Comment by viccis
13 hours ago
>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it
I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.
> the former type is all but obliterated now.
Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.
Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
> Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.
I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
I'm in multiple Discord servers with people I know IRL.
In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
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You're essentially saying you haven't seen anyone's private chats.
I'm in a friend Discord server. It's naturally invisible unless someone sends you an invite.
Yeah same as sibling comments, I'm in multiple discord servers for IRL friend groups. I personally run one with ~50 people that sees a hundreds of messages a day. By far my most used form of social media. Also as OP said, I'll be migrating to Matrix (probably) when they IPO, we've already started an archival project just in case.
And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.
And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.
Idk most of the people I "met" on the internet happened originally on IRC. I didn't know them till a decade or more later.
900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs
I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats.
Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
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> "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL"
"Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list.
Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media".
HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.
I think most people only recall becoming aware of Facebook when it was already so widespread that people talked about it as "the site you go to to find out what extended family members and people you haven't spoken to in years are up to".
Let's remember that the original idea was to connect with people in your college/university. I faintly recall this time period because I tried to sign up for it only to find out that while there had been an announcement that it was opened up internationally, it still only let you sign up with a dot EDU email address, which none of the universities in my country had.
In the early years "social media" was a lot more about having a place to express yourself or share your ideas and opinions so other people you know could check up on them. Many remember the GIF anarchy and crimes against HTML of Geocities but that aesthetic also carried over to MySpace while sites like Live Journal or Tumblr more heavily emphasized prose. This was all also in the context of a more open "blogosphere" where (mostly) tech nerds would run their own blogs and connect intentionally much like "webrings" did in the earlier days for private homepages and such before search engine indexing mostly obliterated their main use.
Facebook pretty much created modern "social media" by creating the global "timeline", forcing users to compete with each other (and corporate brands) for each other's attention while also focusing the experience more on consumption and "reaction" than creation and self-expression. This in turn resulted in more "engagement" which eventually led to algorithmic timelines trying to optimize for engagement and ad placement / "suggested content".
HN actually follows the "link aggregator" or "news aggregator" lineage of sites like Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc (there were also "bookmark aggregators" like stumbleupon but most of those died out to). In terms of social interactions it's more like e.g. the Slashdot comment section even though the "feed" is somewhat "engagement driven" like on social media sites. But as you said, it lacks all the features that would normally be expected like the ability to "curate" your timeline (or in fact, having a personalized view of the timeline at all) or being able to "follow" specific people. You can't even block people.
It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.
I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.
IRC has many many usability problems which I'm sure you're about to give a "quite trivial curlftpfs" explaination for why they're unimportant - missing messages if you're offline, inconsistent standards for user accounts/authentication, no consensus on how even basic rich text should work much less sending images, inconsistent standards for voice calls that tend to break in the presence of NAT, same thing for file transfers...
I was a heavy IRC user in 2015 before Discord and even though I personally prefer using IRC, it was obvious it would take over the communities I was for a few reasons:
1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.
All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.
There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.
It is IRC, but with modern features and no channel splits. It also adds voice chats and video sharing. Trade off is that privacy and commercial platform. On other hand it is very much simpler to use. IRC is a mess of usability really. Discord has much better user experience for new users.
> Discord has much better user experience for new users.
Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.
You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.
/server irc.someserver.net
/join #hello
/me says Hello
I think I'll stick with that.
At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.
Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).
it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels.
you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested
Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
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> I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall
5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother.
Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.
You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know?
"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)
It would be nice if the social media company actually showed their posts in the feed
The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.