"want to learn more about this project? join our discord!" explode. "want to download this game? join our discord!" explode. "want to play this mod? join our discord!" explode. "need questions answered? join our discord!" EXPLODE.
The problem isn't that you have to join a Discord or have an account to get something, the problem is is that Discord is a black hole for information that is completely un-googlable and doesn't allow for easy archiving.
If you want any answers to a basic question in a Discord, you're gonna have to either A. Wrangle with their abysmal search function, B. Pray that the answer is either pinned in the appropriate channel or in an FAQ, or C. Ask your common question and pray that someone doesn't yell at you for answering an already-asked question, get drowned out by people chatting in the same channel, or if the server is particularly dead, get a response at all. VS a forum or reddit where usually all the problems you can encounter have public questions and answers that you can just google.
Not only that, but when Discord inevitably shuts down, ALL servers and information spread throughout gets lost too. Sure there are programs to archive Discord servers, but who is gonna make all that public? Who is going to sift through thousands of messages of idle chat and meme spam in order to get to the discussions and information that actually matters? Whereas with web pages and forums, I have an extension on my browser that lets me send a page to the internet archives with a click of a button. I will archive this very post in fact!
Discord has its place as a casual IM and VC service, but it is an absolute dog shit replacement for forums and information hubs, and no one should be using it as such.
I'd like to add that a lot of bad actors use Discord servers for this precise purpose. The fact that it's difficult to sift through to gain useful information makes it so that information is harder to spread around. Plenty of people are at the helms of projects and communities that would fall apart at having to answer basic questions, and if those answers were easy to Google, every wannabe journalist with a YouTube channel can broadcast your flaws to the world.
With a Discord, now anyone who wants to poke holes in your completely legit venture has to step forward and ask, directly, in a forum you have complete control over. That's powerful: you know exactly when people are sniffing at your heels, whether coverage of your activity is about to drop publicly, and you oftentimes even know the exact name and handle of the person who's about to expose you. This allows you to play damage control, in real time, by getting ahead of any questions you know are coming and poisoning the well against your investigator.
Plus, if you restrict who gets an invite to your server, you can keep the rest of your users in line by threatening to revoke access if they do anything other than express unalloyed support. This gives you some degree of insulation from leaks and helps create the illusion that everything is going perfectly fine.
As a general rule, I wouldn't trust any company that uses Discord as their main PR platform. Companies with good news and faith that what they're doing will succeed generally want their news in front of as many eyeballs as humanly possible. Discord is only good for communities that already exist, and in the wrong hands is only good for insulating current stakeholders from the outside world and its (possibly legitimate) criticisms.












