- Pronouns
- he / him / his
HEM
I refer to myself in third person in this article to add to clarity.
In early 2016 there were rumblings in Europeia about a new communications platform. Europeia had been running on Skype since the discontinuation of Windows Live Messenger in March 2013.
Skype's tenure hadn't been totally without controversy. In the late days of 2013, regional rabble-rouser Zenny began the first EuroChat which was a mega skype group where all Europeian citizens were invited. As was typical for Zenny at the time, the Skype group featured a number of lewd elements and a basically non-existent moderation system. This wild west EuroChat escaped under the radar of the region for some time, but in the summer of 2014 finally got the attention of key Europeians.
Zenny resisted any reforms of her server because it was not "officially Europeia" and she claimed personal ownership. As tensions mounted, HEM established a second group and declared it the official group chat of Europeia essentially reiterating Zenny's claim that her group could remain, but not be supported by Europeia. Without advertising support from Europeia, her group eventually fell into disuse in favor of the official one (much to her fury).
But by 2016, most of these issues were long behind Europeia, and the region was comfortably settled into Skype. This is why when Sopo first formally proposed Discord, the region wasn't very interested.
The idea had been bandied about multiple times in the past but firmly rejected as an unnecessary change to the status quo, and people still weren't that keen on a shift.
"I'm not likely to go unless I absolutely have to... so have fun," Captain Carrot said in response to the call for a Discord server. "Either way, I won't bother switching," Supreme Chancellor Lethen stated, firmly rejecting the idea.
The thread discussing the idea fell into inactivity around the middle of February, until it was bumped again in mid-July. Suddenly, the idea took on a new steam and almost overnight, the beta Europeian server exploded.
Only weeks later, in perhaps the most consequential decision of his short-lived administration, President Trinnien announced that Discord would be the formal off-site communications platform for Europeia.
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Nobody could've predicted the speed at which Discord transformed parts of Europeian society. Original Discord advocate, Sopo, told ENN, "I didn't realize how essential it would quickly become. We have citizens who rarely if ever post on our forums but are staples of the Discord server. That was unheard of with Skype. We've certainly seen the social heart and soul of our region slowly migrate from the Republic Square to Discord."
Early pro-Discord proponent Aexnidaral agrees when asked if he predicted all the changes that came with Discord: "No, definitely not. I figured there'd be a decent shot it wouldn't catch on and we would stay with Skype because it just had more people proliferation." But he also hedges, posing that perhaps Discord gets more credit than it deserves in driving change, saying, "Even if we didn't make the jump to Discord, we'd see the same dynamics playing out over Skype."
Activity was exploding on Discord, and many older citizens in the region began criticizing it for trading long-form, contributive, forum activity for Discords supposedly shorter-form, less substantial, instant chat activity. This sentiment culminated into widely read hot take of the issue by HEM in his Discord Is Hell column.
His piece whacked Discord for supposedly:
(1) having poor moderation practices;
(2) isolating new members by requiring them to frequently be on the instant chat to make friends;
(3) losing track of institutional memory of how governmental decisions were made;
(4) fostering a culture of social life over contributive political life (i.e. voting for friends instead of weighing regional issues, talking in eurochat rather than run for Senate and contribute).
HEM's piece was received with thunderous applause by some. Calvin Coolidge posted a mournful response, agreeing with much of the piece: "This hits home and makes me sad. The community of Discord is not the community of Europeia's forum, but they often control its decisions and outcomes. I don't know if there's anything to be done about it other than to adapt, but this particular change is painful."
Others looked at the article as a sensational overreaction. Punchwood made a forceful post saying, "I don't get this region's hatred for Discord. It seems as if there is a problem, may it be a cultural one, activity issues, or even election results Discord is to blame. The exaggeration as way, you'd think that the forums were a ghostland and everything was done on Discord the way it is talked about."
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HEMs hot take article didn't upend the issue overnight as he might have hoped, but some of the issues posed in the article, and elsewhere, did begin to find broader, consensus-based resolution.
Governments began discussing how information on Discord could be organized and preserved for posterity's viewing. Moderation practice, initially brought forward as a community discussion, was eventually formalized under the Communication Platform Administration Act (2017). The law forged a middle-ground between those who wished to see Discord governance remain in the hands of the elected government, and those who wanted fast-acting moderators to be able to address situations without worrying about rule of law. Moderators, appointed by the President and accountable to the court, would rule the channel day-to-day, while overarching administrators would be able to intercede when pressing real life issues came into play.
