The don't on how to build an engaging Discord community

Welcome back to the part 2 of our in-depth analysis of how to engage discord community, based on over 30,000 quest data points. In Part 1, we explored the initial challenges that servers face in engaging community members effectively. In this part, we'll delve deeper into specific pitfalls that can hinder genuine community engagement within your community. Understanding these common mistakes is crucial for fostering an authentic and thriving environment for your members.

1. Over-reliance on "Chatters" to Jumpstart Community Engagement

Many projects resort to employing "chatters"— paid community members tasked with creating conversation among each others on the Discord server—to simulate activity. While this may generate initial buzz, it often backfires in the long run.

Why It's Problematic:

• Crowding Out Effect: Community members may feel intimidated or unwelcome when they see conversations dominated by a select group. This is also an issue with an active community.  This creates a barrier for new members who might feel they're intruding on an exclusive circle, hence reaching the opposite effect of encouraging participation
• Lack of Authenticity: Experienced users can quickly tell when interactions are inorganic. Chatters often engage in generic discussions that lack depth and rarely pertain to the project's core topics.
• Poor First Impressions: An inauthentic atmosphere can deter potential discord users. First impressions are critical, and a facade of engagement can lead to skepticism about the project's legitimacy.

Recommendation: Focus on organic growth by encouraging members to have genuine conversations. You can try our hype engine to foster authentic engagement. Highlight meaningful discussions and recognize members who contribute thoughtfully. This will create a positive feedback system and tell your discord users that you value quality over quantity.

2. Incentivizing the Wrong Discord Behaviors on Boost Engagement

While monetary incentives can motivate community engagement, rewarding your community members the wrong behaviors can be detrimental. Common mistakes include hosting events with a monetary rewards such as:

• Rewarding Message Quantity: Using discord bots like Arcane (chat competition) to track and reward the number of messages sent by community members encourages spamming rather than meaningful community engagement.

Incentivizing Mass Invites: Offering rewards for community members who bring in new members can attract bots or uninterested users, diluting the quality of the discord community.

Why It's Harmful:

• Degrades User Experience: An influx of low-quality content can frustrate active regular members and discourage participation.It is just harder for normal members to engage when they don't understand what's going on in a server.
• Signals Misplaced Priorities: It shows that the community values metrics over meaningful engagement, which can erode trust.

Recommendation: Design incentive structures that promote quality contributions. For example, reward members for insightful discussions, helpful feedback, or creative ideas that align with the project's goals.

3. Forcing Premature Mass Adoption

Pushing for rapid adoption, typically via Zealy through a special quest might seem effective but can be counterproductive, especially for early-stage projects where there is no data on retention.

Challenges:

• Low Retention Rates: Users attracted by one-time rewards are unlikely to stay engaged, leading to a sharp drop-off after initial participation. This is also a bad way to build a healthy feedback system since your paid community members can only give you more superficial thoughts.
• Missed Learning Opportunities: Managing a massive influx of community members / users without proper analytics makes it hard to gather meaningful insights, so you don't necessarily understand user flows, fall off, and where they are adopting the most. All of this require extensive analytics on the backend. 
• One-Time Impression: Early experiences shape user perceptions. If the product isn't ready, users may not return back to your discord server, wasting the initial outreach effort.

Recommendation: Focus on gradual growth. Engage early adopters who are genuinely interested and can provide valuable feedback. You can setup different channels on Discord to specifically handle bugs & feedback. Ensure your product is robust enough to retain members before scaling up. We've learned this the hard way by seeing some of our client's servers having massive adoption to Hype Engine and early fell off after the rewards is over.

4. Overmarketing on your announcement channel

Announcement channel is the prime real estate in your discord community. While new members might visit multiple channels during their initial onboarding, announcement discord channel often receive 4x more traffic than the general chat channel. It is the first, might be the only chance to make a lasting impression.

Common Mistakes:

• Over-Shilling: Constantly promoting your product or reposting content from other social media platforms can overwhelm and disengage your members. Some examples of bad community announcement can be go to our twitter and like these tweets. Another example can be constantly giving the same promo code to ask people to use your product.  
• Off-Topic Content: Sharing irrelevant updates diverts attention from important information. 

Why It Doesn't Work:

• User Fatigue: Members may start ignoring announcements from your discord server if they're perceived as spammy or self-serving, especially when you tag @everyone each time that you make an announcement.

Recommendation:

• Curate Content: Use announcement channels for updates like product developments, community initiatives, and important news. First, you should make announcements regularly. Second, make your announcement technical and product-driven. For example, if you are a software product, talk about what you guys pushed last week and what's cooking this week. Don't be afraid to make it technical because your developer community members are out there and you want to speak their language.

Dedicated Channels for Social Media: Create a separate channel for social media feeds or use bots to automate posts, keeping the main announcement channel focused and valuable.

5. Selecting the Wrong Moderators

Your moderation teamis super important because they set the tone for your community. Choosing the wrong moderators can have far-reaching negative effects on building thriving discord community.

Red Flags:

• Over-Shilling Moderators: Mods who focus solely on promoting the product without fostering genuine engagement can alienate members. Similar to 4, just shilling X links are not good ways to foster genuine engagement.
• Low-Quality Engagement: Mods engaging in superficial conversations (e.g., only discussing the weather, small chit chat without talking about their own personal life) contribute to a lackluster community atmosphere. If your moderation team is not friendly, why would a new member try to be?
• Lack of Alignment: Mods who aren't aligned with the project's vision or language can create confusion and dilute the brand message. If after a while, your mods still don't understand anything about your projects and don't speak your language, you are better off hiring your superfans to advocate your product on your server.

Why It Matters:

• Behavior Modeling: New members often mimic the behavior of moderators. Poor examples can lead to a deteriorating community culture.
• Community Trust: Effective moderators build trust, encourage participation, and help resolve issues constructively.

Recommendation: Select moderators who are passionate about your project, communicate effectively, and embody the community values. Sometimes, it's better to have no moderator than one who detracts from the community experience.