Using discord is morally lazy | Hacker News Reader

Using discord is morally lazy

j3s.sh

25 pointsquickthrower221 comments

While I'm fully in agreement that Discord has fundamental problems, this article doesn't seem of sufficient quality for HN. It is "unfinished", and in practice that apparently means "makes claims and doesn't justify any of them". So while we can choose to agree or disagree about the claims, we don't know what the author meant. That the article is written in a flippant and dismissive tone doesn't help.

I agree that discord has objectionable philosophical foundations around centralization, data retention and privacy. Additionally, the rate at which they're crapping out annoying, intrusive anti-features is excruciating — think "sound board", "super reactions", "clips", etc. It's profoundly clear that Discord is grasping at straws trying to find any way to motivate people to pay for their fully functional free product, and the way they've decided to do it is to add ways to annoy other users and count on the "meme potential" to entice people to pay get access to them. Overall, Discord is a very effective text and voice chat app, but now requires a lot of accessibility settings and preference toggles to make it usable. It's very sad the direction Discord is heading, given how effective it was as a tool not long ago.

.thoughtbody { max-width: 90ch; }

fixes the overflow so you don't have to scroll left-right to read it.

The formatting of this guy's website is worse than lazy; it's actively bad. The blog post is simultaneously plain text, yet in a bounded box that cuts off the words, forcing me to scroll/pan right within the box.

The irony "!unfinished article warning!"

I think Discord is not the best for organizing an open source project but I think it has a healthier business model than X.

The best times I’ve had playing online games like League of Legends have been when one of the players formed a party that was using Discord for communications. Some of it is Discord being technically better but some of it is also the sense of community it engenders. In unranked you have to deal with idiots who don’t know how to queue, who argue what kind of position they want to play, how you are supposed to play (like it turns out my support is absolutely creaming the other guy’s bottom, not something I could do on command, why does my bottom care if his character grows?). In ranked you wind up with people who think they can’t get ahead because the matchmaker pairs them with bad players and distract everyone by complaining bitterly about it.

Groups organized on discord had a PMA which was more fun and we played better. Something I think about playing LoL again and starting out a summoner at Lv. 1 but if I do I am going to get a Discord and invite people to it.

I envy the individual whose life is so fulfilled and devoid of more pressing issues that they can take the time and energy to pontificate the “morality” of people using a chat service

I know it's unfinished but why is it morally lazy to "use it"?

investment stuff - 500 employees making a product. It sounds like if investors putting in billions into the company are not doing their due-dilligence if your claim is true.

"not my server" - its like the word "module" in computer science. Server is a computer, or it's something listening on a port, or it's a waitress at a restaurant. Sounds like some words mean multiple things.

> I would argue that moreso than any other piece of infrastructure used by people, Discord has the highest potential to harm the world, and our perception of our place within it.

Waht? I'm actually very confused by this entirely.

I don't use Discord even though I play computer games, but your unfinished article should probably be re-written with actual logic.

Yeah, I was waiting to get to the part where it recommends what doesn't suck to easily build up a community from zero. I suppose that the unfinished part.

The way I see it if/when Discord got really bad, individual communities would move elsewhere, the people are the community and unlike loosely coupled networks, a subreddit or Discord 'server' can act with a high degree of coordination.

It encourages the continued and expanding collective investment in it as a platform, as a location for information. We all know how this ends, and we would all rather that information be on a thousand different independently-owned Mattermost instances than on one worse-than-Reddit black hole.

I agree that Discord is bad for the forum/community use-case that has become ubiquitous on there, but the fact that Discord has ended up getting frequently misused in place of forums is not really a reason to hate on Discord itself, and apparently we would not all rather have something more persistent than Discord for useful information--otherwise a bunch of communities wouldn't still be (mis)using Discord.

It's odd to complain about discord "tarnishing" the word server, when discord, for the longest time (starting from the beginning), called them guilds. It's only due to users calling them servers, because that's the colloquial term, that led to the change in user facing messaging. They're still called guilds in the docs.

A great point poorly presented.

Discord, by dent of having no clear path to profitability, must get creative in how it captures value from its assets — namely, user data.

How Discord and other “free” (I know they have paid subscribers but they don’t pay the bills) services monetizes will be subject to future developments. Will they run ads? Train AI models? Sell user data? Pipe it straight into NSA servers? Does Discord already do these things?

Being a “free service” means you always have great PR; how can you hold a free service to high standards without being entitled?

That number for the amount of text they accumulate is underwhelming. It adds up to 15TB which would fit on a $300 HDD. Sure it has to be indexed, searchable, able to be quickly accessed, probably tiered into RAM or SSD, racked into some kind of system, housed in a data center, powered, etc. 40x that would be less than one of those bay area engineers.

Discord is also a file host. Free users have infinite storage, but can not upload files bigger than 25 MiB

"last updated 1993-02-18" ok then

I don’t love all the OSS discords, but I’m not at all here yet:

“I would argue that moreso than any other piece of infrastructure used by people, Discord has the highest potential to harm the world, and our perception of our place within it.”

This is quite a lazy way to say that using a product is "morally lazy"

This website is unbearable. And I enjoy people's funky, personable sites

"!unfinished article warning!"

I guess then the author is intellectually lazy? The only reason to put out this disclaimer is to say oh this was just a draft and I am going to fix that up when someone complains...

The lazyness of ours is not limited with Discord only.

It was written in 2021 apparently but also has

> last updated 1993-02-18

at the bottom of the page. Is this letter a form of satire?

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