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It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games

by bsimpson 10mo ago

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.

__turbobrew__ 10mo ago
Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit). The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
- bookofjoe 10mo ago
  99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
  - barishnamazov 10mo ago
    You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
    - bookofjoe 10mo ago
      I am 77.
      - barishnamazov 10mo ago
        That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all your contributions!
        bookofjoe 10mo ago
        Very kind of you.
  - poszlem 10mo ago
    Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.
  - bawolff 10mo ago
    The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream. But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
    - justinhj 10mo ago
      I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.
  - majormajor 10mo ago
    In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain. Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too. I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
  - izzylan 10mo ago
    Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong. My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
  - AngryData 10mo ago
    I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.
    - bsimpson 10mo ago
      I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is. Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming. If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints? As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual. And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
    - csomar 10mo ago
      He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So 97% of the global population probably have no idea what Discord is. People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)
    - badc0ffee 10mo ago
      I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the day and never got into it. I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rootusrootus 10mo ago
    As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.
    - pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
      In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.
      - rootusrootus 10mo ago
        US. What are they using in UK? WhatsApp? That kinda counts as Facebook, I suppose. But then again, is WhatsApp really a direct competitor with Discord? By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.
      - qwertywert_ 10mo ago
        Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern I've worked with uses discord
        glitchcrab 10mo ago
        Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses Discord.
        qwertywert_ 10mo ago
        I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I agree with you though..
  - mjevans 10mo ago
    Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)
- hinkley 10mo ago
  I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus. Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
  - kulahan 10mo ago
    I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle. I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    It's funny to see how communities shard. In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
    - throwaway713 10mo ago
      Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty large.
- Muromec 10mo ago
  Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
  - _alternator_ 10mo ago
    Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
    - __turbobrew__ 10mo ago
      Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.
    - bsimpson 10mo ago
      Does Signal scale? Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord. It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
      - ethersteeds 10mo ago
        Won't disagree about channels and mindshare, but will note that Signal got public group links in 2020, not that recent. https://signal.org/blog/group-links/ https://signal.org/blog/group-links/
    - lukeschlather 10mo ago
      Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.
    - mbgerring 10mo ago
- emodendroket 10mo ago
  > 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit). You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    It's not really, you can just Google search and find all their posts and comments.
    - emodendroket 10mo ago
      Sure, you can do that. It’s harder and not collated in the same way though.
      - vonunov 10mo ago
        You can just whack space a couple of times in the search field on a user profile on the "new" reddit (www. or sh.reddit) and hit Enter
    - Seattle3503 10mo ago
      There is also Project Arctic Shift.
- yunwal 10mo ago
  The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use. I really wish something better would come along.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    It can do per channel and per server notifications for all messages, @mentions, or none. What else would you want?
    - antiframe 10mo ago
      Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.
    - ravikapoor101 10mo ago
      I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone, override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of like pagerduty.
    - bsimpson 10mo ago
      I lurk in a bunch of Discords for things I'm not active in, but don't want to have to find an invite to if I need to ask a question in the future. I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me" I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.
      - esseph 10mo ago
        You can mute channels and servers completely and get no notifications.
  - 10mo ago
- Cipater 10mo ago
  The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it. There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord. And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before. All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet. I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
  - Vegenoid 10mo ago
    Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.
    - scrollop 10mo ago
      Though there may be some very good information locked behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of reddit isn't forgettable). The good and bad, I guess.
- louistsi 10mo ago
  The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?
oblio 10mo ago
Discord is IRC, just with modern features. I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades. Probably not.
- Y_Y 10mo ago
  finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only. React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses. Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too! As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
Sharlin 10mo ago
If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
- perardi 10mo ago
  Ugh. Sigh. My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements. It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime. https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
  - Flere-Imsaho 10mo ago
    "Content Not Available Content not available in your region. Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom" God I hate the modern internet.
- kulahan 10mo ago
  Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
  - throwaway94275 10mo ago
    I keep Discord running in a Firefox tab. It typically only goes down when I have to restart the browser and I often have it up for weeks.
- firecall 10mo ago
  I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities! Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
  - evandena 10mo ago
    I'm amazed Discord hasn't launched a corporate version of thier software yet, or that Slack hasn't seen the potential of static voice channels.
hinkley 10mo ago
Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
mgaunard 10mo ago
It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
sidereal1 10mo ago
One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo ago
  Yeah ever since email spam filters have been effective, email can now work as a social network. I genuinely think it's an untapped opportunity for the next "great thing".
corford 10mo ago
It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me of ICQ/AIM.

