Comment by JuniperMesos
11 days ago
Discord doesn't fundamentally do anything that IRC didn't do, except work reliably on a smartphone. If that's a drug, then that seems pretty close to saying that any kind of online interaction with other human beings is a drug.
You havent met people who are terminally on Discord yet have you? I don't know that IRC had that level of addiction. People become insanely attached to 'servers' on Discord.
IRC and Newsgroups definitely had that level of addiction going on. Just smaller population size due by technical friction that kept the general population away.
I might count as terminally on Discord myself - what are your standards for "insanely attached" to a specific social environment, and how important do you think the specific software people use to talk with people in that environment is?
One thing that Discord reliably does is to lock me off the account and force me to go through _all_, complete verification hops (starting form the sms to my phone).
Nothing changes between my sessions, IP from the same ISP, same device, same times, not even new servers, just a normal, human pattern of use on the decent, old account.
Just discord being discord.
Yeah I've been having this a lot too. It asks me to verify then logs me in and then 20 minutes later I'm logged out again with a message I need to verify my email. So annoying.
The notification spam on your phone is something that did not exist in the 2000s, no?
I remember that with the advent of smartphones suddenly all websites wanted to send status updates...
No, and I would've wanted it for the IRC channels I was in at the time, just as I typically want notifications (that I can enable/disable at will) for some chats I'm in on more modern realtime communication software.
Irc had screensharing and group video chat i had no idea