Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

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> While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion

I've realized I have exactly one outlet free of this left. It's an IRC channel I've been in since the 90s. I thought about it and none of us are there for any reason other than that we have a common interest and like each other. No money involved, no names involved, and it's one of the more supportive and insightful communities I've ever found online. We've sometimes wondered why it's such a different community from the other places, and this article articulates why quite well, I think. We're old-timers holding out in a little pocket of what has been almost fully absorbed by corporate social media. I'm sure there are others. And I'm sure they won't tell you where to find them, either.

I find plenty of these types of communities through Discord, and I think that is part of the equation that's left out here. I don't really like discord much, but the reason I get when I do is to go check in on those friends. Usually these communities are just people that I've met playing games.

I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.

So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.

Old farts still had irl friends. The amount of teens who have no tangible friendships outside of Discord is sobering.

My son has a group of friends at the Uni, some of them in his same school, some of them in nearby schools, some of them are in the neighbourhood... half of them are from high school, the other half are from Minecraft discord groups.

They have a weekly meeting in a Uni cafeteria and use indistinctly Discord or Instagram as chat. Instagram has replaced WhatsApp as the regular phone chat.

All of them have wider net-only groups of acquitances.

Teens/young adults surely have far more opportunities to make real life friends than working age adults. They are at least required to attend school.

I would say that this is more the lifestyle of adults after being out of education for a few years. They are the group that can ignore all real life interaction if they want, Covid has increased the likelihood of this.

They do use discord like we used IRC, but discord is centralized under one company. So, they will eventually do what companies do and try to find that sweet spot of "how much abuse can our users take" versus "how much money can we extract from our market position" as with all such free services. Discord is a trap, both in the latent monetization sense mentioned, and the sense that all your communications there are gobbled up with little to no privacy guarantee.

Discord is not equivalent. Discord is blatantly in with the current culture, including the prohibitive elements. They remove channels left and right, and monetize every bit that they can. Not a problem I've had on IRC, even on big ones like Rizon.

But unlike IRC, Discord is about personal identity, which is no longer counter-cultural.

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