Comment by bluebarbet
10 hours ago
>information-dense
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
10 hours ago
>information-dense
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
I never had ICQ because I was opposed to replacing open internet protocols with proprietary walled gardens governed by unaccountable private corporations imposing clickwrap contracts of adhesion on helpless users.
When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.
Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.
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ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
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No it wasn't and it's not even close.
Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.
MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.
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Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
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> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
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Oh. Misunderstanding. I thought I was replying to a comment about IRC.
ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.
In Denmark it was MSN Messenger, the nerds were on IRC and also had ICQ.
MSN, mIRC and all other forms of chatting and comms (like Orkut) were also highly popular in Brazil. I guess Brazilians just like to chat.
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Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.
Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set. It also helps that almost everyone I like is there. I'm forced to have whatsapp and telegram to communicate with the general population and I wouldn't use them if I didn't have to.
If someone from discord DM'd me wanting to move to telegram or whatsapp, they're automatically assumed to be a scammer.
> Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set.
It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.
Yes I just love its patronizingly cute little animations everywhere reminding me not to think too hard
I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??
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In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.
Yeah, I know. But they seem hell bent on adding more and more distractions in every update. I mean, it felt more manageable when it was still just a gamer chat.
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It's certainly dense with something. If it's information, it's not information I want though. I have no desire to know anything about their various Nitro sales or have a live feed to what my friends are playing or listening to. People I want to talk to are there, so I go there to talk to them. Anything outside of that just makes it noisy, like you said.
I can’t get into Discord. It’s just so messy and disorganized and too much information flying at my face.
It's the too much completely useless information flying at my face that I despise. So much empty space, the UI is so weirdly verbose for everything but the actual content. You need discord in full screen to manage reading messages properly. It's also slow switching channels and server.
Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.
And yes, I enabled compact mode.
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I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)
We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.
Discord is incredibly popular among younger people in general now. It escaped tech people containment years ago.
every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.
They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.
much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.
Is there any proof that normies would not be on board with it? Discord is information dense and huge among normies.
For the love of... can we stop saying 'normie', it's just so stupid. And intellectually lazy. And also dumb.
I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.