Completely agree. I think zoomers get a high out of all the "engagement" they're manufacturing for themselves and their server, what with all the different chan

Completely agree. I think zoomers get a high out of all the "engagement" they're manufacturing for themselves and their server, what with all the different channels and notifications to click-through and explore. The red notification bubble is a tantalizing treat. They were raised on that kind of hyper engagement-optimized corporate walled-garden internet, so it's what they're comfortable using. This makes me realize something: between the 50+ channel discord servers and the twitter X/20 chain posts, people are slowly rediscovering the superior usability of the "old internet", i.e. traditional forums and blogs. Each discord channel is one long poorly-indexed thread, and each twitter chain post is a blog. People are naturally gravitating back toward these traditional patterns because they work very well for the kind of communicating we do on the internet. Add a voice chat channel to a traditional forum and you have discord with better usability (and index-ability). Put your twitter chain post on your Substack or regular blog and now it's infinitely more readable. I guess the problem with going from twitter to blog though is that you lose discoverability and the momentum and network effect that twitter has. And with discord, it's just visually more appealing than both traditional forums and IRC, especially with all the vector cartoon animals and soft edges. I suppose if a traditional forum started rounding its corners, adding anime kitsune vector art, and using several shades of purple, maybe they'd become popular again. That and add some voice channels.