For now Discord is necessary as a means to communicate with others about membership, project announcements, post promotion, and general discussion about the humanities. I'd love to be able to keep everything on the Steemit site, as it is a hassle to have to use two different apps. However, until Steemit releases a fully functional communities-based UI, I don't see a way around it.

As for membership, it is our way of vetting writers that we'd like to support. If we had no process, anyone could write whatever they wanted and just use the "deepthink" tag to get an easy payout. We're trying to promote quality over quantity. We're definitely open to new ideas, but they would have to serve the same functions as I mentioned above.