đđȘ Discord and the boon of private social networks
Itâs larger than ever on the strength of small groups
| 5 | 4 |
đ Better Know A Concept: Calm Technology
đ Read an excerpt of Sara Hendrenâs New_ Public Magazine article
When we talk about âsocial media,â weâre often talking about the huge platformsâpublic networks where anything can go viral and meaningful context is wafer thin or nonexistent. But there can be unexpected virtue in using private social networks. New_ Public contributing editor Sara Hendren, who is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor, explores this in âCare is not an infinite scroll,â her article for New_ Public Magazine, excerpted below. Sara explains how finding a âsimpler, more intimateâ private alternative to Instagram yielded unexpected benefits. I think sheâs on to something, and Iâd like to consider another platform that gets comparatively little attention, but is blazing a path that deserves examination: Discord.
If youâve never used it, Discord looks and works very similarly to Slack, with groups organized into âserversâ and text-based discussion channels organized by topic. There is also functionality for video and audio chat. Though created in 2015 largely for online gamers, different groups have migrated to it over time, including influencers, creators, fanfic writers, artists, and fringe communities like white supremacists and cyber criminals. Of course, because Discord is private, itâs hard to know exactly how much extremism, crime and harassment is taking place on its servers.
The platform has put more resources into moderation, and has since upped its transparency and moderator certification efforts. Meanwhile, the pandemic arrived, and Discord rebranded away from gamingâgaining a reputation as an ad-free, chat-based private venue to build and grow friendships, adding tens of millions of users last year.
Discord now has 150 million monthly users, nearly triple their user base in 2019. Remarkably, according to CEO Jason Citron, âMost people on Discord are in invite-only servers that have less than 30 people in them.â Discordâs explosive growth has been fueled by millions of small, private networks, including several I belong to.
Early on in the pandemic, my wife had the foresight to set up a Discord server for our local friend group here in DC. I donât use notifications, or follow every channel religiously, and my wife tends to ignore my beloved âplantsâ channel. If I miss a few days it's easy to catch up on everything in a few minutes. But it has been an incredible lifeline through these volatile years. Whether as a place to rant about work (never me, boss đ), track Covid news, or plan Zoom happy hours, the server allowed us to feel close and connected when we didnât feel safe being physically near each other. Weâve even had a friend move across the country, and sheâs been able to stay connected as much as she likes. As Sara writes in her piece:
I find the social bindery of more frequent interaction with a smaller set of peopleâthe updates on the earrings they chose, or the âpostâ-Covid vacation planned and abandoned or, yes, the things their kids sayâearns us both an open line of communication for getting through the big challenges together.
Often at New_ Public, we go back to Dr. Elinor Ostrom and her call of âNo panaceas!â Discord is working great for my friends right now, in this moment, but it clearly isnât a blanket solution for every group. I doubt it will play the same role in my life once the pandemic is a distant memory. And it does take work: New_ Public set up a Discord server for our festival in January, but we havenât figured out how to sustain it, or make it into a real community. (Do you have ideas about what we should do with it? Comment below.)
Not-so-public, digital spaces demand more contemplation, and will inevitably serve an important role in the next generation of social media. My guess is itâll be in these smaller spaces, not the big public platforms, where weâll build some of our most valuable infrastructures of care.
This week we're kicking off a new feature. If a concept keeps coming up, or we think it's a particularly good one that could use a little unpacking, we'll take a closer look here, in "Better Know A Concept." Let's start with calm technology.
Calm Technology
The background: This one goes back to Xerox PARC in the mid â90s, when researchers like Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown were writing incredibly prescient papers about what would come next in tech. They argued that as personal computing becomes ubiquitous, it may become unreasonably demanding on humans. For them, your devices should only do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it, and not automate away any of your humanity. More recently, author and researcher Amber Case popularized the concept and applied it to contemporary tech.