Now, roughly a year after HEMs column, it's time to revisit his controversial Discord is Hell article, and see where exactly we are.
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Before getting into the juicy stuff, one number strikes out very clearly to this writer: 100%.
100% of those surveyed used Discord. While this number surely does not represent the whole region exactly — there is at least one prominent citizen who refuses to use it — it does demonstrate that Discord is the off-site communications platform with the highest participation rate ever.
That's a rather nice way of saying that If anyone still had hopes of rolling the platform back, you're probably delusional.
There probably aren't that many people out there, however, with 83.9% of those surveyed saying that Discord has definitely or probably made Europeia a better place.
But has it? One of the most controversial accusations against Discord was that it made people more prone to social activities rather than the affairs of building and sustaining a region. In order to get a picture of whether this is true, we turn to the data.
We asked 31 Europeians a series of questions regarding Discord. We asked them how much time they spent on the platform, and how interested they were in Europeian politics. To get a sense of whether Discord impacted interest in Europeian politics, we calculated what percentage of their weekly Discord usage range was extremely interested in the political affairs of the region:
On first blush, this data potentially holds up the worst fears of Europeians. The more time that citizens spend on Discord, they less likely they are to be the extremely interested citizens who drive this region forward.
However, when we add in citizens who are "pretty interested", the picture gets a bit muddier.
This curve, that uncannily resembles a capital W, doesn't quite tell the same story. It suggests that citizens who spend 2-4 hours, or 12-48 hours on Discord have substantially lower levels of political interest than all others, but that no greater trend line exists.
To resolve this conundrum, we turned to another question we posed to survey respondents: how politically ambitious are you?
Aside from the 1 hour or less category this graph, perhaps unsurprisingly, bears a significant resemblance to the extremely or pretty interested in politics graph.
The stark truth is that there is a muddy picture here. The most generous defense of HEM's original theory is that Discord use does have some kind of negative relationship with those who are extremely interested in politics. Those who self-select "extremely interested" are more likely to be on Discord slightly less. But there could be a self-selection bias at play (perhaps those who are a little more disdainful of Discords social community are selecting "extremely interested" as a form of virtue signaling).
Otherwise, the data plays out very poorly for any negative relationship between being interested in politics and being active on Discord. Any attempts to find a correlation coefficient or any quantitative relationship between weekly time on Discord and political ambition failed to render any real evidence.
But that isn't to say there aren't some interesting trends. There do tend to be troughs in political interest for those members who spend either 2 - 4 hours or 12 - 48 hours weekly on Discord, while there is a surge of political interest for those who spend 2-12 hours and 48+ hours weekly. These trends manifested with significant sample sizes (1 hour or less is only n=2, so I am less interested in that category), and it does leave questions: Is politics more interesting for those who consider themselves Discord centrists selecting for the middle time ranking, or those who go all in and spend more than two full days a week on #eurochat? It's hard to say, but with these data, building a case against Discord in terms of political engagement is extremely tough.
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Indeed, it is difficult to make the argument that activity in Europeia is at all worse off since the introduction of Discord. Total forum posts remained completely flat from 2016 to 2017, and only slightly down from 2015. Meanwhile, an immeasurable amount of activity goes on in Europeias numerous affiliated servers. To say that Europeia is, as a whole, more active than any other time in her history seems indisputable.
While HEMs article suggested that there would be reason to fear cliques and an inclusive society, the more large and active Discord gets, the less cliques seem to be in play. Members have private servers and standing group chats, yes, but nothing even approaches the paranoia of cliques that existed a year ago.
Nowadays, those fears about Discord seem totally disconnected with reality. Without Discord, many regions wouldn't have an integration strategy.
"Getting new members involved asap is important since NationStates the game isn't the fun part of NS," Empress Sovereign Rachael Arche-VerinGuard told ENN. "[Without Discord] It'd be truly hard. The forums are important to a region, but that discord can bring a region together better than using zetaboards or whatever you use to host your forum. I have a team set up in TGO whose very job is to integrate people."
That doesn't mean there aren't challenges to face.
Discord exists as one of the best content distribution systems the region has ever seen. One "@everyone" ping can distribute an article or announcement to dozens of people within seconds. In the past, announcements like Brunhilde's ban may have taken days to spread across Nationstates. Instead, it took roughly 6 hours.
