If you’re an avid user of Discord, you may have noticed their newest feature: Discord Student Hubs. By joining the Hub with your student email (you’ll still stay logged in to your normal account, don’t worry), you can gain access to the Hub and see whatever Discord servers are connected to it, allowing you to connect with other students.
For the uninformed: Discord is a social communication platform which allows users to create and join servers based on communities or friend groups. In these servers (or in private messages), users can communicate with voice and video calls, text messaging, or by sending media such as images, videos and emotes. It’s a fun space for people to connect and talk about their interests, share their screens while gaming, have voice calls or just hang out.
The Student Hub feature allows server owners to connect their servers to the Hub. The Hub can be accessed by anyone with a student email at a university which offers a Hub. Students can then join other servers connected to the Hub. The goal is to give students access to other Discord servers at their university.
As of publishing, there are eight servers connected to the A-State Hub. Some are just personal servers full of students looking to meet other students, while others are built around meeting students who play certain games, such as tabletop card game Magic the Gathering. There are at least 94 students who have connected their student emails to the Hub, myself included.
If your student organization has a Discord server, you may now be wondering: “Should I add my server to the Hub?”
There are definitely pros and cons. The major pro is that your server will get more publicity and members from other students in the Hub. For example, the A-State Esports team has added their server to the Hub to attract prospective new team members.
However, the major con is that anyone can immediately join your server from the Hub, so if you’ve got a smaller special interest group you may not want just anybody from campus joining your server. A nice middle ground for this is to have some sort of waiting room or validation process for new members, so you can decide who to allow in on an individual basis. For example, the A-State Gender and Sexuality Alliance Discord server is set up so that new server members must introduce themselves in the Introductions channel to be given a Member role, which allows them to access the whole server.
For students considering whether or not to join the Hub, there’s also the usual internet safety things to think about — a server on the Hub likely won’t have the same moderation that the A-State Student App will. Student-run servers also seem to have no requirements for users to have their real name as their username, so you won’t be able to take an issue to Student Conduct if you’re being harassed by SussyBaka69. You should take the same precautions to Discord as you would to something like YikYak (an anonymous social media app where users can connect to anyone in a five mile radius).
Discord has stated on their Student Hubs FAQ that “Hubs are not officially affiliated with or managed by schools. A Student Hub is a collection of student-run servers. The Hub’s function is to make it easier for classmates to find and join one another’s servers if they choose to do so.” However, Discord does have a list of guidelines for Hub-connected servers.
And on the off chance any teachers are considering making a Discord server for their class: It’s entirely up to you. If you have the technological prowess to understand how Discord works, and you trust your students to be responsible in your server, then by all means try it out. But if you’re the sort of person that hasn’t quite figured out how to turn off autoplay on YouTube, you’re probably better off leaving Discord to us youngins. I will add that Slack operates very similarly to Discord, so if you’re technologically apt but don’t want to mess with Discord you can check out Slack instead.
So, should you join the A-State Student Hub on Discord? Maybe. If you’re not the sort of person who talks to people outside of your social circle, or you’re not a big user of Discord, then maybe the Hub isn’t for you. But if you’re interested in talking to all kinds of people from our campus, or you just want some friends to play video games with, then I think the Hub is worth a look. I’ve joined three servers from the Hub so far and I’m interested to see how the communities thrive as more people explore the Hub.
Categories: Opinion
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