Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

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Discord missed a chance to build a community. That might sound absurd, but what separates Discord from HN (among many other things) is that we have consistent identities here. You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Ditto for me being curious about you. That curiosity is an important factor, and Discord’s naming system didn’t foster it at all.

I’m theshawwn on Twitter. shawwn on GitHub. sillysaurusx on HN. I was once on discord for years, till I left — and when I left, I felt no loss. There was nothing attaching me to discord. If I abandoned any of those others, it would feel awful; my entire ML history is codified in twitter, and anyone can go read it. Whereas I can’t even remember what my discord username was.

You might be thinking that you’d lose the servers. If you leave discord, you have to rejoin everywhere if you make a new account. But rejoining is easy; it’s the point of discord to join servers. So that’s not really “a thing” the way that my HN comments are a thing, or my GitHub repos, or tweets.

This change is the first step in letting users feel attached to discord. If they play their cards right, you’ll start to feel like “this is me” the way that those other services feel like a part of you. Being able to link someone to discord.gg/shawwn (or whatever) is no small thing — it’s a reason to care about staying on discord at all.

I don’t know if this change will matter at this point, but it’s nice to see them still pivoting and trying to fix their fundamentals. Making big changes to community software is such a tricky thing (how many times have we seen a mass exodus? I can think of at least 7, with digg being the limit case of what not to do) so I respect that they’re willing to take a risk at this point in their growth stage.

> You can go and see what I’ve been up to.

Not everyone wants this. I'm in Discords with friends, I'm in game hacking Discords, I'm in Overemployed Discords, etc. I don't want everyone knowing what Discords I'm active in.

In my opinion this is one reason why Discord is so successful and the place I feel most free to communicate. Everything you do on the platform doesn’t follow you everywhere.

If any person could see everything I’m doing in B, C, and D community automatically (or even what communities I’m apart of to then track down everything I’ve ever said), I would be way less inclined to be myself and participate at all.

Lack of chilling effects. It’s a feature, not a bug.

You can see someone's username and if they're in any other discords with you. I've occasionally found people from one community in another, or vice versa - Not always to my or their happiness.

I maintain a few distinct Discord accounts for this reason.

With different phone numbers?

Yes, I maintain a few phone numbers (and have gone through a few burners) for the same reason.

But it does. Discord tells other people what mutual communities you are in together, which has personally been a source of discomfort when I don't want one region of my life to cross over into another, but some curious and chatty person brings it up in a public chat to talk about.

I'd like pseudotrue pseudonymity please.

Then make separate accounts?

I mean, this sort reads to me like the software development "It's not too hard, all you have to do is..." morass that I'm sure we've both encountered at one point or another.

Then comes account switching, which you manually have to do as it's not natively supported by any of the clients. This is especially a pain.

What I'm looking for as a user is a way to optionally obscure what my base profile name is, since the server name is what people interact with anyways, and to not list mutual servers by default in the profile (or at least, be able to turn it off).

It's not even really for a nefarious purpose, I just like having nice and clean compartments for different areas of interaction. It's predictable and keeps the world a lot smaller in a nice an structured kind of manner.

Account switching is natively supported by Discord for a while now. On all platforms. Unless you're using a third party app in which case, time to switch!

I feel you're overthinking the problem. Discord encourages multiple accounts, make them and separate your identities. Bonus: you don't have to fiddle around with keeping servers in certain folders to keep track of which identity you're using where.

Account switching is supported in some of the official clients, but not all. Also, multiple accounts means multiple verified phone numbers. You can’t reuse the same phone number between accounts, unless you want to verify it every single time you switch accounts. And they don’t allow google voice or voip numbers. They clearly don’t want you using multiple accounts.

Account switching is natively supported yes, but if you join a big discord server with an account that isn't verified with a phone it will eventually be locked.

I'm not sure how many people have multiple phone numbers...

I had to use some shady weird sms service to verify my other account, I tried legit voip services but those were all blocked.

Well if that is the case, then I was entirely mistaken and I apologize! This would certainly be a thing worth celebrating. Thank you for letting me, I'll take a closer look at this.

>You can go and see what I’ve been up to. Ditto for me being curious about you.

I think this is probably one of the worst features (alongside downvotes / upvotes) about HN, Reddit and similar sites. If you are anonymous your opinion can be taken for what it is without any bias and ad hominem due to your previous comments. We can argue in one thread about something, and agree in another without even recognizing each other. It makes one focus on the content of the post and not on the personality of the author.

Social pressure and consequence is necessary to maintain a civil community. Common identities create common bonds. Your comment history is there specifically so others can judge you as a person and decide whether interaction with you is worth the effort. That's better than the tendentious mess of only finding out you're dealing with a psychopath or serial troll after the rafters have caught fire.

Anonymity tends to lead to the most vile comments being made behind green alt accounts. This isn't 4chan, we don't want that here.

What's the social pressure? Healthy, well adjusted adults will not care if you are offended by their post history.

I've seen the opposite, where attaching your personal details to social media and creating a threat of real 'consequences' have lead to an extremely aggressive attitude of conformity that makes it impossible to actually discuss anything even slightly outside of group consensus. Which is something I have thankfully not encountered oh HN.

> Healthy, well adjusted adults will not care if you are offended by their post history.

Healthy, well adjusted adults will care, because healthy well adjusted adults are possessed of empathy and the awareness of living within the norms and boundaries of social structures, and that the people they interact with online are actual people and not simply text in a box.

Having no internal filter and not caring about the effect you have on others is a sign of immaturity and sociopathy. It's the sort of internet fuckwad behavior most of us grow out of by the time we're no longer teenagers.

>Which is something I have thankfully not encountered oh HN.

And HN has exactly that kind of system, so you admit it works here. People are capable of discussing things outside of group consensus as well as respecting one another and being civil, and the fact that they do at all suggests the effect of downvoting, flagging and disengaging works to discourage bad behavior while not suppressing actual thought provoking or interesting discussion.

> Anonymity tends to lead to the most vile comments being made behind green alt accounts. This isn't 4chan, we don't want that here

And publicity leads to bottling up comments that go against the grain or might provoke controversy leading to groupthink. We don't want that here either.

> And publicity leads to bottling up comments that go against the grain or might provoke controversy leading to groupthink.

That's much easier to moderate than anonymous vile comments. It may not be exactly a civil discussion but you're still learning something about these people and their views.

I'm happy that there are websites with different cultures, so people can choose the best outlet to express their view instead of mudding the water here and turning it to flame wars or whatever.

Hacker News isn't a debate club, we're here to satisfy our collective intellectual curiosity about matters of interest, not "provoke controversy" or try to score imaginary points on political opponents.

I've seen plenty of well thought out, thought provoking comments that criticize or contradict someone's point of view. No one has any reason to bottle that up. However, if your comment history is packed with midwit rants about "the woke" or "cultural marxism" or flagged racist tirades then it's in everyone's interest to have some warning before interacting with you.

I like to engage in lgbt and furry communities on discord. I don’t like to show this content when you search my name and I don’t want my coworkers to see this content.

Please explain what civil disruption is being caused by my lack of social pressure and consequence.

Do you share all of your private conversations and thoughts under your real name?

weird how so few of these communities with social pressure are even remotely civil.

This is exactly what I don’t want. I’m so sick of people stalking through my comments on reddit piecing things together from multiple communities.

I very much like that when I join a discord server. It’s pretty much a blank slate.

disposability is like, the main appeal of discord.

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