concept

[rreubenreyes]

just my notes

• main idea: community building

  • mainstream chat applications (Slack, Discord, etc.) are good for rapid fire and bring communities which are already close together
  • message persistence is always terrible, historical context is always lost in conversations
  • strong search engines only solve so much
  • hard for newcomers
  • threads are hard (see Slack)
  • more channels = more siloing
  • old school message boards are great for bringing together communities of strangers
    • vBulletin, etc
    • message persistence is great
    • "linking to old threads" is actually not that hard
    • easy for newcomers because it's very obvious when you broadcast something

• how to actually bring these two concepts together? idk yet but a few ideas:

  • from the video game world, social games like Habbo Hotel, MapleStory, etc. were good at implementing real-time chat and fostering community building via shared activities and often friends would meet on a message board before meeting in game
  • spectrum kind of did this but too literally
  • focus on the human behaviors instead of just blindly gluing together a forum and a chat app

[rreubenreyes]

mindmap to track the big picture

[rreubenreyes]

idea for MVP paring down:

• leverage Discord as the chatroom frontend, build the product as a Discord application
  • the @friends feature is a crucial user behavior that should remain a core of the product; using Discord for chatrooms mostly removes this

[rreubenreyes]

capture the MMO social experience without actually having an MMO there

[rreubenreyes]

Y2K forum experience mostly consisted of a message board + IRC; what did this get right/wrong? how can we realistically bridge the gap between siloed IRC communities and a broader message board community?

how has that problem expanded into the modern problem of "there are too people on this Discord server and I don't know anyone nor how to jump into a conversation"? why should people use this product over Discord? what communities would be drawn to a chat+forum hybrid?

[rreubenreyes]