I did not know about this: "The center of the A.I. cover songs community is a massive 500,000+ member Discord called A.I. Hub, where members trade new tips, tools, techniques, and links to their original and cover songs."
Me neither. That’s what’s so weird about the internet.
Imagine half a million people out in the streets together. You’d definitely notice that. Meanwhile, we can have these massive online communities and you’d never know unless you accidentally stumbled across it or someone told you about it.
more accurate to say that, while 500,000 people joined the discord by clicking a link, some much, much smaller number are actually active on any sort of a regular basis
Yeah, one of the "worst" (good for metrics, bad for legibility) parts of the trend of moving to discord for any sort of online community is that you have to "join" the community to even view any of the resources ensconced within. Meaning it's poorly indexed (discord search is okay, but not great) and not available at all to external crawlers.
If this community was available for crawling then LLM would crawl it and there would be no value in participating in the community because you can just ask the LLM about all that, no?
If the value your community provides is low enough that it can be effectively replaced by a general purpose LLM, then it should be. The value of a community should be pushing the boundaries of knowledge, not gatekeeping it.
C'mon, this is hacker news, what happened to "information should be free"?
So to continue the analogy comparison, 500,000 people walked in that street at some point. Some unknown percentage of that number is made of unrecognized duplicates (same person new username).
> Imagine half a million people out in the streets together. You’d definitely notice that.
In the streets, sure. Meeting up at out of town conference centers a few times a year, probably not. Most real communities have always been "dark matter" to those outside them; Discord working the same way feels more authentic than most of the internet.
Something I think we're slowly coming to terms with is that the current generation of techies (the ones who can afford to spend hours upon hours tweaking models and sharing results) really prefer Discord over our Web 2.0 forum type communities like this one. Even reddit on, which is lagging in popularity amongst Gen-Z when compared to Discord or TikTok, you can immediately tell upon reading /r/LocalLLMs that a really big chunk of this community are underaged. To be clear, I think this is a good thing!
There was a generation that preferred mailing lists. There was a generation that preferred IRC and BBS, and "my" generation which likes forums and lengthy comment threads. One would be naiive to think this style (the one we're engaging in here) would last forever.
There are definitely very real criticisms of Discord, searchability and discoverability being the most common, but at this point I think the die has been cast. Young people have made their choice.
Agree, im in my early 30s and jump through most platforms, but very little with tiktok/discord.
but i have to admit a lot of newer content (and tech framework support) has migrated to discord channels. Even some YouTube sports talk shows have their own discord for call ins, etc...
These big teleconference apps are usually hit or miss but discord seems to be the winner currently for actual "social networking", also add in its trend in the gaming community
I kind of disagree? I am gen Z myself, and have used reddit extensively. While I like Discord a lot, I strongly disagree with using it to host content, essentially gating non-members from getting what they want (which is what leads to these communities with ludicrously inflated member counts). And this sentiment definitely isn't just me, a lot of the techie "CS major" people I know lean towards using slightly older services - which is also probably why the aforementioned /r/localllama community still has more than 60 thousand members.
That being said, Discord does have some advantages over older forum-type communities - it's usually way better for cultivating smaller communities, and its no-effort-required chat systems means that you can always hop on and discuss things that are on the cutting edge. This is quite important in a field like AI, where it feels like something revolutionary happens every other week.
(Also, I don't know if that implication was intentional, but gen Z and "underaged" haven't meant the same thing for many years now)
I poked around there for a while, and my takeaway was "sub-par" all around, which might be the reason for it's relative obscurity? The thing is, I can't tell to what extent it's the tech, and to what extent it's just "very uninteresting source material."
Like, there's a whole lot of "classic song done by presently popular rapper," and I'll be the first to insist that there is nearly nothing vocally interesting at all coming from todays popular hip-hop artists (and I say this as an extreme long-time hip-hop aficionado)
Imagine half a million people out in the streets together. You’d definitely notice that. Meanwhile, we can have these massive online communities and you’d never know unless you accidentally stumbled across it or someone told you about it.