ideas before they write them.

It's also harder to find if you aren't already a member.
I sometimes read random deck threads, doesn't mean I want to join some chat group for them.

[Dice_Box]

I think it's the way things are likely to shake out over time. The reason Legacy has a dedicated forum and Modern does not is, in my view, because Modern rose in the time of Facebook. Legacy has managed to hold on to some of the old ways purely on the back of the older player base, but it won't last like that forever.

Discord is really well layed out if you want to put the effort into making it work. I have a Table top RPG going on Discord that has a channel for everyone's Characters, NPC's, off topic, on topic and Game. Once that would have been a single Skype thread and a mess.

It's that kind of flexibility that changes things. It's easy to access, easy to understand and grants almost instant answers to what might have been a single sentance question here. That as well as having options to joke about times at the pub, swap songs or even talk about your kids with others who you come to see as friends is nice.

[kombatkiwi]

I like forums as a repository for significant nuggets of information, e.g.
- Primers, Matchup Guides etc
- Tournament Reports
- Decklist references / Links to mtggoldfish etc
I find Discord is inherently bad at archiving these because it records information in one continuous stream rather than discrete pages

Forums are also a good place to start a discussion on a topic that doesn't have an established following yet, e.g. a new deck brew. (But maybe there are general format discord servers where this kind of thing is encouraged? not sure).

Forums offering an easy-to-access record of all discussion in a format that is (mostly) unadulterated by spam is kind of nice, but I think mostly as a kind of historical curiosity. Chugging through pages and pages of old threads has some value but I don't think is really the best use of anyone's time if the goal is to learn a deck. (People should just playtest and try to make more effort in keeping the primers up to date).

I also didn't initially like the idea of discord but I have been using it more than forums since I installed it. The messenger-style app is more conducive to live discussions and there is much more of a community feel.

Sometimes what I do is if I want to make a longer post I do it in a forum and then link to it in the discord which seems to combine the best aspects of both.
I don't think the average intelligence of discord users is considerably different to any other medium (it's mostly the same people anyway).

It's also worth considering that the apparent lack of posts on the source could simply coincide with a general dip in popularity of legacy (due to card prices or format stagnation or whatever reason). A lot of the discord servers for popular decks (e.g. Death's Shadow) are also fairly empty

[thecrav]

I'm only in one Discord and the advantage Discord has over The Source is that the Discord mods will ban you for asking a question that's answered in the FAQ.

[ThomasDowd]

I'm only in one Discord and the advantage Discord has over The Source is that the Discord mods will ban you for asking a question that's answered in the FAQ.


That sounds tight. That is also on a per discord basis though so ymmv. Some have no pins so the same question is asked frequently or are not organized at all so its just an eternal chat log, it really depends on admins and who is running it for sanity/ structure. Pin/ resources channel IME does not prevent having to say "go read the FAQ" or " did you read the FAQ"to every jobber who picks up the deck/ thing/ whatever. "i'm new to X tell me how to do the thing" is pretty fucking annoying. maybe I'm just old and cranky that people want shit fed to them when they can literally just google search the thing and spend 20 minutes reading.

I like discord for low friction engagement and shortening the loop on peoples experiments, getting an idea on meta/ matchups with more data or peoples first hand experience helps in the now (getting a fish). Also being slick on mobile helps kill dead time. I prefer forums for hopefully well presented information with detail and searchablility. Forums on a mobile browser is pretty rough, but still good. Forums IMO are better at fully understanding an archetype/ thing such that you need less technology and can then fish for yourself, ideally.

The main tradeoffs i see:

Discord:low quality info, fast, spammy and off topic, temporary, low friction to engage, high friction to consume.
Forums: hopefully high quality info, slower, focused, depth, high friction to engage, low friction to consume.

I am on discords to get ideas on the decks i play but i still prefer the depth of book style knowledge of forums

Also echoing Cave's opinion, preferring book style to video style and going deep on old ideas to find the nugget of maybe something that does a thing.

