De-Cluttering Discord Channel

During the last ops-guild weekly call, we discussed a method to de-clutter the discord, with respect to guilds.

Idea

  • If you do NOT have a guild tag, only three channels are available: guild-start-here, guild-general, and guild-collaboration. (Guild collaboration is for member outside the guild that need guild support, like projects or inter-guild collaboration.)
  • If you DO have the guild tag, all channels under that particular guild category are available.
  • Furthermore, a singular firehose tag will unlock ALL channels to bypass the Discord tag gating

In this way, each person can curate their feed for which guild channels are relevant to them and can opt in and out on the fly when they need access to a specific guild channel (ie, get the tag, then remove it when no longer relevant).

Example

Without ops-guild or firehose tag:
pic1

With ops-guild or firehose tag:
pic2

Next Steps

  • We will leave some time for discussion in case this ends up being a bad idea.
  • Barring any serious changes, if you would like the ops-guild to make these changes for your guild, please run a poll and reply with a picture or link to the results.
11 Likes

I honestly like the idea. I just went through and muted a bunch of the threads to try and minimize the channels I am not interested in. It can be extremely overwhelming when looking at the vast amount of information and posting going on.

Seems like a useful tool to have. For Dev Guild, I wonder if we should hide things like Solidity or DevOps or Bot-Mechanics. They ride just on the cusp being something that would always be available since they are their own subdaos.

dev-program-proposals yes
development yes, possibly even delete
dev-workroom yes

The main point I am sticking on is this: do I need to join the guild to see the conversation? This can fundamentally change how visible content is - and if my ping reaches the person I intend it to.

It also alters ā€œguild membership numbersā€ and if I now have extra guild tags, Iā€™m actually getting MORE pings.

I also donā€™t believe this solves for projects, though perhaps thatā€™s for a different solution to handle.

IMO just teaching people healthy muting tactics could be a more resilient solve, but I do sympathize with the limitations Discord has (vs Slack) and the sheer overwhelming nature for first joiners.

Tough problem, thanks for working on it!

2 Likes

Thanks for this @frogmonkee Discord De-Clutter is definitely a good idea.

Just had a quick question of how this works in regards to points 2 and 3 youā€™ve raised:

Does this mean weā€™ll be able to ā€œtoggleā€ between different modes? For example:

Mode 1: (I have 3 Guild Tags), I can only see channels associated with those tags.

Mode 2: Fire house - I see everything.

I do like the idea of de-cluttering, but would also welcome the ability to toggle where I might want to browse around and serendipitously be pulled into a conversations in channels I donā€™t normally frequent.

ok, thatā€™s all right.

For the Treasury Guild I think the channels visible to all would be #treasury start here, tokenomics and treasury.

I think probably voice channels should be visible too?

Thank you, your proposal is very reasonable, especially towards new users and new members who come to the DAO.

While each of the already expert contributors has developed some of their own ā€œsurvivalā€ strategies, the need to make the DAO more understandable arises from the need to show a more understandable environment to those who do not yet have the knowledge of the organized chaos of BanklessDAO.

Surely in the future there will be a way to make the organization of the channels less chaotic (or maybe not), in the meantime this proposal goes in the right direction in my opinion.

1 Like

@jameswmontgomery.eth All fantastic points! Thank you for taking the time to think this through.

Do I need to join the guild to see the conversation? This can fundamentally change how visible content is - and if my ping reaches the person I intend it to.

Yes. Interesting point about reaching a personā€¦ I think this could be a potential problem, but perhaps not a big one. What are the odds youā€™ll tag someone in a deep guild channel (deep as in not the three globally visible channels) that doesnā€™t have the tag vs. reaching out to their guild?
Nonetheless, I think this will be a small point of friction, but not enough to surmount the benefit of decluttering.

I also donā€™t believe this solves for projects, though perhaps thatā€™s for a different solution to handle.

I donā€™t think projects should be nested within guilds. They should have a main project discussion channel. If itā€™s a sufficiently large project, like Bankless Academy, it has its own category.

It also alters ā€œguild membership numbersā€ and if I now have extra guild tags, Iā€™m actually getting MORE pings.

