Copying and pasting some random thoughts I just posted onto Discord:
1st Nothing Launched Forums
2nd Nothing scrapped Forums
3rd Nothing Launched Discord
4th Nothing Re-Launched Forums
5th Rinse & Repeat
so it’s maybe kinda tricky - perhaps a better question might be are users more mobile and about or more stationary at home. I mean that as Discord, on a phone, fits the mobile up and about style.
You get notifications baked, in, chat’s and engagement like here, the dot channels for example. Forums has value, especially with long form content such as articles since, it’s probably easier to write that on a computer, when not mobile. I think both can co-exist but there needs to be a synergy - which has been lacking recently. Lots of ‘info’ seems to be posted onto the forums by community and neglected to be cross posted here (Discord) via announcements, etc or some other simple automatic feed. Then atleast, people on discord can be like oh hey, let me check that out. The new widget seems a good start in that direction - but it’s limited too in a way.
Perhaps Nothing needs to be more daring again - Nothing was content in shutting the forums 100% - so why not be content in calling time on Discord - say the company and community have outgrown etc then put all the energy and time in developing the forums better. it’s an interesting one for sure
Also - the workshops (liked those) were a great engageing way for the community to interact with Nothing - those have dried up since the move to the longer form content on the forums. Perhaps it’s in aid of better marketing - as in a way Discord acts as a walled garden around the content - unlike the forums where it’s public and can be indexed by Google and more readily shared.
Now - there is also an argument in scrapping Discord purely because it’s a 3rd party - and does a company want to beholden to a 3rd party? Will they get support when things go wrong? How much control do they have, etc? The forums is technically a 3rd party too so perhaps that argument is moot - although I suspect there is probably more control in the forums than discord as it’s most likely open source or paid deploy it and run it source.
If both were kept then they need to be able to have some of the benefits of both perhaps or a clear and communicated line on what each is for. The black dots and red dot channels for example, there is Nothing (hoho) like this on the forums? No dot integration to offer anything extra or special. (ok granted the whole dots NFT is a nother conversation in itself cause that’s a pretty dead duck lately too)
RE: The workshops - they themselves were what was interesting rather the medium in which they were presented. Perhaps they could be done in some other way rather than on Discord if the company want’s to ween off Discord. Maybe not the same but live stream perhaps from YouTube or IG or something. X tbh would serve that function - but again that doesn’t answer the fundamental question - to Discord or Not to Discord? Let’s make a definitive to that first before we can truly move on
