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# System prepended metadata

title: Stop over-organizing Chats
tags: [rant]

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---
title: Stop over-organizing Chats
description: Stop overly organizing chats into a million categories, please.
tags: rant
image: https://i.imgur.com/ygHMrVP.png
---

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# Stop over-organizing Chats.

Recently I've noticed that many chats are way too over-organized, specifically on Discord, Revolt and Guilded.

By that I mean that there's way too many channels for a specific purpose. For instance, instead of one #OffTopic channel, you might have an entire OffTopic category with a main chat, Tech-Talk, Music, Pet images...
This can be quite annoying to talk in, as for every change of topic, you need to switch channels on most servers according to the rules.

Let me give you an example. Here is a screenshot of the "General" category on the Linux Mint Discord server, which is steadily growing in terms of channels, with more and more categories added over time:

![](https://i.imgur.com/ltWGXni.png)
<span style="font-size:12px; color:grey">(I only used this as an example, no hard feelings, love y'all!)</span>

Here you can see #OffTopic, #TechTalk, #Memes, #Music...
And it shows exactly what I think shouldn't be an offtopic section
Sure, there can be some seperate boards mainly for images, like #Pet-Photos for instance, but having 4 different channels for discussing either anything, *only* tech, *only* memes, and *only* music seems excessive. Not to mention the server has more of these:

![](https://i.imgur.com/QMSB2N4.png)

## A Different approach:

Instead of having multiple offtopic channels, which actually do *have a topic*, we can replace them by the following instead:

- **Multiple OffTopic Channels** (uncategorised)
Multiple offtopic channels allow multiple conversations to be held at once, without limiting yourself to one topic. This means you could have one group of people currently discussing music or art, but they could switch to tech at any time without having to switch channels. An example implementation would feature between 2-3 channels, named #Offtopic-1, #Offtopic-2 and #Offtopic-3 respectively.
- **Threads**
Whilst this is extra effort from singular users, if two discussions are going on in the same offtopic channel, people could simply branch out into a thread to seperate their conversation. With automatic archiving, this wouldn't clutter the chat too.

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<span style="font-size:25px;">Thanks for reading and have a nice day! :heart:</span>