I actually kind of like that the Discord doesn’t have any cred attached to it right now.
Our Discord server functions differently from our Discourse server. Discord is real-time and spontaneous, with interactions on the order of seconds. Discourse posts invite more thought: discussions happen on the order of hours to days at minimum, as people’s thoughts percolate.
I just sent a message in Discord that contained only the word “hi”, and followed it up with a message “what’s up?”. These aren’t exactly interactions that invite a rich structure of cred.
This isn’t to say that valuable and substantive interactions don’t come out of the Discord. They certainly can! In such cases, maybe the participants should create a “real artifact” on Discourse, anyway. Doing so:
- …is itself an act of curation, signaling, “I think that this content is important enough that other people may be interested in it.”
- …provides a venue for others to contribute to the discussion in a more structured form (e.g., with “quote reply” features, cross-linking, etc.).
- …makes the content easily searchable and accessible even to people who aren’t logged in or don’t have a Discord account.
- …encourages the post author to clean up and clarify the content, if necessary.
Of course, once it’s in Discourse, it’ll also be in scope for our normal Discourse cred.
There’s also a totally separate sense in which it’s nice to have a
“cred-free zone”: it creates an environment without any weird
transactional dynamics. I can freely use a :+1: reaction to indicate
that I agree with a comment, or to vote in an ad hoc poll, or to simply
convey that I’ve seen the message and don’t have anything to add,
without having to think too much about what exactly I mean and what the
ramifications of this are. I try not to give too much thought to these
things, anyway, but they’re always there to some degree—and I know that
others have felt this, too.
And, finally, a new plugin means new infrastructure: fetching APIs, persistence layer, graph generation, weight definitions, tests. That’s a serious amount of effort. I would want to be convinced that we’re gaining something valuable by taking this on.
What do you think?