Discord Owns Up to Killing Forums — Now Turning to AI to Fix the Mess
Discord is exploring the use of AI to help users catch up on conversations , which could be a major relief for anyone who’s ever returned to a server only to face an overwhelming flood of unread messages.
Peter Sellis, Discord’s Senior Vice President of Product, admitted that the platform has become a kind of information black hole , telling The Verge :
“This is something we want to solve. It’s not our intention to lock knowledge inside Discord.”
Over the years, many have criticized how useful discussions and solutions get lost in endless chat logs — especially within private servers — making it hard for new users to access past insights. This has contributed to the decline of more structured spaces like forums.
To address this, Discord is considering two main approaches.
First: enhancing features that support organized knowledge sharing , such as tools tailored for game developers, which could function similarly to traditional forums.
Second: leveraging AI models like those behind ChatGPT, which could summarize long, messy threads into digestible takeaways. As Sellis put it, lengthy chats are “a really poorly structured shareable object” — but AI might turn them into something searchable, sharable, and even publishable online.
That said, there’s no timeline or finalized plan just yet. Sellis noted that the team hasn’t found the right solution and wants to avoid overburdening moderators, who already do a lot without pay.
Still, the issue hits close to home internally. As Sellis explained, “I assure you, this is something people at Discord feel the pain of ourselves — and when our team feels it personally, they tend to find a way to fix it.”