Writers guild has a (potential) solution for this. We want to create a writers-participant tag which would replace the current writers guild tag, and a secondary writers-member tag. This members tag would function similarly to the Contributor tag, in that it requires a nomination, second, and vote. This stratifies between passive lurkers and active contributors.

IMO just teaching people healthy muting tactics could be a more resilient solve, but I do sympathize with the limitations Discord has (vs Slack) and the sheer overwhelming nature for first joiners.

Perhaps we encourage the use of the firehose tag for active members?

@paulapivat

Does this mean weā€™ll be able to ā€œ toggle ā€ between different modes? For example:

Yes, you can toggle using the #guild-select channel. This de-cluttering model allows for self-selection.

@Kouros
Good idea! I think voice channel should be public as well in case members from other guilds (or guests) need to join a meeting without having to select a tag.

Well done Frogmonkee. A step to remove some of the friction and keep folks like me from getting confused. It goes a long ways in reducing some of the friction.

yes. Desperately needed. yesterday, I actually muted a bunch of channels that do not apply to me.

Like others have mentioned, this is definitely needed. Otherwise, IMO, the discord and maybe the whole community gets lost in the weeds.

The weeds being: too much going on in too many channels. If there is a way to consolidate, I think it would be a good idea to do so.

How are none of yall gonna comment on the fact that I rick rolled everyone that read this post :roll_eyes:

1 Like

Wow, I skimmed through this earlier today and was wondering ā€˜what are these weird channel names?ā€™ā€¦ Should have read them in sequence together xD

Thanks for putting this up. It has been discussed in various places before and keeping our Discord organized and structured for everyone is important, yet complicated.

Iā€™m in favour of the firehose; itā€™s an easy toggle where I donā€™t see many problems. Itā€™s a go from me.

The guild tag separations that you mentioned with the writers guild example is a possible solution, although that would generate a lot of tags if every guild and every bigger project needs different tags. The challenge then becomes how we present and manage those in a structured manner. If we can overcome these issues, Iā€™m for it.

Let me know if I can help out somewhere with the execution once something has been decided.

Great work per usual ser.

Definitely a big fan of ways to declutter and denoise the Discord so people can focus on their core objectives.

One thing Iā€™ve been thinking of is transitioning the local channels to independent telegram groups. This would mitigate a lot of scrolling + channels on Discord and allow everyone to opt-into the local areas they want to participate in.

Looking at Bankless NYC on TG, it feels much easier for that local communities to coordinate and the fun part is that all the individual channels can be token-gated using Collab Land (itā€™s supported on telegram!). Each community could set the BANK threshold at their own discretion, ideally making it lower so itā€™s more accessible for new people to get join.

The only major ops lift here would be a guide on how to create a collab land TG group + a directory for all the channels (could live on Website or Notion).

Just some thoughts :slight_smile:

1 Like

Posted this in the Discord yesterday and frogmonkee suggested I post here. Posting the original below but in short, my suggestion is to have the discord channels start pin-ing a short bio of what they do and/or when their next upcoming mtg is. Donā€™t know if every group should have the same structure of info that they pin at the top or if it should be up to each group to decide. Just opening the suggestion.

ā€œHey everyone, new here so take this with a grain of saltā€¦but in trying to acclimate myself to all the different channels, i kind of found it difficult to quickly understand mission/goal/current tasks/etc of some of the channels. I think the group has done an AMAZING job at breaking out channels and title-ing everything, honestly nice work! In trying to go through them though to acclimate myself, I just found it difficult to see what each group is working on without having to scroll for quite a while to piecemeal things together. Perhaps there is a better solution but I was thinking it could be helpful to pin a quick statement to the top of the channel that maybe says what that channel is doing/currently working on. I also saw that there are a lot of great note docs on recent mtgs so the latest notes could be pinned or something?? Just a suggestion and could just be my experience so perhaps not necessary but figured Iā€™d mention in case anyone else had a similar experience and thinks this could help. Also, as soon as I find where I fit in in here, Iā€™m happy to do this for the groups Iā€™d like to actively participate in!ā€

Super clean, simple, I think this works well. Really well thought out and keeps the noise down unless you opt into the noise

Writers Guild is on board for this

1 Like

Writers Guild is redoing our #start-here channel. Would this be a good place? What do you think is missing?