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 vs Slack
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
Using your chat system well
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…
When to spin up a new Discord server?
I might be on the hook for too many of these at the moment :P
Alternatively: “when should I kill a discord server?