In action: Case writes on the Calm Tech site, âIf a technology works well, we can ignore it most of the time. A teapot tells us when it is ready, and is off or quiet the rest of the time. A tea kettle can be set and forgotten, until it sings. It does not draw constant attention to itself until necessary.â
In digital public spaces: Last week, in talking about how Facebookâs design process led to the creation of a monster they cannot control, I suggested: âWhat if, in creating the next generation of digital public spacesâincluding the new ones that Zuckerberg wants to makeâwe choose to value calm technology, or center design justice principles?â Sara, in her piece, gets a glimpse at what this might look like in action on the app Notabli, which she describes as âan unapologetically modest interaction.â I experience something similar in my friend groupâs Discord. Thereâs never any anxiety about keeping up. As Mark Weiser wrote in 1993, âA good tool is an invisible tool⊠you focus on the task, not the tool.â Instead of âOh, a new Instagram notification,â the calm technology version would allow you to think, âI want to check in with my friends.â
Care is not an infinite scroll
How a slow app made my relationships stronger
Sara Hendren
It would have been in my kidsâ middle-grade yearsâsomething like ages six, seven, eight?âwhen they first properly observed Instagram over my shoulder. Weâd be on the couch, pasta boiling in the nearby kitchen, and theyâd hang their little elbows around my neck or maybe fold into a half-sit on my lap. That was a developmental era with bright bursts of consciousness, big leaps in abstract reasoning, and a bare-bones sense of numeracy. But thenâsimple numbers turned out to be all they needed to understand social platforms. âWow, Mama,â theyâd say. â43 likes!â They had internalized Instagramâs deepest logic. More is nearly always more.
In the years since that little-kid parenting era, Iâve asked myselfâthe way so many of us haveâwhether more is what itâs cracked up to be. And I donât just mean the self-evidently hollow offering of âlikes.â There are all kinds of numbers that animate apps on the scale of Instagram or Facebook, reinforcing the algorithmic idea that bigger is betterâor that bigger is inevitable, anyway. It took me a while to figure out that I needed something simpler, more intimate, and I got it in an unexpected way. I started using an app thatâs officially marketed to families, and it became the digital social experience Iâd been hoping forânot just as a parent, but as a person.
Notabli is not the kind of self-announcing refusenik tech targeted to folks who are outraged about the big social giants, who want to go rogueâor even just go weird or experimental. Notabli is an approachable and minimalist app for privately sharing, archiving, and easily printing digital imagesâled, as the app often notes, by an interest in âthe kids you love!â Itâs marketed as a convenient way to keep images of children far away from the public (or even the slippery semi-private) internet, and as a way to build the 21st century form of the family scrapbook.
Read the rest at New_ Public Magazine
Log Rolling
For more on Dr. Ostrom, and about New_ Public in general, listen to our Co-director Eli Pariser on Baratunde Thurstonâs podcast How to Citizen. Eli says that heâs motivated by wanting his children to grow up in digital public spaces where they can say, "oh, it is possible to have a good conversation with strangers online that doesn't devolve into all of us calling each other Nazis." Listen to the whole conversation here.
Also, friends of New_ Public are organizing an unconference next Friday, called âLogging Off Facebook: What Comes Next?â They describe it as an âEvent on what is next for technologists, policy makers, and organizers who are looking to hold Facebook accountable & find alternatives.â Advance registration required.
Query Log
Slack now reports much higher revenue than Discord and was purchased by Salesforce for $27.7 billion, which is more than double Discordâs projected value. If Discord has 150 million monthly average users, how many users does Slack have?
Finding the perfect gif,
Josh
Illustration and design by Josh Kramer
New_ Public is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.
I mean I love discord. The real issue that discords have is a reason to communicate. I've tried to set them up for events and groups. Older folks don't always want to join because they are luddites. Other folks don't want to join because they just aren't good with tech or use too many already. But for folks that are really motivated to organize around an idea or an issue, it's really great. That's why it works for gaming I think, because games are knowledge and achievement oriented so people are driven to share knowledge online for some pretty standard rewards. I've seen it break down in climate communities because the roles and needs are less defined. There are also people who will just spam ideas without putting the work in to get them done, while the people who are busy working actually stay silent.
I think the fact that you have a magazine going consistently is actually really good. People can chime in and talk about stuff. And you can also gauge what people are interested in by checking in on the discord occasionally. Would love to be invited
"Instead of 'Oh, a new Instagram notification,' the calm technology version would allow you to think, 'I want to check in with my friends.'"
This literally is why I want what I call (and I've referenced here before) an "asocial networking" site. Not only no notifications, but no feed; just profile pages: when you sign in you'd simply get a list of the people you follow who have updated since the last time you looked, and a list of those who haven't.
The feed itself, for me, is not at all a calm way to organize things.
(This is why, in fact, formats such as Slack or Discord also don't work very well for me: the chat history itself is a kind of feed hovering over your head when you sign in. I still prefer vanilla Internet Relay Chat, where when you enter a channel it's like walking into a room: you can't scroll back to see what was happening even if you wanted to.)