331–340 of 436 posts
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IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.
In theory. In practice, like Slack, Discord is unsearchable. As someone rightly said on another thread: Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.
Similarly with Quora. I ditched Quora when they had a similar policy change as Reddit, which I disagreed with (honestly, I cannot recall what the kerfuffle was about, but I deleted my Quora account and never went back.) I hate when quora pops up in results. But google has engineered themselves, deliberately so, into the "black-box behometh in the corner nobody can poke or question, and it just does its damn thing des…
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[false quote narrative removed, I had names mixed up] Not in the slightest. You see, you can use mastodon.social for exactly as long as it suits you to do so. If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted. If you figure it out eventually, you can take all of your content and migrate it to whatever new instance you like. No hassle, no corporation making it difficult beca…
> If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted. So, 99% of users will stay there, and another 0.9% for the network effect of interacting with the 99%. Right?
The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…
the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye becaus…
There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit.
Eh…
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Google flourished because it could find forums (and blogs) and mine those, but much of that content has disappeared into Facebook and Discord (and YouTube - we must not discount how many things that would have been easily parseable blogs are now buried in livestreams and videos).
So I've been working on a side project to make a Youtube channel I watch have its content be more discoverable through text. I've had great results by scraping the Youtube transcription, and running that for a few passes through GPT 3.5 with some prompts to essentially act as an editor. The original transcription was often terrible in some spots. Just whole phrases or multiple words mistranscribed throughout. For alm…
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What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)
Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that? Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity. The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural w…
And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day.
I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a place that's structurally makes a community be run by close-knit group of people with too much free time.
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Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.
This is a huge, huge, huge problem and Google I feel could work to solve this. NEWS (heh it contains new) is important to be up-to-date and recent. But so many things are olds and you should give more weight to older pagerank-verified pages.
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It usually gets contained to a branch however. You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.
When you have to collapse a dozen worthless discussion trees to find one that is actually discussing the topic instead of spamming lame reddit narwhal memes, I think it's fair to call the discussion derailed.
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It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is b…
Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.