Oh, more ways to hoard user data and metadata and sell it.
Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
131–140 of 234 posts
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#132Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights: - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious; - Multiple places where you set settings; - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anyw…
Its not you. It’s a disaster. I often wonder how something like this even came to be.
For me the biggest issue is the most basic: the UI is a mix of random icons (some labeled and some not), text buttons and command line functions. But there is no rhyme or reason. It’s even difficult to explain how to do something.
I imagine if you have a disability where you can’t use standard inputs or use a screen reader that Discord is, in fact, completely unusable.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#133I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…
> but then scrubbed every mention of games There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?
They operated a games storefront and library for a short period of time, but that died pretty quickly.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.
> Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason. Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-…
>I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now.
people can be extremely naïve.
It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say,…
Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.
This is not really practical without good opsec because of the risk of doxxing. You basically need to have strong discipline to censor out every information that could remotely be traced back to you. The doxxer need to succeed to id you only once; you need to protect yourself on all and every comment you make.
Take a look at my comment history. Can you figure out who am I? I worry constantly about this.
I was targeted once in a politically motivated witchhunt on Reddit (that also targeted other moderators of a national subreddit), and there were a doxxing pastebin that circulated in hate groups. It contained the real name, addresses, id number, etc of many moderators; a lot of them had made a conscious effort to not leak anything, but they could be traced nonetheless.
In my username it had "none information could be found". But I later checked out my comment history on reddit and found out plenty of information leaks; people were just not determined enough to comb out the comments.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#136Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…
I created https://sqwok.im because I wanted an open, indexable, public chat site tailored to kitchen-table conversations, influenced from my years growing up on IRC.
There's been an active discussion on whether to allow gifs/images in the chat, with many saying they like that it's focused just on conversation.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me. It's a really poo…
In my experience when I see an open-source community use something like Zulip, Glitter, Matrix, or Slack it seems inactive relative to an equivalent hypothetical Discord community. I think this outweighs the privacy concerns. Discord's biggest advantage in my eyes is that it makes it easy to build a critical mass of users. This makes it easy for newcomers to get answers to questions quickly.
It doesn't. You are the one heavily devaluating the need of privacy.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#138I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…
I'd love to get feedback on my project sqwok.im and whether it may interest you.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions
Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.
I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers.
While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.
Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations
#140My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev ) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this. Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a grea…
You could be a lot happier, really - in both practical and ethical segments. By using a sane alternative instead of a privacy-hostile proprietary platform.