5 ms·

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for? God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose. And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website. >God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.
kelnos 3y ago
The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.
wunderlotus 3y ago
I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.
Applejinx 3y ago
This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent. It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed). You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.
  - bsder 3y ago
    > if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple. I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever. What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you. The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  Too bad we can't (won't?) all just go back to Usenet.
hmmdar 3y ago
I don't think discord is a valid replacement. One of the best parts of reddit was the easily browsable/searchable Forum like threading. Where there are communities for a given theme, and threads branching off of that group. Discord is great for realtime chat, but a significant pain for async conversations. In general for information access I personally don't like to search through chats because the threading is too shallow, and conversations are had at the root, aka group level.
- smachiz 3y ago
  kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jochem9 3y ago
    I'm happy it's happening. Putting ownership back in the community's hands is a huge win for the freedom and diversity of the internet.
    - smachiz 3y ago
      I agree, but it's a lot more work, and each individual federated instance has a lot of control and data. It's definitely better, but you'd still need to migrate content if your instance owner goes ape.
      - jochem9 3y ago
        Then host your own instance. That's actually more work, but worth it if you don't trust whomever is hosting your community. Should become fairly straightforward once you have parties taking care of the technical details (there probably are already some). Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?
eterm 3y ago
> which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server. The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.
waboremo 3y ago
I actually believe this is one of the reasons Reddit (and its alternatives) will never reach their peaks again. Too many want to take, not many want to give their valuable information. What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry. This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access. Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  The one advantadge I can (not so) proudly say I've learned from years of digging through the mucks of the internet for various kinds of NSFW media. You don't get the info easily, no one wants to advertise it even if you wanted to. sometimes the info isn't even for free. You either spend a lot of time finding some truly backwater forums with nuggest of gold, or pay someone who's dug that deep to curate for you. If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  [dead]
ryandrake 3y ago
> Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet. Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.
autoexec 3y ago
You're right that discord is shit, but the web used to be filled with forums that did everything reddit does just as well, but simply were not as popular. Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success. Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing. The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama. Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Agreed, people chose once again to centralize instead of diversfy, and as history has shown time and time again: we're paying for it right now. At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Centralization removes a massive barrier though. We want content, and control over that content, distributed and preserved (usually), but we also want everything in one easy to access location. Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work. Subscribing to 100+ subreddits and hitting the refresh button on one website was easy and mostly worked pretty well. A single interface/client/login for everything is ideal. What we really need is a new usenet.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose. And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website. >God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

kelnos 3y ago

The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.

wunderlotus 3y ago

I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.

Applejinx 3y ago

This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent. It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed). You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.
- bsder 3y ago
  > if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple. I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever. What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you. The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.
commandlinefan 3y ago
Too bad we can't (won't?) all just go back to Usenet.

hmmdar 3y ago

I don't think discord is a valid replacement. One of the best parts of reddit was the easily browsable/searchable Forum like threading. Where there are communities for a given theme, and threads branching off of that group. Discord is great for realtime chat, but a significant pain for async conversations. In general for information access I personally don't like to search through chats because the threading is too shallow, and conversations are had at the root, aka group level.

smachiz 3y ago
kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  [dead]
- jochem9 3y ago
  I'm happy it's happening. Putting ownership back in the community's hands is a huge win for the freedom and diversity of the internet.
  - smachiz 3y ago
    I agree, but it's a lot more work, and each individual federated instance has a lot of control and data. It's definitely better, but you'd still need to migrate content if your instance owner goes ape.
    - jochem9 3y ago
      Then host your own instance. That's actually more work, but worth it if you don't trust whomever is hosting your community. Should become fairly straightforward once you have parties taking care of the technical details (there probably are already some). Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

eterm 3y ago

> which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server. The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

waboremo 3y ago

I actually believe this is one of the reasons Reddit (and its alternatives) will never reach their peaks again. Too many want to take, not many want to give their valuable information. What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry. This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access. Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

johnnyanmac 3y ago
The one advantadge I can (not so) proudly say I've learned from years of digging through the mucks of the internet for various kinds of NSFW media. You don't get the info easily, no one wants to advertise it even if you wanted to. sometimes the info isn't even for free. You either spend a lot of time finding some truly backwater forums with nuggest of gold, or pay someone who's dug that deep to curate for you. If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.
dumpsterlid 3y ago
[dead]

ryandrake 3y ago

> Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet. Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

autoexec 3y ago

You're right that discord is shit, but the web used to be filled with forums that did everything reddit does just as well, but simply were not as popular. Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success. Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing. The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama. Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Agreed, people chose once again to centralize instead of diversfy, and as history has shown time and time again: we're paying for it right now. At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Centralization removes a massive barrier though. We want content, and control over that content, distributed and preserved (usually), but we also want everything in one easy to access location. Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work. Subscribing to 100+ subreddits and hitting the refresh button on one website was easy and mostly worked pretty well. A single interface/client/login for everything is ideal. What we really need is a new usenet.