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by Hermitian909 1100 days ago
> What you described is a culture of fear

No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.

It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).
2 comments
AstralStorm 1100 days ago
Technically there always have been platforms that let you run a hosted forum maintained by others on someone else's host. These were typically paid.

But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.

It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.

The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.

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johnnyanmac 1100 days ago
>Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.

I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.

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