I did not know about this: "The center of the A.I. cover songs community is a massive 500,000+ member Discord called A.I. Hub, where members trade new tips, tools, techniques, and links to their original and cover songs."
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.
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.
The community is not gatekeeping knowledge, anyone can join. It merely tries to keep certain corporations out...
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.
There was a generation that preferred mailing lists. There was a generation that preferred IRC and BBS, and "my" generation which likes forums and lengthy comment threads. One would be naiive to think this style (the one we're engaging in here) would last forever.
There are definitely very real criticisms of Discord, searchability and discoverability being the most common, but at this point I think the die has been cast. Young people have made their choice.
These big teleconference apps are usually hit or miss but discord seems to be the winner currently for actual "social networking", also add in its trend in the gaming community
That being said, Discord does have some advantages over older forum-type communities - it's usually way better for cultivating smaller communities, and its no-effort-required chat systems means that you can always hop on and discuss things that are on the cutting edge. This is quite important in a field like AI, where it feels like something revolutionary happens every other week.
(Also, I don't know if that implication was intentional, but gen Z and "underaged" haven't meant the same thing for many years now)
Glad to hear you and your peers are still posting on the open web!
Like, there's a whole lot of "classic song done by presently popular rapper," and I'll be the first to insist that there is nearly nothing vocally interesting at all coming from todays popular hip-hop artists (and I say this as an extreme long-time hip-hop aficionado)