Willemstan's Move to Discord

This article was last updated on November 26th of 2020.

The first message sent in the #notifications channel.

The Declining Silly School for Cosmic Children

Main article: Silly School for Cosmic Children

The Silly School for Cosmic Children, the birthplace of Willemstan, wasn't very active to begin with. However, things became much worse during the summer of 2018, which was a two month period of inactivity. When members of the classroom finally regrouped in the fall of 2018, inacitivity was still a large problem. This lead to the creation of the Willemstan Discord Server, which was created by Eli Payton on September 24th of 2018.

Reasons for the Move

Inactivity - The Silly School recived little use during its seven months of operation.
Google Classroom wasn't built for something like this. It was meant to be an academic program, not a group chat. Conversations on the Silly School took place in the comments section of posts, which was awkward to use. This made it hard to talk and share ideas, in fact it was easier to talk about the Silly School in person than it was to talk about the Silly School in the actual Silly School.
Discord was rising in popularity during this time period. Many members of the classroom had already jumped ship to Discord before the official move and found it easier to use than Google Classroom.

Opposition to the Move

Charlie Nolan was the main opponent to the move, but then Dictator Josue Mejia was also against the move. Charlie had a few reasons, but these were ultimatly resolved shortly after the move. Charlie liked the classroom, and at the time less people were on the classroom than Discord. He didn't have a Discord account at the time either. Josue was against the move because he didn't care enough, as he was losing interest in Willemstan at the time.

The Departure

During September and October of 2018, members of the classroom slowly trickled over to the Discord server. The move to Discord was solidified when the sever voted in a 4-2 majority vote to officially move to the new platform. Eli Payton voted both for and against, taking a neutral stance. David G, Devin S, and Dominic voted in favor of the move. Charlie Nolan voted against. After this offical vote took place, almost everyone lost interest in the Silly School for Cosmic Children. For the rest of 2018, the classroom was primarly used to post election updates in case if someone didn't see it on the Discord.

The vote.

The first messages in the original #chat, as well as the arrival of the first members of the Discord. This was a conversation between Sean and Eli, but you can also see Charlie's join message.

Impact of the Move to Discord