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Stop Using Discord

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Re: Stop Using Discord

#161

Post by pwillia7 »

iteygib wrote: post #141
anymouse123456 wrote: post #70

This. "Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me. Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative. Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now…

"Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all." Who cares? Why do you want to record every single thing forever? Do you write down every single thing when you converse with someone in real life? And you really can't figure out how to use Discord, when a 14-year old appar…

yeah any complaints about UX should be seen as boomerism and fought against with your full might with no reflection on the critique. When the water wars come and you have to learn to use a slide rule -- remember this day.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#162

Post by yodon »

TheRoque wrote: post #153

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I could…

It disappeared because people disagree on whether to upvote or downvote comments. When the HN algorithm sees signals like comments receiving large numbers of upvotes and downvotes simultaneously, it interprets that signal as "this post is controversial." HN explicitly and intentionally downranks algorithmically identified controversial topics in order to reduce the odds commenters behave badly (which is disproportionately more likely in controversial topics).

The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#163

Post by roenxi »

Springtime wrote: post #54

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in natu…

> the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive

This phrase was in context of sharing moderate amounts of data, but I think the un-indexable nature of Discord is a feature in more ways than that. The public internet has become decidedly less tolerant over the past decade and I can see why people would want to retreat from it and form more isolated communities.

I thought Parler back in 2021 was an interesting case study. From a simple game theory perspective, any group with minority opinions should probably not be organising in public. Majorities are pretty brutal to people who do not conform. We seem to be entering a tense era, so something like the Holocaust or the Chinese Land Reform Movement is not out of the question in the next 50 years. Pseudonymity is a good start, but even better is not having publicly available records of what was said so the bureaucrats don't know what to deanonymise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

Re: Stop Using Discord

#164

Post by michaelt »

lulzury wrote: post #26

I don't like Discord as much as the next person, but people use Discord because it's convenient. Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

> Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

I am an IRC lover, it's a classic platform.

But my classic IRC platform needs someone to host the server.

And it needs NickServ to add on the missing persistent usernames.

And it needs ChanServ to ensure opers don't lose control of the channel.

And it needs a bot so you can leave messages for offline users.

And it needs some sort of third-party image hosting and file hosting.

And you need something like irssi+screen if you want to see messages that arrived while you were away.

And you need to rename yourself to michaelt_afk when you're away.

And you need some way to block spammers and other unwanted bots.

And if your channel wants a browser-based option, someone's going to have to figure that out.

And you've got to take care not to reveal your IP address for DDOS by griefers.

And of course the normal ports might be blocked at work/school/college, maybe you'll need a workaround for that.

IRC has solutions for all these problems, but not particularly easy solutions. Discord/Slack/Microsoft Teams have succeeded by fixing all the weaknesses of IRC that we IRC lovers have been working around for decades.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#165

Post by skydhash »

Springtime wrote: post #54

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in natu…

It’s free and easy to setup. That was the same as Facebook, Twitter,… and that’s because corporations have money to throw at the problem. The issue is that their intention is not the same as the users and after a while, the illusionary cooperation stops. And then, the communities collapse and a whole part of the internet goes dark.

The other part is that Discord feels much more like a club than a library. It may be nicer, but no one is interested in popularizing information. Instead you have to hope to be heard by the experts. And that’s after the requirement of being a member. A forum is open to anyone on the internet, who can consult the interactions anytime they want. And information categorization is already done.

The real danger of Discord is that people want to use it for everything and forget to offer other means of communication like a Wiki or a bug tracker. Imagine if Arch Linux was only present on Discord.

The alternative are still the same as it was ages ago. Host a forum software yourself or pay someone to do it. And build a Wiki to answer the most requested information. Relying on free products from companies is not the correct decision if you care about permanence.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#166

Post by lovethevoid »

joenot443 wrote: post #124
Springtime wrote: post #54

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in natu…

My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn when the other cool kids are playing with LLMs and Flutter and WebGL. Obviously _we’d_ prefer if they learned to setup vBulletin and do it our way, but when Discord is free and all their friends are on it, it’s a tough sell to the other nerds. It’s not a “kids…

There’s also a mismatch in incentive. Before you would become a webmaster and foster a community with your friends, now even if you try, your community will just be botted, content scraped, and rehosted on bigger platforms that have giant conglomerates behind them. An example of this is that Fandom site which is abhorrent but has ruined many fan sites due to alternatives being squeezed out.

You have to effectively create your own closed off platform to avoid those shortcomings like discord so might as well just use it (or Matrix etc).

Re: Stop Using Discord

#167

Post by swayvil »

TheRoque wrote: post #153

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I could…

>178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ?

Seriously. What's the probability that invisible masters gave the censor order?

Re: Stop Using Discord

#168

Post by badsectoracula »

NeutralForest wrote: post #37

I feel like we have this discussion every month, one way or another. People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord. Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the…

Indeed, Discord is chat, Discourse is forum.

That said, most people use Discord because other people use it and there is much less friction to add a new "server" (i hate how they use that term instead of something like "community" or whatever) alongside those you are already part of than making a new account to yet another site.

I know i'm using Discord mainly because the people actually go there. I used IRC since the 90s but for more than a decade it has been channels with 15-20 people all of whom are AFK and idling via some proxy bot or whatever with the occasional chat now and then by a couple of people (Discord also has a lot of idlers but it has 10x more people too so that couple of people becomes 20 people). IRC not having server-side storage of discussions does not help because i can't login to a channel, ask/answer a question and leave later. I know some people like that lack of permanence but personally i find Discord much easier on actually making or even starting discussions (e.g. i might respond to a message someone left 8 hours ago which is seen by someone else right after i post it and starts a discussion - this only happens because i was able to see that 8h old message). I know IRC supposedly added optional support for this recently but i don't know anything that uses it (and even then it wont solve the "people go to Discord" problem since other services like Matrix already supported that for years and people do not go to Matrix).

Re: Stop Using Discord

#169

Post by Iuz »

They won't stop using it. It's simple as that. Should'nt we be doing something to scrape discord servers, push information to a acessible place instead of this? Is that doable?

Re: Stop Using Discord

#170

Post by beretguy »

sneak wrote: post #74
CM30 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the key part here. There's nothing wrong with using Discord to chat about random stuff. If you're talking to your friends about your latest night out or playing online games with a community, then Discord is fine. The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and m…

This is untrue. Talking to friends in DM on non-e2ee platforms normalizes ubiquitous surveillance of friendship interactions and makes all of society worse. Don’t be reachable on non-e2ee DM systems. Delete your account.

I don’t disagree, but challenge is getting other people getting onboard of another system.
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