[codetrotter]

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.

[evan_]

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

[LordDragonfang]

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.

[throwaway290]

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?

[LordDragonfang]

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"?

[BeFlatXIII]

> C'mon, this is hacker news, what happened to "information should be free"?

We've had an infestation of "pay me or I won't share" types.

[throwaway290]

More like an infestation of "open = I must be able to exploit and abuse for profit" entitled SV VC types.

[throwaway290]

"Information should be free" doesn't work when you have Microsoft inserting itself as a middleman of information.

The community is not gatekeeping knowledge, anyone can join. It merely tries to keep certain corporations out...

[thomastjeffery]

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).

[dylan604]

this sounds like the description of most "new" social platforms. we see immediate interest, and then a sudden loss of that interest

[lmm]

> 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.