3 Tips for Using Discord for Our Writing Community
This video overviews how to use Discord for our writing group. It goes over how to send a direct message, how to post a link internally and externally, and how to comment on someone else’s post. It’s just the starting work — not the ways that gamers use Discord for gaming!
0:00 introduction
1:31 Decide on your device or browser
1:50 sample server—direct messaging
3:12 Post and respond to others posts within Channels.
4:43 How to post from the web and addresses there and place those links within Discord
4:55 Share to Discord
5:45 How I drop in information and the limitations of the resource
So the first decisions are where to use Discord — on your phone, on your computer, and what version you want —- do you want to download the app or sign in on a browser?
Once you’ve sorted the basics, including signing up and finding the invite link, then the first step is to try out direct messaging.
DIRECT MESSAGING: In Discord, you can set up a conversation with another member in your “Server” (think group), and then have a continuing conversation throughout the duration that the group meets (and further out, if you so desire).
There’s an icon — and it changes its look/location depending on your device, so you’re looking for an icon that suggests two or three people or has a message icon. Again, it depends on what your interface from Discord looks like. You click on that icon, and you’ll see your direct messages. You can, within the community, click on someone’s post, and then direct message that person from there. It’s really intuitive.
I like messages here, as opposed to email, because it’s easier to keep track of an extended conversation.
POSTING AND REPLYING WITHIN CHANNELS: Here’s the reason to like Discord — you can talk about specific topics without taking up too much space in an equivalent kind of program like Group Me. Group me is great, but it’s for specific questions, not for conversations that some want to opt to ignore. In Discord, you can ignore channels that aren’t helpful/interesting for you.
So you can respond, post or ask questions in specific channels, and you’re not on center stage. Click in on the post that you like or want to respond — you select the box around the post — you will see options.
LINKING RESOURCES FROM OUTSIDE DISCORD INTO A CHANNEL.
You can find an address outside of Discord, copy that address, and then paste it in Discord, or you can hit the share icon, and if you have Discord as a possible app option, you can then select the Discord server, and the channel, and share it to that channel while you’re still surfing the web.