Introducing The Techdirt Insider Discord
from the join-us dept
Join the Insider Discord with a Watercooler or Behind The Curtain membership!
Techdirt has been around for nearly 25 years at this point, and we have an unfortunate habit of being just slightly too far ahead of the technology curve. The site was launched before the word blog even existed, and certainly before there were readily available and easy to use tools for creating a blog (more on that soon!), so we cobbled together our own solution. We've done that with unfortunate frequency. In the early 2000s, we even built our own internal RSS reader in order to find stories (I always thought it was better than Google Reader). And, a while back, we launched the Techdirt "Insider Chat" long before Discord or Slack or other such tools were popular.
The Techdirt Insider Chat was a widget on our site that, if you supported us at certain levels in our own Insider Shop (or on Patreon), you got access to a chat that only those supporters could use -- but which was still displayed on the sidebar for anyone to see. Because there weren't widespread tools to make this possible, we built our own. But it was a bit clunky and limited, and honestly wasn't receiving that much use beyond a handful of dedicated users.
Over the last few months, we've moved the Insider Chat over to Discord, which has become the standard these days for community chats. However, we did want to still include the feature of displaying the chat publicly -- but only allowing actual supporters to participate. So while we are now using Discord as the basis of the chat (which is much easier for many people to use, has many more features, and allows for things like accessing the chat on mobile devices), we built our own embeddable widget that reflects the chat in the sidebar (which you can see if you look over to the right).
If you're interested in (1) supporting Techdirt and (2) joining in on the conversations now happening in the chat and (3) connecting with others in the Techdirt community, please consider supporting us at a level that includes the Insider Chat.
As you'll recall, earlier this year we removed all the ads (and Google tracking code) from Techdirt. We are relying more and more on our community supporting us going forward, and we're working hard to provide those supporters with more useful and fun features, including this new Discord community.
Filed Under: chat, insider chat, techdirt
Companies: discord, techdirt
