Comment by bakugo

15 days ago

If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.

Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.

9 comments

bakugo

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ziml77  15 days ago

There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.

  • johnnyanmac  15 days ago

    I'm always exhausted by a migration. But I don't move off because there's an easy alternative. There never is. I do it to maintain principles, even at the cost of my social circles.

  • 0xDEAFBEAD  15 days ago

    I remember back in the days of instant messaging, there were clients which let you chat with people in a manner agnostic to the underlying IM provider. I used this one:

    https://adium.im/

    Maybe we need similar omniclients for group chat platforms, with automated migration scripts etc. I think the ideal migration method would be to implement continuous archiving, so the platform can't block you from scraping your own chat archives.

jackcviers3  15 days ago

I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC... yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?

People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.

Absolutely exhausting to be honest.

  • andrepd  15 days ago

    Kids today are alarmingly bad at technology. This is not a "kids these days" situation, this is absolutely true. They understand "tap on icon, open app, there's a feed and DMs".

    I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.

    • nhhvhy  15 days ago

      I don’t think people understand the true level of tech illiteracy of Gen Z. A couple years back I did an internship with the IT guy at my high school, and the vast majority of the problems students had with the Chromebooks we used were, in no specific order:

        - Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
  - Trying to use them without an internet connection
  - “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
  - “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop

      That’s not even to mention the abysmal typing skills of most students, so many 15WPM hunt-and-peck typers..

      There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.

      2 replies →

    • subscribed  15 days ago

      Correct. From my personal experience (have kids and nieces/nephew this age), and all think an app is the thing that they scroll in, and any attempt to explain the very basics on internet connectivity, servers, databases, etc, ends up in them basically experiencing blue screen moment and backing away to the safety of the endless scroll.

      The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes later they will download phone flashlight app that requires Google services for app delivery.

      Shocking.

      I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to technology in any other way than pointing to help/manual/search engines and asking questions.