Discord has become increasingly popular in recent years. Originally created as a chat service for online games, it has recently grown in prominence as a general community setup for gaming communities, with numerous fandoms establishing a "home" on it.
As many communities use Discord as an alternative to forums and Reddit, there has been a demand for some changes to improve user experience.
Recognizing the need to upscale the platform, Discord is now rolling out some tests to introduce new features that will address long-requested functionalities.
What Are The New Features
According to Tech Crunch, the first new feature will introduce forum-like channels that can be used as a hub to make conversations more organized. Since Google has no access to communities at all, some users find it difficult to find information about a topic online.
Although Discord technically has a search feature that users can use to search about a topic, it is not easy to look for what has been posted before.
For example, when searching for some keywords, there is a possibility that a lot of posts would show up, which will then cause the user to go through the whole list.
Problem is, the list can be as long as 60 posts, especially if the community is big.
However, the problem does not end there. The original source of what users are searching is sometimes not in the form of text. Instead, they were from other sources like posts on a social media site (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) or a YouTube video.
This difficult part of Discord is what is being improved through this new feature.
Further, a homepage-style feature is also being tested. Through this, users will have an overview of the timely content that is relevant to the community they are in.
Lastly, Discord is also testing a new automated tool for moderation. This will help the platform in terms of moderation. Although there were not many details disclosed, it is known that mod bots on Discord automate the process of welcoming new users, scanning for inappropriate behavior, and even kicking people out if they break the rules.
How These Features Will Impact Discord Communities
As a voice and text chat tool for gamers, growth is something that can be permanently associated with Discord. As such, given the current features it has, the new features can offer so much improvement for the platform.
Considering how large communities in Discord are, the forum feature, when launched, will be of great help to keep conversations organized.
Users can just go to such forums to look up particular topics that they want to revisit instead of having to search for them and go through long lists.
For the time being, the experimental functionalities are only available in a closed beta, with Discord seeking the help of some large servers to test them out. Discord will be looking at how these new tools can fulfill the demands of different servers.
