Comment by PaulDavisThe1st
12 hours ago
> 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.
The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.
But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).
The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
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.
Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).
Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends.
The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...
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Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used- but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
might be a regional thing instead, i don't know many americans with whatsapp -- all of my friends are on discord.
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
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.