Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alx_the_new_guy 711 days ago
Again, returning to the "it's not the internet itself, but the content on it" thing.

Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).

At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.

I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.

There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.

I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.

In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.

2 comments

It might be better to instead say, what does a discord server offer to you that a mailing list does not for your technical user group? I think most people are on discord because its fashionable and they are unfamiliar with older technology like mailing lists, which were more common place when they were only children perhaps.
> what does a discord server offer to you that a mailing list does not for your technical user group

Having to click on multiple links to just make sense of a conversation?

It's the reason I can't even get myself to follow places like NANOG and LKML; because the experience is just so painful. It makes you almost immediately want to disengage from the subject matter.

I'm almost never looking for a mailing list. I've been on the internet for 20 years and they never fill the same niche as IRC. Same for discord. mailing lists can't do what it does.
I've never successfully used discord, sure I have an older computer and slow internet but I just don't understand why facebook and the like are fine but discord never displays for me.
I would love mailing lists to be a thing again, but the experience of using email is just so bad for me. The sheer amount of unsubscribing I have to do to make it usable - not even taking spam into account - makes email a place I don't want to spend any time.
Staying one step ahead of HR and lawyers? They monitor everything you do over email.
You should never use your work email for anything that isn't work-related.
What exists in life besides work?
By far, the majority of my time "online" these days is spent in a Discord server for enthusiasts that are also interested in my hobby. Due to the server's small size and narrow niche, moderation is straightforward and we rarely have any issues with trolling. We don't allow political discussion, which mostly allows members of diverse backgrounds to interact safely, since triggering discussions don't come up very often.

It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.

Chatrooms used to be for idle chit chat, banter, and quick questions, but are now being used for deeper technical discussions. Ironically, you find a lot of this on places like Reddit, including an excess of uninformed and repeat questions.

I am of the opinion that Discord does any niche community a great disservice by first locking content behind an invite link and, once invited, content is locked behind pages and pages of search results if the content is even still available.

I’m sure there is bias on my part because I cut my teeth on forums of the ā€˜00s to the mid ā€˜10s, but the siloing and fragmentation of information has ultimately divided up centers of knowledge into smaller and smaller pieces. Those in the know will know and those not will be shut out.

There are many within our community which share this viewpoint, and any time we do serious technical research the general sentiment is to move that onto our forums or wiki, specifically to make it discoverable.

I personally don't socialize on the forums though. My unfiltered thought process doesn't need to be searchable for the next century. It's okay for some communication to be ephemeral.

Political decisions and sex are part of being a human being so I encourage communities to sometimes do that. Not all of them, but we need more spaces for adults to be adults. Too many hacker spaces are sterile in this way. Moderation is worth the challenge.
The specific space I participate in is a game development community. Due to it's very nature, it attracts minors. Because we keep our doors open, we have a strong incentive to keep the discussion clean, and generally we find that political discussions get hateful extremely quickly, which is the main motivation.

Thankfully there are lots of other servers that have more lax inclusion of adult topics, if that's your fancy. I think it's okay for different communities to have different standards.