Not being active on social media has meant a lot of old friends have drifted out of my life so I'm trying to force myself to be more active on it but sadly there are no enjoyable (or usable) platforms left.
TikTok is almost purely algorithmic, stranger-generated content consumption with the novelty factor cranked to 11. Discord has no algorithmic curation, voting, etc, and is just people talking that you have to curate yourself.
Facebook is trying to pivot in the TikTok direction. Problem is there are a lot of people who want to use it to connect with actual people (because that's kinda how it worked in the past), which is orthogonal to their mission of pumping the maximal possible amount of garbage into your brain.
I use discord mostly for keeping up with friends and am very glad those chats aren't on the open internet
Are they? I'm sure there are people who use Discord like that, but I am on dozens of servers and all of them are public, i.e. anyone can join anytime. That's not private that's just hiding from Google.
> If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that.
Chat/video/audio as good and popular as Discord? Where? IRC? Matrix?
> Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant?
Fair enough but nobody is asking direct messages or the servers for people who actually know each other and want privacy to be on the open web. Just the ones that are closer to being public squares for discussing specific topics.
> In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.
Eh, I get what you're saying but don't you think the Internet as a whole loses a lot of its value if this happens? Wasn't Google and good indexing one of the crucial things that led to the Internet revolution?
If an open source project chose to track issues using a series of private conversations in restaurants, most of us would recognise how ephemeral and fleeting that is.
They're irritated by all the open-source projects replacing their mailing list, forum, or wiki with "Just ask on the Slack or Discord". It's the most god-awful mode of community support imaginable.
I love the old bulletin boards and IRC channels where you get to know people, talk about projects, asking for help, etc.
Discord fills that role in a much more accessible way than posting on a forum or googling a stack overflow answer.
Both hae value. Apparently you much prefer a less real-time interactive approach to solving those problems.
For those of us who came of age during the "RTFM before bothering anybody, dammit!" attitude toward supporting engineers, looking for already posted answers to a problem that likely someone else has already solved is vastly superior to bothering someone about a problem they might well be tired of talking about for the 100th time.
I've never been good at "conversation" in real life or online; some of us simply aren't and have/find our strengths elsewhere, and increasingly it seems all online discussions about, say, issues around a game published by a small indie vendor are being pushed to Discord and in some cases even shutting down other online communication channels in favor of that. A vendor who keeps its online discussion forums available and supported is always going to get a lot more interest from me than what I see younger companies doing.
Maybe it's just a big cultural shift, and I am no longer relevant. Not ready to "go away" just yet...
Annoying that that's not the default, sure. But at least it exists.
I thought sk=h_chr was unimportant so I trimmed it off the URL before sharing. Turns out it's necessary.
Facebook is a ghost town. There’s just three people of the 125 “friends” who appears in the first 20 odd.