Despite the name, this thread isn't (just) a boomer complaint about "le evil discord killing rp."
I'd say it is undeniable that a large chunk of writers/prospective writers have left traditional forums and migrated to Discord servers (Case in point: a search for "Jujutsu Kaisen forum rp" has three relevant results, one of which never opened, one died in 2021, and the last died in 2022. A search for Jujutsu Kaisen rp on Disboard shows ~96 servers. I assume some are dead, some in other languages, but the point stands.) but aside from that, which you could argue is a matter of personal taste for platform, there's a bigger problem.
It isn't just roleplay forums which have moved to Discord. General purpose forums have also moved in massive numbers. So have official forums: for instance, Amazon's MMO New World had a thriving forum.
The community as a whole was forcefully moved to Discord and posting on the forums was disabled as a "sunsetting measure" to ensure compliance.
The issue I want to illustrate with this is archivability. Let's say you've created a new character in the game and have a specific question about something - say, about how a particular ability functions. On a forum, it would be a simple matter to search for your problem and find a topic on it - or if it didn't exist, create one and get helpful answers. Going forward, people with the same issue could easily find the solution via the forum or even with a google search.
Now with the move to Discord if you had that same question, you'd have to: A. Create a Discord account. B. Hope the Discord invite still functions. C. Hope you can find something relevant buried in the Discord using an obtuse search system. D. When you can't, ask it and hope you don't get buried in an avalanche of irreverent one-liners and pseudo-tweets.
You've all used Discord servers, I'm sure - no doubt you can corroborate that most of the time, they're chatboxes. Which is fine, because in our hobby that's why we even use them. But topics get repeated ad nauseam (Which faction should I join? - Mine! Well x is popping off lately - repeated dozens of time over a site's life.) rather than having a single, dedicated thread with full-length helpful answers that can be easily referred to again and again. (Not to say OOC posts were always full-length or helpful.)
The reasons for this trend are probably numerous. For large companies, etc. I imagine part of it is that Discord servers are free. But the results are disastrous. This isn't even mentioning the possibility of Discord servers being deleted, or being rendered akin to by expired invites. All that information, gone. More pertinently, all those threads. Gone. Years of writing, potentially, vanished if you didn't save copies.
tldr; Discord has killed (all, not just rp) forums as a medium. Going forward, all the information in those servers will not be safely stored or easily (publicly) accessible.
What are your thoughts?
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