Reducing Bloat on Discord
By Rach
When asked what makes a good Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram said it was learning to say no. This has allowed Instagram to say no to features that bloat it, say no to aspects that would take away from its core features and allow them to increase the quality of the features there already. This has allowed Instagram to beat both Twitter and Snapchat by most measures. In Europeia, this question of saying no and keeping things simple has not always been applied as consistently.
On Discord, channels continue to be created while disused ones are not deleted. This has led to a steady increase in the amount of channels on the discord. For people who are on many of the Europeian channels and who are on many servers, this makes it increasingly difficult to always pay attention to the right channels. This is especially difficult for our more casual members. In large part, this is also exasperated by the limitations of Discord itself currently and our own reluctance to delete channels.
In recent months, the concept of ‘institutional memory’ has led to an increased reluctance to delete any information on Discord. Institutional memory is the idea that institutions have a shared amount of facts, experience, ideas and knowledge. The term is used to increase awareness that an institution should continue to pass down these concepts and maintain them. Thus, there are concerns that by deleting discord channels that we are damaging the institutional memory.
Yet, if we are to maintain institutional memory it is not enough to simply not delete information. Rather it is important to be able to effectively share these aspects of institutional memory. Having an archived channel with some important discussions that a select few in the region can find and read is not an effective educational tool. This is not good practice when it comes to preserving and pushing for increased institutional memory.
Instead it is the worst of both worlds. We are not truly preserving institutional memory because so few can effectively utilize these sources and we are doing this at the expense of bloating the number of channels we have. This is a problem particularly because of the limitations of Discord. On the forums, we could effectively hide or archive old forums. But on Discord channels remain on the front page unless made hidden by users. This is also not generally effective as it could mean that useful channels are ignored and that access to valuable information is even more limited.
The idea of maintaining these channels like #Euro10 for nuggets of valuable information when most of #Euro10s contents are general normal conversations seems odd. Particularly when an easy albeit time consuming solution would be to copy the history of the channel and post it in a topic. This could provide a good exercise by those convinced that the information within these channels is essential. It would also allow us to delete unused channels and maintain a more effective server.
There are other aspects of general direction and bloat that have been the result of not having a strong overarching vision for the Europeian Discord. Instead we have allowed a more organic process to take place while prohibiting pruning. A good example of this is how the previously first three channels of the Discord were #eurochat, #spam, #debate & #gaming. It seems odd that there is a #gaming channel when the discussions in that channel could be had in #eurochat or #spam. Additionally, it is even more odd when one considers that if there is to be a #gaming channel when other sort of speciality channels could be added. Channels like #music & #film seem to belong just as much as a #gaming.
After a discussion with r3n regarding this, the channels were re-ordered so that #gaming and #debate are no longer near the top. This is certain to make the channels less used and yet they still take up space. So we are discouraging their use while allowing them to still take up space making them both less useful while maintaining the same amount of space. There should be a sharp vision in terms of our Discord server to make it as easy to access and use for our players as possible. When our #worldassembly channel is low on the list, that makes a difference for people wanting to use that channel. When we have many fragmented channels, it makes a difference to the community and newcomers who want to use it.
The channels we have on Discord should be chosen with the users in mind and be contain channels that are both as effective and efficient as possible. It is not enough to simply re-order the channels. There should be an effort to condense the list of channels so that we have a single community of users rather than one where various people are only on specific channels because they have had to hide channels due to the bloat. Having a highly effective server would allow us to better serve our current and future members of our community.
