At the beginning of this semester, I decided to use social media to grow my Minecraft Discord server, which centralises Minecraft gaming with friends.
Over the past couple of weeks, The Zone Project has adapted and iterated in accordance with my plan for the project.
Here is a quick video summarising some of the iterations and learning curves.
The first major iteration from my initial plan was to adjust my formal wording and to narrow the focus of my project. You can read about that iteration in this blog. This didn’t affect my recognised “problem”. In my initial Pitch I explained that I run a Minecraft server and connected Discord server that is very small. My problem therefore, was that it didn’t have many members and those that were there not very active or talkative. My aim was to shift people from the paradigm of “playing alone” to “playing with others”.
My “aim” has been one of my iterations. After discussing my project with a peer, we realised that my aim needed to be narrowed even further. Moving players from “playing alone” to “playing with others” was not only too broad, but also didn’t directly solve my problem. What I really wanted was to get people playing and staying in my server. The paradigm shift therefore would be from playing Minecraft alone or in other servers, to playing in mine and participating in my community specifically. Although this seems like a broader focus, it is actually more specific and focused on my problem.
One of my early plans was to grow followers through a public Instagram account that promoted gameplay on the server and announced updates. I started this fairly strong with an account that I tried to use daily and engage with the Minecraft community through other accounts and tags. This firstly became unrealistic with my lifestyle and timetable. I also found both gathering a following and finding similar accounts really difficult. Instead, I found Instagram saturated with meme based content. I saw this as an potential way to connect with the audience, however, for similar reasons that I already wasn’t using the platform a lot, I didn’t pursue it.
[Above]: The Zone Instagram
Although this platform didn’t gain a lot of traction, it initially did gain a few members for the server. So I don’t count this as a failure, but an iteration opportunity.
I then started twitch streaming to try and gain members through that platform. Twitch is a gaming based platform, this meant that the audience was pre-conditioned to the concept of gaming communities and potentially joining them. The biggest setback for this has been time. Twitch uses an “affiliate” structure similar to twitters “verified”. This allows users with a big enough following to gain more traction. As the weeks have passed, I have gotten closer to this status, but haven’t yet reached it. That being said, this strategy has amazingly proved much more successful. Through our bi-weekly streaming on Twitch we have gained heaps of new members to our discord and game. Many of these viewers have really contributed to our community.
[Above]: The Zone Twitch
To cultivate the active and friendly community that I am trying to build, I also worked on things internally. The Discord server has gone through multiple iterations of structure and design to test different styles that work best for my aim.
The first thing I did was invite a few people to help me moderate and communicate as we grew. With our numbers now more than double what they were at the beginning of this project, I am so thankful for their help. I initially asked 2 people to help moderate. This expanded further as we grew. One difficult iteration was when I decided to ask one of our staff to step down after a couple of weeks. This was in part due to their behaviour being quite arrogant and pushy, along with their inconsistency. Some weeks they were very present and helpful, others they were completely absent without explanation. I spoke to them about these reasons and asked them to step down.
I joined a number of Minecraft themed Discord servers to research their style and aesthetics. I was particularly curious about how active each of them were. This was helpful because I was able to see not only what others were doing, but also what I liked about their approach.
I came to realise that I was part of my own audience. My server is a reflection of my gaming style and how I interact with the Minecraft game. Therefore, I needed to keep in mind that part of what I was creating and curating was a Discord community that I want to and enjoy being a part of. This has really helped drive my motivation for this project.
There has naturally been more iterations and progress, but I can’t put everything here. To find out more check out my other blogs, other Beta, or the server itself.
Video Reference:
Marshall, P, Moore, C & Barbour, K 2020, Persona Studies: An Introduction, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.
Boswell's Brain 
Hey Boswell, glad to see the Zone has seen such significant growth in members and is thriving. I hope this is a continued pattern as you continue to moderate this space.
I noticed and appreciate all of the changes you’ve made to the Discord server’s layout and structure, especially streamlining the channels and adding a rules section. As the core platform for facilitating this online community, it is definitely the most important aspect to maintain. What I love about Discord is how modular everything is, so you can be constantly updating and iterating upon your project, like a perpetual work-in-progress. You have a fast, effective, and consistent feedback loop with your members right at your fingertips on Discord. You’ve shown that already you’re taking advantage of this by listening to the suggestions of your Discord community members. I think you may benefit from creating a #suggestions-box channel, for feedback directly from your users, so that it’s all available in one place for you to check. Other members can use message reactions to re-affirm an idea or suggestion made. Maybe this can be in the ‘other’ channel group below #questions or you could even rename this channel to #questions-and-suggestions if you wish to consolidate to avoid clutter.
I noticed in your beta video that you touched upon the challenge of users muting the server or suppressing pings when it became too noisy. As I suggested in my initial peer review, I think as a public discord community you would greatly benefit from creating a self-assignable, reaction role system that allows your users to customise their notification settings. They can each select which topics or announcements interest them the most, and notifications can be attached to roles, saving @everyone pings for very specific circumstances only. So for example, a role for twitch stream pings, a role for mod/server announcements, a role for community content, and so on. Here’s a wikihow article that will run you through the process of creating self-assignable roles using a Discord bot;
https://www.wikihow.com/Add-Reaction-Roles-to-a-Discord-Server-on-PC-or-Mac
This guide is using either Carl Bot (https://carl.gg/) or Zira (https://zira.gg/) but some other options include YAGPDB (https://yagpdb.xyz/) or you could follow this tutorial for Mee6 (https://mee6.xyz/tutorials/allow-users-to-self-assign-roles-in-discord-with-the-mee6-bot-reaction-roles) which is a bot that you’re already using for The Zone.
Users will be less likely to mute pings and whole channels if they aren’t being bombarded with notifications they don’t want, so allowing everyone to customise their own server experience may help alleviate this issue.
I think it was the correct decision to move away from Instagram as a platform, and focus on recruiting members through other channels instead, such as Minecraft server list websites, other Minecraft communities’ self-promo channels, and plugging the server through your Twitch streams. However, I still think that you could easily re-use your Twitch VODs to create video content on YouTube or TikTok and reach a new audience. You could create highlight reels by downloading and cutting down your streams (https://www.lifewire.com/download-twitch-videos-4151697), or create a “best clips” compilation using clips created by your own audience (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscordzone/clips?filter=clips&range=all).
I think it’s a great idea to use other communities for reference and inspiration, it may even help to reach out to some mods of these spaces for advice or help. Best of luck for the upcoming weeks and I hope this feedback is useful for you :]
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