Reddit vs Discord vs Hub

[Acid Bubbles]

Now there are three places to discuss. While resources make perfect sense, I'm wondering what this will mean in terms of community? Where should people go? Will this kill reddit? Will some discord channels move here (screenshots, scenes, etc), and some stay on discord (scripting, unity, etc?)

VaM is a learning curve for people, and having three places to go (and for people who help others, having to parse through multiple sites) without very clear guidelines about what goes where could create a mess.

What do you think?

 

[Tiseb]

I think reddit will be replaced by this hub, and that the downloads of discord will arrive on the hub as well.
We'll probably lose some things, but we'll all be able to store on the hub, it'll be so much better, to share or find resources.
discord should be kept, it's more friendly. But if reddit disappears I'm fine with it. And I think that's the plan?

 

[RossNutkinChan]

Good points... I'm hesitant to making big suggestions of sweeping changes because currently I can't predict how this three legged stool will evolve. I do agree about this hub replacing reddit completely. At VAM's inception we had two reddit subs, that was almost three years ago now. We killed off one of those subs to keep everything in one place. Maybe the current vamscenes becomes a redirect for the hub - a real possibility. I do love the hub. Discord has a nice live feel and I think can't be replaced by the hub.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

To me it's obvious that hub replaces reddit, but there's lots of content on reddit, lots of visibility and a migration. The real issue is Discord v.s. Hub. In any case they serve different purposes, but if people ask for help about stuff in all three places, this is what would become more time intensive for members. So it's not really that much about making a choice, but rather about structuring both this forum's sections and discord's channels so the overlap is small.

 

[meshedvr]

Reddit was always terrible for sharing. The main thing it has going for it is it has a nice way to browse. I'm attempting to mimic some of that here. It should be possible to have a top page that works like "Hot" that can show hot posts, images, and resources all in one endless-scrolling page. Kind of like this link but with filters and endless scroll enabled: https://hub.virtamate.com/dev/index.php?whats-new/latest-activity

VaMScenes has also turned pretty toxic over time. Mods have done a great job even in the face of that. The whole fallout of paid vs. free seemed to be the tipping point. One thing with the hub is the reddit concept of throwaway accounts and blind down-rating isn't going to be really possible here. There is so much more control here compared to reddit.

Discord will continue. I love the live chat feel. I'm planning to enable one of the Discord addons that will allow this board to auto-post resource releases to Discord in the appropriate channel. I haven't had much time to play with that yet. There are also some widgets out there that enable Discord to run in the sidebar, but I'm not sure how well that will work.

 

[RossNutkinChan]

Both of those discord features sounds very neat - I do love the hub in terms of aesthetics, fuctionality and ease of use.

 

[kemenate]

Hub is a great step forward and improves all the shortcomings of reddit. I have the feeling that reddit is used more as "grab and go" and actual feedback or help was less frequent.
Discord on the other hand is awesome for immediate help. A high rate of questions get an answer pretty fast. But then, there are a lot of frequently repeated questions and they are less visible to newcomers. So this might improve with the help section in the forum, where we can pin a FAQ and Quick Start Guide. Also the forum is visible from the outside eg from a google search and people can join an older discussion with new ideas.

So I agree that the hub can replace reddit completely. People can come here with different intentions and will easily find the right section: download assets, get help or even just to consume the media without participating at all... I
ntegrating discord into the hub somehow would be cool. Asking a quick thing there has a much lower hurdle then writing a full forum post.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

And it's always possible to move from one to the other (back and forth in a forum, "come talk to me on discord", vs a question asked on discord, "check this link on the forum"). And let's be honest, the same questions _will_ be asked over and over again on both discord and hub

 

[Acid Bubbles]

My only hurdle is that I have a hard time keeping up with Discord, I'm not sure how I'll be able to do both. I like that _clear_ questions may have _clear_ answers, but you know what would be nice? A stack exchange site. Clear questions, multiple _direct_, straight to the point answers, good answers get voted up, bad answers get voted down. I always hated forum to actually get good answers to stuff. Discord's not much better though.

We'll see I guess! We'll probably have a few different "champions" on hub and discord and fewer on both, given a large enough community this could be a non-issue.

 

[RossNutkinChan]

My only hurdle is that I have a hard time keeping up with Discord, I'm not sure how I'll be able to do both. I like that _clear_ questions may have _clear_ answers, but you know what would be nice? A stack exchange site. Clear questions, multiple _direct_, straight to the point answers, good answers get voted up, bad answers get voted down. I always hated forum to actually get good answers to stuff. Discord's not much better though.

We'll see I guess! We'll probably have a few different "champions" on hub and discord and fewer on both, given a large enough community this could be a non-issue.

I'm not familiar with stack exchange sites.. but based on the description, I have visited them in the past looking for answers on frustrating windows 10 problems. I wonder if something like that is possible here?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@RossNutkinChan they're kind of everywhere now. The major ones you might know about are https://serverfault.com/ and https://stackoverflow.com/ but there's a ton of them: https://stackexchange.com/sites

For the Q&A model there's nothing close to beating those sites. But this is not for conversations and require moderation. There's something that could work: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/question-threads.5767/ but I didn't check it out. I don't know if we want this Q&A model here, but since it's typical to get "how can I do X" and expect "You have to do Y", maybe it's worth investigating.

 

[meshedvr]

I don't see a way to make something like stack exchange here, but I agree that is useful for question/answer style boards like Help. Perhaps there is some kind of addon that can do it. I'll poke around

 

[meshedvr]

Well I see @Acid Bubbles did some poking for me. I'll look at that addon.

 

[meshedvr]

This one might be better. Same creator of the trending addon I'm looking at:

Unmaintained - [TH] Question and Answer Forums

Question and Answer Forums Turn your forum into a knowledge base, support portal, or just a questionnaire based community with Questions & Answer Forums. Your users will be able to post a question, receive answers, and mark which answer fits the...

xenforo.com

 

[Acid Bubbles]

This looks like a great (better than I thought we could find) solution! Having a dedicated section for Q&A would be very helpful since it's a large part of what makes vam hard to adopt for creators, but it's also a good part of its appeal. Look forward to this!

 

[Tiseb]

Personally on discord I'm almost nothing, because I can't find any automatic translation software for discord, I have to copy and paste all the time in my translator. it's long and boring to do it.
So I'm just the talk of the conversation about me... but there's not a lot of it ^^

 

[hammock]

I'm trying to find my way to a VAM discord. I'm new to VAM content creation and I want to ask some questions about workflow so that I don't end up having to undo a bunch of work because I did it wrong. I found one invite on the Hub but it's no longer valid. Anybody else have an invite?

 

[Tiseb]

J'essaie de trouver mon chemin vers un discord VAM. Je suis nouveau dans la création de contenu VAM et je souhaite poser quelques questions sur le flux de travail afin de ne pas avoir à annuler beaucoup de travail parce que je l'ai mal fait. J'ai trouvé une invitation sur le Hub mais elle n'est plus valide. Quelqu'un d'autre une invitation ?[/CITATION]

Join the Virt-A-Mate Discord Server!

Check out the Virt-A-Mate community on Discord - hang out with 46,301 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

discord.com

 

[hammock]

Merci beaucoup!