I have been looking into articles for the upcoming Community Norms – Concept version paper, and one of the communities I have been looking into is Discord, although is a hobby focused service, and throughout it’s history has been a more chat service, but through time has evolved (sorry, shameless Pokemon reference!) to include more gaming topics and introduce more of a community aspect. What is interesting is that a discord “channel” starts from the top-up of a specific influencer or gamer, and from there the community spreads with the effort from each person to grow the community. The influencer starts the discord community, and through the main channel, the community can branch out through sub-channels. It’s similar to Reddit in there is the main channel for the individual game that starts the discord community, and then from there they can create a variety of sub-channels that can range in topics – some specific to a certain game, to others such as channels about pets, general conversations, literature, etc, to help stimulate the community. For researching the strengths and weaknesses of different Web 2.0 tools for promoting learning and performance, Discord I will admit is a more hobby focused service as I mentioned, I found this a good thought exercise to examine details of various sites to determine communities, how to create and sustain one. In this instance, the root Discord channel of an influencer starts the channel, invites known members to join, and then create and branch out more to additional sub-channels. It’s important to note that Discord channels are more private in nature, locked behind an invitation code that one has to seek out to join if they know the person’s name. YouTubers for instance often list their Discord links in the descriptions of their videos to act as an additional level of privacy to the public to find a Discord community.
Let me know if anyone has any questions! I’m curious to see
what everyone thinks, and I am curious to read more blogs about various
communities.
I've tried Discord and started to follow DesignGost (https://www.designgost.com/) which is a group of people that focus on visual design and it's in Turkish. I liked the way they identify people based on their expertise. They used different types of fruits to identify different roles. For instance, strawberry represents 3D artist, kiwi represents Product Designer, apple represents Graphic Designer, etc.
ReplyDeleteMost of the channels are closed initially and one needs to engage in certain activities to access those channels. Similarly, there're certain actions that one needs to perform to be able to access some of the resources. Also, they organize some events where they invite established designers and share their experiences. I think they also have a podcast. I recognized that they also had a Twitter account and started to follow it on Twitter which certainly influenced my decisions of not spending time on Discord anymore but I can see how it may facilitate group processes and may empower learners as well as support their learning needs.
I think we'll try Discord in this class in future weeks! Maybe we can engage in some Discord challenge, ha? :)