Streamlining Discord Onboarding and More

Hey Everyone!

This post will be about the current state of the 1hive Discord server and my suggestions to improve it. They’re pretty straightforward and I’m sure I’m not the only one to have thought of them, but with the incredible increase in new users (I am one of them) it seems necessary to discuss the changes that could be made.

  1. User Onboarding
    • Central Hub
    • Restricted Initial Access
    • Limited Rights
  2. Moderating The Discord
    • Malicious Intent
    • Role Significance
  3. Utilizing SourceCred
    • Earning Roles
    • Locked Emojis

User Onboarding

  • First things first, as a new user myself it has been quite the journey. Now that @Eth_Man is creating a very well documented FAQ things are starting to take shape. This can be built upon and utilized on all relevant platforms, Discord being one of them. I believe the server would benefit from a few channels which are completely restricted and can only be read. These are the channels that will answer all your basic questions, as long as you take the time to read them. Technically all this information could fit into one single FAQ channel however I do think 3-4 categorized channels would be more efficient.
  • To incentivize new users to actually read these channels and to prevent flooding of the server by botted accounts or malicious users, a simple check can be put in place in one of these channels. A discord bot can assign permissions or a role when a user reacts to a certain post with an emoji. This is a simple check often done in larger servers. After completing this check they’ll gain access to the rest of the server.
  • Once said user has been granted access to the rest of the server, I think it would be wise to allow the user limited rights. As an example, newly checked users can be restricted to text messages only. No links, no videos and no images. This could be for as little as 10 minutes, which would already help tremendously.

Moderating the Discord

  • Now, the previously mentioned measures might seem quite strong, especially considering how open and inclusive the community tries to be. The issue however is that there will always be users with malicious intent. Many issues come with running a large Discord server, including brigading and rivaling communities, however strange that might sound.
  • Roles play a large part in moderating a Discord server and there are various ways of attaining them. Most in line with this community’s aims would be for roles to be earned. One example is the green honey role present currently. I’ll expand on this idea a little bit below, related to SourceCred. With the large influx of users it’ll get to a point where more moderation might be necessary, although it seems fine for now. Perhaps implementing a short-term moderation system in anticipation of even larger growth wouldn’t be a bad idea though.

Utilizing SourceCred

So these ideas are a bit more conceptual. I’ve read about SourceCred but obviously have no idea how it works behind the scenes. I’ve made these suggestions to @sandpiper however and they seem fine.

  • As mentioned above, moderating the Discord might very well be necessary at a certain point. Ideally we would decide as a community who would be capable of taking up this role, however as shown in the past on other social media platforms this doesn’t always work out. My suggestion therefore is to utilize lifetime Cred earned to assign roles. Roles with more permissions require more Cred etc. This would tie permissions that help moderate the discord to users who have significantly contributed to the project and who are least likely to abuse them.
  • Lastly there is the possibility to lock certain emojis behind similar roles. Currently Cred can be earned when users react to your post with emojis. Locking higher weighted emojis behind these roles is a way of balancing out Cred distribution on Discord. Regular users have access to lower weighted emojis while contributors have access to higher weighted emojis. There are some potential issues with implementing this and it depends a bit on how/when SourceCred determines whom to assign Cred to. We’ve talked about it a bit already and it seems doable but you never know.

EDIT:

Just to add to SC utilization, although my initial explanation only covered roles with relevant permissions being locked behind Cred, this obviously isn’t necessary. ‘For fun’ roles can also be locked behind cred, in turn gamifying contributions. Same goes for emojis.

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