Discord Hangout This Saturday

Dear 15+ Patrons,

I'll be hosting my October Discord hangout this Saturday. The hangout will begin at 2pm Eastern Time and last a couple hours.

~~~I also want to announce that I'm considering opening a new, Patron-only ContraPoints Discord, to which all, say, $2+ patrons will be invited (and which we'll use for the 15+ hangouts). The current Discord is basically a fan server—it's moderated and used by a variety of fans of my channel, not all of whom are patrons. I therefore feel somewhat reluctant to supervise it too closely, issue decrees about what is or isn't allowed, ban users, etc. Unfortunately, this has become a bit of a problem, as a number of users and patrons have complained to me recently about the state of the community—they feel that it is hostile to them in one way or another. While this sort of issue is going to arise in any community of this size, and though the time I can afford to spend mediating disputes between fans/patrons is limited, I think that if I'm going to continue to use Discord as a patron reward, I need to be able to supervise to some extent, and increasingly it looks like that means starting a patron-only server. This won't happen for at least a couple weeks, however. Any other suggestions about how to handle this would also be appreciated.~~~

If you're new to Discord here's how it works:

Discord is an app that you can run in your browser that basically works just like an old-fashioned chatroom. The advantage over Google hangouts is you can have more than 10 people in chat at once.

I have my own ContraPoints server, which is made and moderated by fans and not closely supervised by me except during patron hangouts. Within the server there are different text-chat channels, like #general, #books, #politics, etc. There are also voice-chat channels where you can do audio chat. We'll use one of these called "Patron-Chat" to do the hangout tomorrow.

The first thing you need to do to get connected is join the server, using this invite link: https://t.co/x6sHJ9ZyPj

Once you're in the server, go back to Patreon. Go to your account settings (the gear icon). Go to the "Account" tab. Scroll down to "Connections." In the "Discord" section there should be a button that says "Connect." Click that and you should be automatically added to the "15 Patrons" role on my Discord, which will give you access to the Patron-Chat voice channel.

It sounds complicated, I know, but you should only have to do this once! Let me know if you have any questions.

Talk to you soon! 

<3 Contra