__turbobrew__ 10mo ago

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit). The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.

bookofjoe 10mo ago
99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
- barishnamazov 10mo ago
  You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
  - bookofjoe 10mo ago
    I am 77.
    - barishnamazov 10mo ago
      That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all your contributions!
      - bookofjoe 10mo ago
        Very kind of you.
- poszlem 10mo ago
  Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.
- bawolff 10mo ago
  The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream. But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.
  - justinhj 10mo ago
    I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.
- majormajor 10mo ago
  In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain. Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too. I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
- izzylan 10mo ago
  Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong. My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.
- AngryData 10mo ago
  I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is. Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming. If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints? As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual. And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."
  - csomar 10mo ago
    He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So 97% of the global population probably have no idea what Discord is. People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)
  - badc0ffee 10mo ago
    I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the day and never got into it. I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- rootusrootus 10mo ago
  As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.
  - pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
    In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.
    - rootusrootus 10mo ago
      US. What are they using in UK? WhatsApp? That kinda counts as Facebook, I suppose. But then again, is WhatsApp really a direct competitor with Discord? By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.
    - qwertywert_ 10mo ago
      Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern I've worked with uses discord
      - glitchcrab 10mo ago
        Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses Discord.
        qwertywert_ 10mo ago
        I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I agree with you though..
- mjevans 10mo ago
  Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)
hinkley 10mo ago
I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus. Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
- kulahan 10mo ago
  I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle. I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  It's funny to see how communities shard. In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.
  - throwaway713 10mo ago
    Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty large.
Muromec 10mo ago
Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
- _alternator_ 10mo ago
  Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…
  - __turbobrew__ 10mo ago
    Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    Does Signal scale? Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord. It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
    - ethersteeds 10mo ago
      Won't disagree about channels and mindshare, but will note that Signal got public group links in 2020, not that recent. https://signal.org/blog/group-links/ https://signal.org/blog/group-links/
  - lukeschlather 10mo ago
    Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.
  - mbgerring 10mo ago
emodendroket 10mo ago
> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit). You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
- esseph 10mo ago
  It's not really, you can just Google search and find all their posts and comments.
  - emodendroket 10mo ago
    Sure, you can do that. It’s harder and not collated in the same way though.
    - vonunov 10mo ago
      You can just whack space a couple of times in the search field on a user profile on the "new" reddit (www. or sh.reddit) and hit Enter
  - Seattle3503 10mo ago
    There is also Project Arctic Shift.
yunwal 10mo ago
The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use. I really wish something better would come along.
- esseph 10mo ago
  It can do per channel and per server notifications for all messages, @mentions, or none. What else would you want?
  - antiframe 10mo ago
    Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.
  - ravikapoor101 10mo ago
    I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone, override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of like pagerduty.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    I lurk in a bunch of Discords for things I'm not active in, but don't want to have to find an invite to if I need to ask a question in the future. I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me" I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.
    - esseph 10mo ago
      You can mute channels and servers completely and get no notifications.
- 10mo ago
Cipater 10mo ago
The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it. There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord. And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before. All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet. I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
- Vegenoid 10mo ago
  Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.
  - scrollop 10mo ago
    Though there may be some very good information locked behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of reddit isn't forgettable). The good and bad, I guess.
louistsi 10mo ago
The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?

oblio 10mo ago

Discord is IRC, just with modern features. I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades. Probably not.

Y_Y 10mo ago
finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this
bsimpson 10mo ago
Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only. React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses. Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too! As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.

Sharlin 10mo ago

If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.

perardi 10mo ago
Ugh. Sigh. My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements. It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime. https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo ago
  "Content Not Available Content not available in your region. Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom" God I hate the modern internet.
kulahan 10mo ago
Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
- throwaway94275 10mo ago
  I keep Discord running in a Firefox tab. It typically only goes down when I have to restart the browser and I often have it up for weeks.
firecall 10mo ago
I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities! Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
- evandena 10mo ago
  I'm amazed Discord hasn't launched a corporate version of thier software yet, or that Slack hasn't seen the potential of static voice channels.

hinkley 10mo ago

Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.

mgaunard 10mo ago

It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.

sidereal1 10mo ago

One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.

Flere-Imsaho 10mo ago
Yeah ever since email spam filters have been effective, email can now work as a social network. I genuinely think it's an untapped opportunity for the next "great thing".

corford 10mo ago

It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me of ICQ/AIM.