Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

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Of course it was. From a future revenue perspective, it absolutely makes sense that facebook would focus on young people, so any research done into the future of facebook and its revenue _must_ include a decent number of young people. I imagine that they are having little success in getting young people to join and interact on facebook, especially because it is being heavily leveraged for international political pressure.

Given current social and political realities, though, and a series of deeply troubling news stories coming out of facebook, I think it might have lost a very large segment of young people that will never join or return. I watch my 15 yo daughter interact with people online, and she has no interest at all in facebook, and her interest in instragram is waning. Currently, her primary interaction space is discord.

I've heard semi-private chat rooms are what is going to be popular, and I expect that we're going to see that kind of thing in facebook soon. I wish them luck (not really) building a revenue model on it that matches what they currently expect.

I used to teach a course at a local university. I asked the kids every year about facebook. Starting in 2015 the female students basically stopped using it. It wasn't politics or even advertising. They said the "creep factor" just got too high. Everyone one of them had a story about an unwanted stranger suddenly appearing on their or their friend's facebook.

The next wave of political manipulation is those "private chats". Facebook/Google/Apple can crack down on the adverts. They cannot so easily police invite-only chats that are often end-to-end encrypted.

On the other hand, private chats are harder to get into; someone has to actually get invited, by the very nature of things. Manipulation that way is going to be harder (though not impossible, especially when they get bigger than everyone-knows-everyone size).

Which also can lead to social exclusion of individuals, which is critical at school age. In the past time rumors spread between groups, so even the not-liked kid could overhear it somewhere. Now all the discussions move into the private group, where only the "cool" kids come in and spread less over smaller groups ...

You just need to generate memes that people will willingly copypasta into their private groups.

Small groups are for sure becoming popular. I’m surprised that your daughter is doing that through Discord vs a messenger app. Is she a gamer?

I think at this point discord is the new IRC, a generic chat platform for communities, organised by interest - nearly all the same benefits of IRC vs Messenger apps, with the additional benefit that somebody cares enough to make it user-friendly. A shame that it's closed-source and centralised though :(

Discord is slack for not-work with far better voice chat.

Discord has become a pretty standard messaging app for non-gaming communities for a while now. Its getting to the point where it can simply be thought of as big.

Discords for small niches and personal servers are increasingly popular. Many subreddits have an associated discord.

About six months ago I created a discord account to join a server for an open source project, and since then I've discovered that almost every hobby and professional interest I have is represented in discord. I keep it open all day and spend several hours per day chatting on it. I suspect it's going to become a giant, and I hope they can come up with a business model that isn't user hostile.

Some of the guys I work with who have remote colleagues just sit on a discord the whole day with stuff on low volume and talk like really rarely. It's not just for gamers. It's like simulating an office. Pretty cool.

She is, but she doesn't use discord for gaming chat. She uses it for chatting and voice calling her friends.

There are quite a few groups on discord that are non-gaming related. Laravel, the PHP framework, has a pretty active one. I prefer Discord over Slack. Slack and Discord are basically the same thing now in the majority of features.

> I prefer Discord over Slack

can you explain why? I use slack at work and discord at home (for games). I find them to be pretty similar products, except that discord seems more oriented towards voice command and slack seems more reliable and less buggy (on a regular basis discord takes a very long time to connect). I personally prefer slack mainly just because I find the UI more pleasing.

Being able to mute and outright block annoying people is the main thing for me. The channels I'm in on slack don't allow that. It could be the plan type, not sure. I'm not a heavy user of either and try to avoid them if possible.

I actually prefer the UI of Discord. I like having all people just listed on the right instead of typing `@` and having to scroll through a list that pops up and blocks the main active content.

I've just seen too many games on slack compared to Discord that I find really annoying, with people being banned and instantly rejoining and flooding crap. It reminds me of EFNET in the late 90s with bot floods and all of the crap that ended up ruining it. It's not nearly as bad as efnet was, but it's still annoying enough for me to not want to use it. That might not be the case for a private company's slack or something, but I'm not really in any of those - mostly public type channels.

UI is exactly why I prefer Slack over Discord as well. I run a Discord server for a game of mine with a few hundred people, and often have to force myself to use it. That said, I used to feel the same way about Reddit.

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