DRMacIver's Notebook
Invitations and exclusions
Invitations and exclusions
There’s a thing that I do in the design of my discord server that to me seems just absolutely blindingly obviously the correct way to do it, and is also directly the opposite of how everyone else does it, in a way that very obviously causes problems.
It’s this: A channel is an invitation to start a conversation about a subject, not a place where only that subject is appropriate.
For example, we’ve got the #games channel. This is a place where you are invited to talk about games. Sometimes it’s also a place where we talk about philosophy, or programming, or parenting… but it’s mostly about games. Looking at the #games channel I don’t really see much that isn’t about games recently, and that’s fine too.
There is one very big consequence of this approach: We almost never have to have talk about something being off-topic and request moving it to a different channel.There are a few cases where we do that, but it’s always because of more specific rules than a general “stay on topic” category. During the height of the pandemic, we tried to uh quarantine pandemic chat to #pandemic, and the owner of a feed can always ask for conversations to be moved elsewhere. This removes a constant source of background anxiety about staying on topic, and also it allows for many conversations to occur that otherwise would be stifled.
The reason #games is a place to talk about anything isn’t because people come to #games to talk about anything. It would be weird to just randomly post a picture of your lunch in #games, because that’s not how you start a conversation about #games. We don’t police that, it’s just not a thing that people do because why would they? But if, for example, you were talking about games you play with your kid, and it branched into a more general conversation about parenting, that would be absolutely fine, and the conversation could continue to be about parenting for as long as you wanted it to, without any sense that you were doing something wrong.
Another consequence of this approach is it changes when channels are created. In the traditional approach, you create channels when volume on a particular topic gets too high, and you want a place for it to go,We do occasionally do this of course. We created #dubious-ontologies when sandwich discourse took over #chatter for the third day running, and we branched off #slay-the-spire from #games because Slay the Spire conversation was dominating too much and people wanted a space where they could talk about games despite not being interested in Slay the Spire. while on my discord I create channels when there’s a particular topic I want to encourage more conversation about (or when someone else suggests similar) and creating a channel for it invites that conversation.
On top of that… This system obviously works better on a bunch of specific practical factors, but to me the most important part of it is that it removes a general background level of… cop behaviour from the discord. In places where there’s a big focus on staying on topic, it feels like everyone is constantly policing other people using a channel wrong, and everyone is constantly worried that they might be using a channel wrong, and this creates a pervasive background of low-grade suspicion and anxiety that I don’t think is good for anyone, and in general I really recommend designing systems that don’t make everyone lightly miserable.