5 Tips for Managing an Engaging Discord Server

I’ve joined plenty of discord servers in the past year and most of them have been treasure troves filled with wonderful and insightful people. Some of them have provided useful resources for technical support, others were wonderfully scented dumpster fires for well-crafted memes and fun events. Yet, every now and then activity in a server that was once buzzing comes to a full stop. So, I couldn’t help but wonder- what happened or what now? Eventually I’d decide to leave and move to another one more active, only to either leave the server untouched for a couple months to see little to no activity from others.

Discord lets us join 100 servers without worry. It’s amazing if you like interacting with a bunch of strangers on the internet at any given time, but as a server owner it means that your community could be starved for attention and engagement.

Now, engagement isn’t something I think every server looks to have unless it’s one geared towards building a strong social connection between its users or expects them to contribute in some way to give back and provide fresh content for the server as time passes. Still, the benefits are obvious, most of the engaging servers I’ve been to has members talking with one another, sharing, and bringing value to the experience of being part of the community for everyone who’s there.

The servers I think seem to do particularly well are technical servers such as that concerned with subjects like computer science, streaming, UI/UX/website designing, and personal finance. Then there are social servers like co-working spaces, music, art, crowdsourced stories, game nights, roleplaying, and even streamer/personality centered servers which I think, without the five tips I mention below, don’t always make for an engaging server.

Anyways, here’s 5 things I think you need to maintain an engaging discord server.

1. Have a core group
When your discord server grows, you’ll need the help of others to keep it alive. Unless you’re going to devote hours to feed the server interesting news, memes, and other amenities that bots don’t provide 24/7, there’ll undoubtedly be lots of down time. So, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect other people to initiate interactions within the server outright just because (although there are those very few who do).

The members of the core group can be delegated to act as a welcome party, a hype team, an entourage that helps set-up jokes, send daily memes, tidbits of pop news, oversee in-server user developments, and even marketing it to the outside world. All of these could be done in their free time and there’s definitely an opportunity to have a lot of fun when there’s some variety in the interest within the core group.

Another reason for why I think having a core group is essential is that you share the burden of creating engagement and it seems less pathetic when loitering in VC channels. I say this because I don’t think there’s anything more pathetic than seeing one person alone in a voice channel for hours on end all the time. I don’t think it looks good. Sometimes having one or two people hang around the server voice channels or being direct lines to voice concerns seem to be something that “indoctrinates” new members to the server. I find that a lot of people are shy and prefer to lurk, and it’s something you may have learn to accept over time. but let me save that discussion for point five of this list.

My observation has shown that it takes some engagement to create more from others.

2. Strip Channels to the essential.
Don’t have 3 or more bot channels unless needed. You don’t need that many. You may also not need to have more than 2 fixed voice channels in the start unless you’re sure that it’ll have people using them regularly on certain parts of the day. After all, there are bots that let you create temporary voice channels. In my opinion it results in a less cluttered and confusing server menu.

You want to keep channels relevant to your server’s goals. If you insist on adding Nsfw channels in an SFW space you may include it in a locked and hidden group, so its access and visibility is limited.

Surely “essential” is subjective. I think some servers have excess voice channels that server more “decorative” purposes that compliment the server’s theme. Yet gaming channels or generic voice channels should be limited to what is needed at the moment for a less noisy server interface.

3. Create re-occurring events consistently.
It takes a lot of effort to keep a server full of interesting moments for people to want to engage with it, but after stripping your server’s channels to their essentials and delegating roles for the management and engagement of individual channels, you’ll eventually have to decide “what to do inside them”

Sometimes it’s just a bit of fact/novelty/ a day in a year. A daily question. A weekly or monthly discussion on a hot topic. Etc. For servers that revolve around youtubers and streamers it’s going to be a new video upload, or stream, commissions, or workshops. Regardless of what kind of event it is, certainly, consistency is key for users to want to check and come back to a text channel in your server.

The period in which some re-occurring events may occur should be relevant to how fast you and your users expect to make a decent reply or fresh piece of content.

Imagine, if you were running a social group and you’d want to have movie screenings it takes less preparation to stream a movie than it does to prepare questions for game night. So quite naturally, the period in between sessions is going to be shorter for the former.

4. Take advantage of threads and roles
Most of the time, threads can seem a tad formal. Understandably so, it’s a sort of paper trail of what’s worth keeping track of and the context it was said with.

But when you browse through the search tab, and look up old conversations, it’s very difficult to track what people are talking about and with who without scrolling through several lines of unrelated conversation. To them and in the present, it’s difficult to know who a stranger was conversing with when it’s overlapped with several other users also talking in the same text channel.

It’s only after a year of using discord that I’ve seen the importance and value it can bring. In general, I’ve seen it give a clear overview of the topics and discussions that had occurred in the past year or so. And when I open up the thread, it’s easy to follow conversations relative to those I’d find on the main text channel.

I can make a short article of why using threads are important and some of their applications some other time. But simply put, backreading can get somewhat tedious, specifically if you’re looking for an important discussion that may have happened 5 months ago.

Threads keep the conversations fresh, and easier to reference for future instances. Of course it takes a bit of foresight to ever consider a conversation would need to be referenced on a later date. But it’s definitely going to be best practice to use it whenever discussing things that you plan to occur frequently (i.e. under a reoccurring event like say for a book club).

Roles are also something I feel a lot of servers are underutilizing to some extent. I’ve seen roles let users know they share the same interest as other users, making it easier to pinging them for re-occurring events. But imagine this, roles can also be provided based on your activity.

Having to earn a role means it becomes a bit of a carrot on a stick. The challenge for a server mod is then to provide an adequate “carrot”, in this case hidden channels that require a certain level of commitment and engagement from the users.

5. make room for ways to exist without having to engage immediately
If you think creating and planning events was difficult. Try to consider the possibility that others will lurk during said events as a given when you plan things out.

A lot of people prefer to lurk until they’re interested or comfortable enough with every stranger involved before they’d engage. So, having a lot of lurkers that have no interest in contributing to a discussion is definitely something I think you’re going to have to accept.

There are activities that exist that show active participation without needing them to talk. Imagine a movie watching session, having someone perform on a stage, a seminar and workshop. Sometimes, these things could be done via threads with asynchronous discussions, monologues, and critiques during the post-event.

Final Words
I don’t think having all the five tips above would make a server instantly “worth engaging with” I think they give people an opportunity to want to engage with your server. Another thing, if you were hoping to revive a dead server and turn it into an engaging one these may help you do that, but I’ve listed more tips on this another article I’ll be posting soon.