An update on why Discord
Nov 13, 2018
One of Blockchain at Berkeley’s main goals is to actively provide education and resources for those interested in the Blockchain space. By providing Blockchain resources, we hope to help bridge the gap between the vast number of industry and community members interested in learning about Blockchain and the subject of Blockchain.
As part of this effort, we have decided to move from a public Slack to a public Discord. The reasons for this change can be broken down into two issues: reliability and scalability. Through our discord, we hope to provide an open platform that is multifaceted in nature so that community members are able to come together and discuss various seasonal research topics managed by Blockchain at Berkeley members, daily trivia questions, limitless resources, and a central location for Blockchain events.
Reliability:
In terms of reliability, one of the biggest issues with Slack was the inability for members to search previous messages. This is an issue as Slack begins to archive messages after ten thousand messages have been sent including direct messages. We felt that discussions were not as meaningful as they would be quickly lost and unsearchable after a short period of time. Searching for a potential solution, we quickly found Discord to be our top potential solution since all messages are kept. Similar to Slack, Discord is a free service with premium add-ons which do not have a direct impact on discussion within a server.
Scalability:
While looking for a potential solution to our issue of reliability, we also began to look for solutions that could accommodate our future goal of providing Blockchain resources to as many people as possible. The transparency and active communication from Discord developers led us to be quite confident that a Discord server could have upwards of forty-five thousand members online concurrently. While Slack may have scaled, the limitation of ten thousand messages leads us to believe that moving platforms would be worth the hassle to ensure that we meet our goals of becoming a center of learning and communication.
Conclusion:
In the coming months, Blockchain at Berkeley hopes to transition to Discord by discontinuing the public Slack. We hope that the Discord platform can serve as a basis for those who are interested in connecting with the Blockchain space but also members of Blockchain at Berkeley. The primary goal, however, is to simply provide a means of communication between multiple communities including industries, and students not limited to Berkeley. To do so, we hope to provide community members with limitless Blockchain content and are so excited to add yet another channel for Blockchain growth and knowledge.
We hope to see you there! https://tinyurl.com/babDiscord
Leave a Reply