Kvetching about Discord

13 Jan, 2026

I've been thinking of getting back on Discord.

This is despite my decidedly mixed experiences with the site (which I've barely touched in several months, despite using it quite heavily in the past), and all-online pseudonymous communities in general. For me, and I presume plenty of other people, anything that is that constantly present and inviting you to check it becomes a time leech. Throughout the last couple of years I've been cutting those sorts of things out of my life, one by one, until I have mostly pared down my (non-IRL adjacent) web presence to this little blog and some adjacent small, subject matter specific forums and comment sections. This has done a great job of cutting down on unnecessary stress and recovering my Slack¹, but at the cost of feeling somewhat isolated. Maybe it's FOMO, or the fact this blog isn't exactly breaking view count records, but I have maybe slipped too far into a fairly comfortable but lonely corner of the internet. There are certainly much worse ways to use the web, but arguably there could be better if I manage to find a smart, high-quality community (and I have some leads), and I want to avoid confusing the status quo with the best I can possibly achieve, one of the things that kept me in those stressful places in the first place.

If I do this, I need to find ways to compartmentalise and limit my time on it. Thankfully, this might be a solvable problem with various time tracking tools and (inevitably) Beeminder. Also, I'll keep it off my phone and try to treat it as an asynchronous communication tool, at least outside of one-on-one or small chat groups². Hopefully then I can use Discord as a way to find smart, reasonable people to talk and share ideas with and not as just another time-suck app.