However, neither Discord nor the forums are set up to take advantage of this. While Discord is hugely advantageous for content distribution, and the forum is a superior platform for long-form communication, it becomes tricky to use Discord to spread the content but develop the dialogue on the forum.
Firstly, with roughly 40% of the forums visitors using mobile, it is imperative that a mobile skin or integration be implemented. As is, it is much easier to distribute content via Discord and then go back in-app and chat about it there. Instead, we want to encourage users to have deeper, more archivable discussions on the forum and have it inspire new forum content (counter article, EBC Radio broadcast).
Furthermore, only a select few regional influencers are posed to take advantage of the content distribution powers of Discord. Only key players can "@everyone", and eurochat often moves too fast to see content links, or, alternatively, is too dead for anyone to be around to see them.
Europeia should explore dedicated channels and @groups to distribute more announcements and media articles. These announcements should be in comment-free Discord channels so that discussions are incentivized to take place on the forum vs. the quick flowing, never stopping, #eurochat feed.
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There are other problems too. While Discord has largely been a tremendous resource for administrators to be able to investigate misdeeds, the moderation structure leaves something to be desired.
"I struggle in my role as a Discord moderator because I'm only able to uphold our roleplay laws which often do not apply to managing a chat. Sure, I could kick or ban someone for spamming outside of #spam, but what if people are debating outside of #debate? I have no authority to force people to debate in the proper channels. I think we need to revise the powers our moderators and admins have to actually moderate the Discord server in a common sense way that may also be outside of existing law," Moderator Sopo told ENN.
Senator Aexnidaral agrees that things could be better, saying: "Sometimes it seems like our Moderators aren't as quick on the draw as maybe they should be."
The middle-ground compromise that led to government moderators and out-of-character admins to share governance of Discord has created a lot of confusion since being established, with people often not knowing who to go to — or people assuming that Administrators are in charge of the moderators. With a wide grey area of who should act when, oftentimes problem characters can fall through the cracks for some time. For instance, many people believe Cokeland should've been removed from #eurochat long before he was.
And while the search functionality and centralized nature of Discord allows Admins to do quick research and investigations, it also allows problem users an instant directory of potential victims. MisterTin was able to harass and badger at least six different citizens before being removed by an administrative ban.
Whether reform looks like more moderators, or a second look at how Discord is governed, there is clearly room for improvement.
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Discord makes communication easier because it is more accessible on a phone, it can be used to socialize with Europeians casually, and it can provide a better structure for group projects or one-on-one interactions.
The people, I feel as if I can really get to know my fellow Europeians via Discord.
Convenience of chatting and the chance to be extremely casual, silly, and non serious. also the odd occasions of an easy large group VC are nice.
I like the live chat. And being a citizen of other regions, I've noticed that Europeia's discord is more active than most regions.
I'm a sigh person, afflicted with anxiety and self-doubt. The discord let me get to know people before diving blindly into politics better than the forums alone could.
Sometimes the forum can feel a little disconnected, distant. But the instant chat with discord makes everyone feel like actual people.
Above are a few of the many positive comments about Discord submitted by those who took ENNs recent survey.
With 84% of the region saying that Discord makes us stronger, and only 3% saying that a prior off-site communications platform was superior, there's absolutely no chance of it actually going anywhere. Furthermore, it is important to consider just how many citizens get real, tangible joy from Discord and the social interactions formed within.
Europeia began as a political simulation where everyone was here to play politics and achieve power. Today, we are a true society with those who care about the political mechanisms more and those who care less. All the available evidence suggests that Discord is attracting members who wouldn't otherwise be interested in a government simulation rather than seducing otherwise politically passionate members toward shitposting. Indeed, the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens have at least some interest in politics suggests a baseline of political awareness that no modern nation could boast.
That being said, without a government and active political sphere the society cannot sustain itself. While Discord is not hell, it sure ain't yet heaven, and we sure are stuck here.
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All data taken from ENN's Discord Survey (n=31). Special thanks to Sopo, Aexnidaral,
and Rachael to who gave exclusive interviews to ENN for the piece. Please talk about this article on the forum.
All data taken from ENN's Discord Survey (n=31). Special thanks to Sopo, Aexnidaral,
and Rachael to who gave exclusive interviews to ENN for the piece. Please talk about this article on the forum.
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