[BooleanLobster]

A human information system often needs to be split into a fast, responsive section and slow, thorough section. But since people favor immediate gratification, the slow section ends up both unused and starved of content. For the system to work over the long term, the fast section needs to summarize and navigate content from the slow section, and the slow section needs to aggregate and curate info from the fast section. Solutions to actually do that are... uncommon.

See:
- Chatrooms versus Forums
- Personal ToDo list versus Ticketing System
- Helpdesk versus F.A.Q.
- Mailing lists versus Wikis

Wikipedia is wildly successful because it solved this. It put the slow, thorough, section as the first thing that newcomers encounter and navigate through. Then each page has a faster moving discussion page. The content from that is collected, filtered, and put back into the article. The community is diligent about that because the site design makes it really easy. The quick edit/review cycle encourages write-first;refine-later. And most of the newbie questions are handled by the article before people ever find the discussion pages, so the remainder is higher quality.

I'm curious if anyone has other successful examples of this, or instructive failures.

[CptHaddock]

It's just quicker to get answers when you're talking to a group via some kind of chat instead of posting on the forums and waiting for someone to respond. Maybe this is because of less the source usage in general but i've noticed a lot less of the "what do you think about this stock list?" type posts.

I think it works really well where there are a group of dedicated players who are good at their respective archetypes e.g. miracles, turbo depths/lands and rug. It's pretty bad when they don't. I had to leave the stoneblade discord because it is full of the dumbest people I have ever interacted with on the internet. So shoutout to the person who said that jitte didn't do anything so they cut it and also the person who thinks that TNN is uninteractive so they don't play it and actively convince other people not to play it.

[8bit9mm]

So shoutout to the person who said that jitte didn't do anything so they cut it and also the person who thinks that TNN is uninteractive so they don't play it and actively convince other people not to play it.

Wha...what did I just read?

Anyways, I don't think the source is necessarily dying. There is still plenty of discussion here; in depth-experienced discussion.
I honestly think that the advent of deck-dedicated Discord channels isn't a bad thing either.
I participate in quite a few Discord servers, but I am constantly sending people to The Source for information.
The Source is the home base for legacy information and discussion. Discord is mainly supplemental.

[twndomn]

The Source is Changing, not Dying.

The endless emoji-like intuitive back and forth has moved to discord, which is more suited for immediate conversation.

The Source has now become long paragraph, slower paced, deliberation. Due to this new nature, not everyone has the time to write that much on Magic, hence the overall number of posts and responses has gone down. Like cryptocurrency, I don't think a website would actually die as long as it has the money to renew its domain.

[Kap'n Cook]

A lot of the old posters are not really playing the game much anymore it seems. I'm wondering if we have daily visits data and how hard of a spike it took after Nedleeds got banned and we weren't treated to daily B/R rants and sick posts in the pimp thread

[Humphrey]

im not sure you only can blame discord that much. legacy slowly but surely goes the way of vintage. less and less new players come to the format and the insane rise of card price doesnt help it. in my area legacy have always been very niche and its basically dead for years now.

that said, i also joined the discord of my petdeck and while its fun to have some discussions here and there basically the lists and card choices are running in circles. reading hundres of pages is something i usually never do, unless im really bored and most of the information arent really enlightning, so yeah. less redundancy, but basically the same amount of information is fine for me. in the end the playerbase usually looks up the most succesful decklists anyway and for the smaller questions discord is just fine.

ts and other forums are still great for more general topics

[Phoenix Ignition]

For me it's the complete lack of innovation available in the format. I used to come here all the time, I loved making the terrible (but successful for a while) Zur the Enchanter deck and debating choices for Merfolk. Back then so many decks were viable and single cards could create awesome synergies enabling other formerly useless cards. Now you can't play useless cards, so viable decks have narrowed to blue shell + other cards that are good on their own, Chalice decks, or ignore-you-combo (also comes in flavor ignore-you-but-I-also-have-blue-combo).

