Why I Switched To Guilded

And then, switched back to Discord.

Let's be clear, Guilded was always a zero-growth platform for us. If you didn't already have a massive following elsewhere, recruiting on Guilded was abysmal.

The issues with Guilded span wide. They were a bridge too far for many who were looking for alternatives to the Nitro nag hell of Discord. Many chat clients went the way of the dodo, ceased their offerings, stripped their services, or leaned toward capitalizing on their product. Some for greed, some for survival.

via GIPHY

But Guilded Was Supposed To Be Different

I've been supporting Guilded since Enjin was a popular guild-site option. Think MySpace for gamers. I actually paid into Guilded's membership plan for years. At some point, I stopped using the platform, stopped gaming so much, and so it didn't make sense to keep supporting a product I simply wasn't using.

Then Guilded rebranded. They rebuilt their client, seemingly from the ground up. Offered unique channel types with a Slack/Discord-esque UI and seemed to be about the user experience. Unfortunately, that dream fell flat on its face in short order.

Guilded Sold Its Soul, and Yours

Guilded became a feature factory, churning out new channel types and features in sporadic bursts, and put a great deal of effort into producing skits / ads they displayed on Twitter/X and other socials. Then the marketing content started flooding their Twitter feed, seeming to target younger and younger audiences. Then the virtue signaling began, and it was downhill from there.

To be clear, virtue signaling, in my terms, is any time a company changes their logo or content to reflect support for an entity, when very little or no actual support contribution occurs.

Then the 3D skits, the animations, the goofy gamer-targeted ads, and so forth.

Then they sold out to Roblox. At first, it seemed like Roblox were angel investors, supporting Guilded in name, without putting their hands in Guilded's circuits, so to speak. Guilded reaped a ton of benefits from their new owners buyout/support, for quite a time. And through proxy, the users (like me) did as well. We got larger uploads, a seemingly more stable client, etc.

The Betrayal

Guilded actively recruits new partners, and Gil Gang members. Gil Gang is supposedly an intersection of highly supportive Guilded users, and Guilded's inner circle, which may include devs, but at least one or two members of Guilded's top brass.

Guilded actively partnered with at least 3 people who openly declared mental illness, and/or the intent to harm themselves or others, in the general chat, of the official server. The closer I looked at the activities of people who were announced partners, the worse it got.

Other partners seemed to have smaller audiences than I, on Twitter (now X) YouTube, and Twitch. One major driving factor for partner recruiting my associates and I could deduce, was the number of "stonks" those users had. Partners seemed to be selected based on how many recruited referrals (members who sign up with the invite link / server link). Upon investigating, we determined the servers for those users often did not have as many people as their profile seemed to indicate they had recruited, so where did those stonks (5x referral-based signups) come from? Simple answer, they were fake signups. We investigated multiple partners and gil gang members and determined at least half a dozen "partners" and Gil Gang members that were announced had more stonks than members in their server, subscribers to their channels, etc. We couldn't find a source for their recruitment traffic.

Upon testing we determined it was fairly easy to cheat the system to generate stonks. This was all being discovered in my last few weeks on the platform.

So to be clear, we only managed to identify 2 qualities Guilded wanted in partners.
1. Mental instability/illness, on public display.
(I'm not making fun of it, I'm just being honest).
2. Tons of recruits, regardless of real social media presence/following.

At some point, other than a few merch items, I couldn't find a single reason why partner would be desirable. There were no perceivable benefits to striving for partnership, and no road to achieve it in the first place. When denied partner, we were given no options, no pointers, no information. Simply denied, and then ignored.

We Saw The Signs

And then they announce Roblox login integration. Something every member in my server over 16 (and at least one under) complained about. Imagine the youngest member in your server complaining because they're concerned about a deluge of squeaky voices (Roblox users) flooding their servers. Guilded has a minimum age of 13 platform-wide. But Roblox can have kids of any age, with their parents permission. A massive chunk of Roblox users are pre-teen. Guilded effectively signed its death warrant at this point.

We had suffered a lot of other problems, platform-wide, that made us consider alternatives, and even reconsider returning to Discord. Voice and video comms instability, causing total dropouts of users, desktop sharing glitches that forced us to stop whatever we're doing, sometimes in the middle of a fight in whatever game we were playing, just so we could restore comms. We tried using Guilded during game jams, dev meetups, etc. 19/20 calls had some form of visual or audible glitching, if not total loss of comms, that drove us to look for other options.

It Gets Worse

While encountering numerous issues, being wary of the Roblox merge, and trying to patiently wait for updates/fixes, still in our optimistic phase, Guilded brought me into Gil Gang. Gil Gang, primarily run by Fi really only had 2 nodes to it.

Game Nights were, kindof fun. It's sometimes a challenge to find multiplayer games that can support a lot of people at once. And when you do, comms can become an issue in-game.

Bear in mind, in Guilded, we're still struggling to have voice comms or desktop sharing with 2 people. Now try 5, 12, or 20. At first it seemed kind of fun....but we actually started running into issues with comms. People dropping off, voice quality dying, staticky disconnected voices, all manner of issues. It was so bad people were jokingly suggesting we use TeamSpeak on at least two game nights.

Then, you begin to understand the bane of Gil Gang, and why, it sucks.

In order to remain a member of Gil Gang, you have to slave your social media accounts to it. You have to frequently blast Guilded on your own socials so you can keep up with a mandatory "to do list". (posting various personal details like favorite foods etc, posting Guilded referral URLs on your own socials and/or sharing posts from the Guilded Twitter feed etc)

Supposedly, after you rank up from doing this for....quite some time, they send you a beanie, and some other merch. But to be honest, I don't think anyone I spoke to about it, thought it was worth the time and effort.

The problem with that system boils down to 1 thing.... socials die when they appear to be extensions of another brand. We all had fledgeling socials and were trying to make cool stuff and share it with the world.

If you actually managed to make partner, supposedly there was a bit of reciprocation for the whole cross-promotion thing... but the handful of people that made it, didn't seem particularly interested in helping anyone else figure out what the hell Guilded was looking for in partners. The criteria Guilded posted online was abysmal and vague, and partners tended to stay tight-lipped about it.

The Path Forward

So where do I stand now? Well, I'm growing my Discord server again. I'm also paying for Nitro. While I wish I didn't have to, and I wish there was a better alternative out there, I also can't deny, some of the extra features are decently implemented. Even some of the micro-transaction items appealed to me.

Discord isn't out of the woods yet. There are other products that may rear their ugly heads and challenge the throne. It may be some time before we see them in the spotlight. Who knows, maybe an open-source alternative like Matrix will make it big. I think we have yet to see the full fallout from Guilded's.... betrayal. Multiple businesses/companies were reliant on Guilded's offerings and promises. I expect an article on Kotaku or LifeHacker any day covering stories from insiders about all of this, and I doubt it'll be pretty.

If you know of alternatives, we would be happy to check them out.
I know of Matrix, Rocket Chat, Revolt, etc. Most of these lack stable VoIP, video, desktop sharing, among a plethora of other features.

Did you have issues with Guilded? We would love to know about them in the comments (or on our server).

In the mean time:

If you're looking to join a Discord server full of creative and talented people, come check out our server. We've got game devs, 3D artists, programmers, musicians, all kinds of people from all walks of life. You're more than welcome to join us.