Communities build, sustain and grow on Discord. Originally as the platform serving gamers, it started serving crypto communities and then naturally became the space for DAO communities.
Chances are you’ve come across Discord if you are reading about DAOs. Or you have just recently been immersed in it. If you haven’t, Discord is a community messaging service, where people hang out over text, voice and video.
While some find Discord overwhelming initially, others continue to feel that way over time. As it is the main platform required for participation in DAOs, I want to help you take steps to navigate it well.
In this article, I will share some tips I learnt as a community leader to create a Discord server that enables a better experience.
Discord Tips
Do you know that you can create folders in Discord? If you drag a server on top of another, it creates a folder. The cool thing about folders is that you can also set notifications for the entire folder rather than doing it server by server. You can mute a server, you can also mute mentions such as @everyone. Use them, they are great mental health tools!
Within a server, intentional Discord flow design helps balance the amount of noise with the right level of signal. This is where categories, channels, roles, and bots come in extremely handy.
It is also becoming more common to use the best practice of staggering the flow of entering a discord. More on this below.
This piece is especially relevant for DAO operators, Discord admin, and community managers who are new to the space. But even for the more seasoned ones among us, I believe there could be value in reflecting on how you may improve the flow in your server.
Best practices
Discord operates as a digital campus intended for a fusion of synchronous and asynchronous communication. There are chat rooms—known as channels—to discuss topics. You can typically find out what is appropriate to discuss there by the name of the channel and its description.
Good community leaders and moderators will provide an appropriate channel name and give it a good description.
They will also seed the channel with the types of behaviour they would like to see and regularly check in to see that nothing inappropriate is being shared in the channel.
Categories
Categories are a good way to bunch topics together. The benefits are:
1. You create a categorisation in people's mind about what sits together
2. You can enable role types by categories
3. You can mute entire categories that are irrelevant e.g. the start here category in most Discords tend to become irrelevant once you are onboard and so it can be muted.
Crypto, Culture, and Society’s Discord Design
Upon entering the CCS discord, all you can see is the start here channel:
Once you read the rules and click on the Apple emoji, it opens up the verification channel. In the verification channel we have set up a Discord bot called collab.land which allows you to connect the token from your wallet to ensure that you have the right token for this server. At this point you are appointed the role of ‘value-aligned’.
As soon as your wallet connects successfully, the semester opens up to you. Scams are rampant so we need to always be vigilant and on the lookout. At this point, you are appointed the role of ‘learner semester II’.
The community team (consisting of Kassen and Bhaumik) agreed on a time to sync over zoom and came to the discussion having reflected on the best discord servers we’d experienced. We also acknowledged that we had different personality types and brainstormed what other personalities might exist in semester II so that we were not just designing for ourselves, but for others too.
We actually spent quite a few hours designing what we felt was the right number of channels and the right name for them. Some people have asked what ‘right’ is but there is no scientific method. We just gut checked what felt right to us given our knowledge of the learner types and our personal experience in other servers.
We wanted enough channels to be able to separate out the conversations but we did not want too many channels to cause overwhelm. We settled with 13 channels, an announcement channel and a voice channel. We decided that it was better to start with less and gradually expand as required. We would start with a thread and if the thread stayed really active, we’d migrate it into a channel if needed.
Think of channel names as mechanisms for priming. The design of this digital campus guides how people should and should not interact. The constraints inform them of the norms of the community - things that are encouraged and discouraged.
During semester II, I did ongoing user research by understanding the community needs. One thing that I was pleased about was that our Discord design was called out a couple of times. This showed that good design and intentions do come across well.
This is a further description of our Discord channels:
📌|learners-bulletin: this is a read-only channel for announcements for CCS members, for members who find discord too overwhelming they can select to hook this channel up into their server to receive key announcements.
⏰|event-reminders: as the lectures are the main event of CCS, we wanted a channel specific to these lectures. Another read-only channel for receiving reminders for workshops, community events, etc.
👋|intros: we provided a template that I have curated over multiple discords as a suggestion. This enabled people to read through quickly and skim for key information. I felt that it provides for better UX when there are so many intros to read. People generally followed the flow which was lovely as an experience!
👋 About me:
💻 What I’m looking forward to:
🙋 How I can help/what I am experienced in:
🛹 Fun facts:💬|general-chat: this is used for general discussion—examples include sharing interesting articles/videos/art, meeting new people, posting pics (of IRL meetups, your most recent addition to our Community Mural, or your dog), finding others going to crypto conferences
🧠|deep-dives: this is a library / think tank for deep and thoughtful discussions around specific topics, articles, research questions, etc.
📓|workshop-discussion: as the main course of our DAO is the lecture, we wanted to specifically reserved this space for pre and post-workshop discussions about workshop content
🎨|culture-feed: a space for sharing media (music, art, movies, podcasts, fashion, etc.) that is moving you or inspiring you 💛 What are you into lately?
🖇|co-create:
Find others to write with, build with, leave feedback, etc.
Examples of projects that were co-created in Semester 1 include:
People also found writing accountability partners and others to hack on new ideas with!
💛|gratitude: for showing some love/gratitude to another community member. It can be for anything—their kindness, thoughtful insights, etc. Give them a shoutout or say thanks!
🔥|small-wins: for posting wins in your life—the small ones matter just as much! Did you learn something new? Overcome imposter syndrome? Finally get around to making that soufflé? We’d love to celebrate with you.
🤗|new-to-crypt: beginner-friendly space for asking and answering questions about web3 and crypto. There’s no such thing as a dumb question!
📩|help-desk: have questions but not sure who to ask? Ask here!
🔌|signal-boost: promote your own or someone else’s work, event, etc.! Please do so in moderation.
Common-room: this is a voice channel for students to use and we have an accompanying chat for it
common-room-chat
Next time I will dive into reading applications for entry into the DAO, what the community team looked for and how I used that process to start thinking about how to create smaller group feelings.
If you enjoyed this piece and want to reflect on it with me, please do say hello on Twitter!