Let's talk about our platforms

Aight, so, this is all over the place and it's mostly me just raising things up that I think we should talk about. Feel free to dispute/disagree with anything I'm saying, this what I'm hoping happens.

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Regarding our external platforms, can we do more with Youtube? I honestly don't know enough about it to say.
What else can be done with it besides just posting the videos? All I can think of is eventually creating playlist, but we're still not there yet.
Eventually I'd like to use it to showcase other community channels, doing collab works, etc, but we probably have more videos. 

I loved that we were able to get someone to join our Discord by joining that conversation on Twitter. I don't use it much, but I think we should strive to do it more. If you see an opportunity make sure to post it in #marketing or #general (I wonder if it's worth it to have a social presence channel on discord). As far our Reddit Account goes, posting comment responses is probably fine. As per reddit rules the main videos, posted on other subs, should be posted using personal accounts that are used for other stuff too. I see a case both for replying to video comments using our personal accounts and for doing so with the official ones, say after hashing it out on the forums. What do you all think?

Discord is wonderful, got nothing to complain except that it doesn't integrate with IFTTT. The only way I can see we doing something is Slack, which does and is a lot similar, but it's pretty expensive ($6.67 per user/month) and I've never used it to be sure. I can say with confidence that Discord is the main plaza of our little internet town, as everything we do fluidly revolves around it. I'm mostly fine with it, but feel free to suggest a reworking of the channels or whatever. The only thing I can think of atm about discord is maybe changing the name of the offtopic section to community, but you could say that it's a pet peeve of mine.


Now, the forums and why I think it's important that we talk about the clunky elephant in the room (not my words). We've already talked about it a bit over Discord, but it's stream of consciousness format doesn't lend itself very well to thought out responses. The conversation moves too fast, which is great if you want to keep things moving but I think we all agree that there is a lot to be said about long form discourse, which is exactly why we need a structured platform. We've had feedback that the forums feel weird, that people they don't know how to use it, how quoting works, etc. While I'd like to investigate this and talk more about it, I think that if people don't like it they're not going to use, regardless of the reason. We need platforms that people like to use, that they feel comfortable with. It's why discord works.

That said, from my perspective we seem to have 2 choices if we agree that the forum is not ideal (which we might not):
Pick something else. Maybe let's use GDrive, Reddit, Kialo, or something else. Maybe a combination of those tools.
Make it better. Change the forum's system, interface, integrate it more with discord, change the boards layout, write FAQs to tell people how to more easily use the forums, etc.


I'm personally mostly fine with using a forum, although I'm not particularly attached to this one. What I currently see as the most promising solution would be a possibly better forum and more effort put into integrating it with Discord, the last one being key. I don't think a subreddit quite fits the bill because of how dynamic it is, from what I know trying to organize/categorize it only results in a increase in said clunkiness. Kialo is interesting, I think we should try to test it with different stuff, but I don't see how it would substitute a forum. Regardless of what we decide, I know that moving this kind of things is a hassle, count me in as a volunteer.

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That's all I can think about atm, I'm hoping other people hop in to contribute!

Yeah, definitely. I tried to lay it out and raise issues as widely as possible but, all in all, the best solution I can see now is to integrate discord and the forums as much as possible and consider them our main platforms. We can't get to frictionless, but if we agree to keep it this way the #tldr and the eventual bot are a step in the right direction.

Regardless, I'm curious if someone has a better alternative for any of this, or want to pinch in some other way.