Comment by bsimpson
1 day ago
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use.
I really wish something better would come along.
> Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search
worst part is that it used to :/
I wish Discord had a betrer account switcher on mobile. I have a realname account for friends ana family, and another I use with randos.
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It can do per channel and per server notifications for all messages, @mentions, or none.
What else would you want?
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The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it.
There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.
And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.
All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.
I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.
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99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.
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As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.
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The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream.
But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
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Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)
You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
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In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.
Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.
I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.
Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.
My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
It's not really, you can just Google search and find all their posts and comments.
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I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.
I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
It's funny to see how communities shard.
In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
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The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?
Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
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If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
Ugh. Sigh.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
"Content Not Available Content not available in your region.
Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom"
God I hate the modern internet.
I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities!
Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
I'm amazed Discord hasn't launched a corporate version of thier software yet, or that Slack hasn't seen the potential of static voice channels.
Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
I keep Discord running in a Firefox tab. It typically only goes down when I have to restart the browser and I often have it up for weeks.
everytime discord ask me to claim this account i just quit the app. they operate in some bs tech realm that no other service does.
Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me of ICQ/AIM.
It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.
Yeah ever since email spam filters have been effective, email can now work as a social network. I genuinely think it's an untapped opportunity for the next "great thing".
Discord is IRC, just with modern features.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Probably not.
Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this