A measured invitation to the Beeminder Community Discord

[dreev]

I just asked in the Discord if we should potentially put an invite link in the beeminder.com site header and the consensus so far is that that’d be too much hoi polloi. The Discord is currently a very nice, cozy, friendly community. But so is the forum! I’m actually a little torn about advertising the Discord here because I think it’s a shame when people say interesting things in Discord that then scroll away into oblivion. (Technically you can search for old stuff in Discord but it’s pretty painful trawling through old dialog compared to finding a relevant forum post.) On the other hand, it can feel a lot easier to just start typing thoughts in Discord as opposed to Composing A Forum Post.

In conclusion, maybe check out the Discord, but please don’t use it instead of the forum!

Here’s an invite link that will expire in a week:
https://discord.gg/W6wyz9MF

PS: Huge thanks to @narthur again for setting up the Discord in the first place!

PPS: Here’s a non-expiring link for those motivated enough to dig up this old thread:

Join the Beeminder Discord Server!

[april]

Is Discord still alive btw?

[dreev]

Yup! It’s great. My only hesitation in promoting it is how great the forum also is and I hate to dilute that. I’d love to figure out how to better incentivize people to move things from the Discord to the forum for posterity. Here’s me doing so recently:

List of Best-Self Software

Thanks to @theospears in the Discord for posing this. We came up with the following list of candidates so far: Beeminder, for doing what you want Anki, for having a superhuman memory Khan Academy, for autodidactification Mathematica as exobrain probably doesn’t fit in this category (it would open the floodgates if so) but I do use it for various best-self things, like autogenerating intra-day graphs of my weight. There’s also a tiny app I use to keep track of my alliterative alimentation schem…

So maybe consider that the price of admission to the Discord: willingness to recap as forum posts interesting discussions or things you learn.

PS: Here are the current channels in the Discord:

Main channels

1. #larvae: introductions; keep it brief, then move to #hive
2. #hive: main; keep it beeminder/akrasia/productivity/etc-relevant
3. #bumbling: random / off-topic
4. #beemios: special channel for the iOS app
5. #apiary: API and programming (like the Tech category in the forum)
6. #pollen: polls (it’s funny if you speak german)

Obtuse/nerdtastic/rabbit-holey channels

1. #meta: like the Meta category of the forum
2. #busybees: pomodoro poker / co-working
3. #birds: twitter feed
4. #weightloss: self-explanatory
5. #spellingbee: word games, especially bot-mediated ones
6. #waggledance: announcements
7. #botspam: for testing bots for the love of god mute this
8. #starboard: experimental way to star/pin messages

Come to think of it, the #starboard channel was meant to help with the problem of remembering to move things to the forum. Emoji-react to something with a star and it gets auto-collected in #starboard and in theory we can beemind that to make sure everything starred gets moved eventually.

[strickvl]

Have 2x experienced the opening up of a Discord and saw how it killed forums. Def appreciate you being thoughtful about this. I’m even pretty sure that all the people who now live in those Discord spaces would all agree that forums were nicer for navigation + search of older materials.