[Megadeus]

For me it's the complete lack of innovation available in the format. I used to come here all the time, I loved making the terrible (but successful for a while) Zur the Enchanter deck and debating choices for Merfolk. Back then so many decks were viable and single cards could create awesome synergies enabling other formerly useless cards. Now you can't play useless cards, so viable decks have narrowed to blue shell + other cards that are good on their own, Chalice decks, or ignore-you-combo (also comes in flavor ignore-you-but-I-also-have-blue-combo).

Agreed. Hyper efficiency of fair decks and raw power of combo decks (basically Griselbrand) has pushed out the interesting synergy based strategies. I do think Griselbrand ban could help this a bit as resolving a show and tell or reanimate no longer is just GG ninety percent of the time

[bruizar]

For me it's the complete lack of innovation available in the format. I used to come here all the time, I loved making the terrible (but successful for a while) Zur the Enchanter deck and debating choices for Merfolk. Back then so many decks were viable and single cards could create awesome synergies enabling other formerly useless cards. Now you can't play useless cards, so viable decks have narrowed to blue shell + other cards that are good on their own, Chalice decks, or ignore-you-combo (also comes in flavor ignore-you-but-I-also-have-blue-combo).

This is exactly what has caused the stalemate in vintage when the format became:

Blue - I decide whether you get to play magic
Shops - You don't play magic
Dredge - I was never playing Magic to begin with

[pettdan]

I should re-read the whole thread before posting, but I'll save that for later.. I think right now we can't complain about the lack of innovation in the format, the format is bubbling.. I think actually the main problem with this forum is that there is no structure, that I'm aware of, to create subthreads within a thread. For example the Nic Fit thread would benefit immensely from having a shared thread and separate subthreads. Creating separate threads for all types of Nic Fit would, I believe, fragmentize the discussion too much.. There would be hundreds of new threads from all decks multiplying their threads. I still think the Source is the best place to publish interesting information and discuss it, because it's one place where you find all of relevance, all views are treated equally (I imagine upvoting and downvoting can kill a discussion by removing controversial views), and information does not get lost over time. How am I going to find a tournament report I made five years ago on Discord? I don't see that happening, at least not with my current Discord skills.

[itslarryyo]

Ugh no way
I used to frequent a wh40k board that did that. What ended up happening was a million threads with 1 or 2 posts each in them. It was a cluttered mess and killed any discussion as everything got so separated, people only looked at their specific thread, and a lot of 'outsife the box ideas were lost.
I'll sit and read a few pages of s thread, I'm not going to click between dozens of threads with 1 reply each that are super similar but have a slight difference.
It's not like there are thousands of new posts here everyday to keep organized, most decks only get a few added messages a day.
Plus it makes the board look even more dead with so many almost empty threads.
Didn't themanadrain do something like that for a bit a few years ago?

[pettdan]

It seems like you're agreeing with what I said, having separate threads is not good. Having sub threads is a different option, there would still be a main thread where discussion most likely would continue similarly to now.

Either way, we're not in a position to have any of these changes.. Thought I'd add the obvious.

[forestfold]

While i recognize the appeal of being able to talk directly with people and receive immediate answers, i think this is a very very bad change. Discord cannot replace a forum in any way, because a forum is basically a huge collection of informations and knowledge that is available to everyone.

This is why I am a little sad, but ultimately not bothered by the lessening of activity. I think there is enough action and necessity for the forums to exist, and while I wish there was a little more discussion going on I think the important stuff is being laid down here. I think discords have their place, but it is more about community than knowledge. I can't use discord at work, and I rarely have the free time to do that stuff at home so I am a little biased perhaps, but it is what it is.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Oh man, content medium chat gets banned from the podcast thread and then this thread gets bumped? This is some serious Fault of Amigara level of trolling.