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Comment by __turbobrew__ | Hacker News Reader

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but

1. Reddit communities tend to get too large

2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading

3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.

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The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use.

I really wish something better would come along.

It can do per channel and per server notifications for all messages, @mentions, or none.

What else would you want?

Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.

I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone, override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of like pagerduty.

I lurk in a bunch of Discords for things I'm not active in, but don't want to have to find an invite to if I need to ask a question in the future.

I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me"

I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.

You can mute channels and servers completely and get no notifications.

I wish Discord had a betrer account switcher on mobile. I have a realname account for friends ana family, and another I use with randos.

I use discord PTB and Canary to run multiple instances with different accounts on a single device.

It also allows running multiple instances with a single account (to be on multiple vocals at once for example).

The only drawback is the release cycle is more frequent and I need to update every time I boot.

Is this a feature of PTB, or something coming soon to the stable version?

> Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search

worst part is that it used to :/

The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it.

There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.

And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.

All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.

I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.

Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.

Though there may be some very good information locked behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of reddit isn't forgettable).

The good and bad, I guess.

99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does

You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.

I am 77.

That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all your contributions!

Very kind of you.

Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.

The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream.

But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.

I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.

In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.

Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.

I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...

Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.

My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.

I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.

I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.

Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.

If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?

As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.

And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."

He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So 97% of the global population probably have no idea what Discord is.

People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)

I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the day and never got into it.

I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.

As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.

In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.

US. What are they using in UK? WhatsApp? That kinda counts as Facebook, I suppose. But then again, is WhatsApp really a direct competitor with Discord?

By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.

Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern I've worked with uses discord

Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses Discord.

I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I agree with you though..

Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)

> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.

It's not really, you can just Google search and find all their posts and comments.

Sure, you can do that. It’s harder and not collated in the same way though.

You can just whack space a couple of times in the search field on a user profile on the "new" reddit (www. or sh.reddit) and hit Enter

There is also Project Arctic Shift.

I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.

Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.

I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.

I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.

It's funny to see how communities shard.

In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.

Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty large.

The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?

Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems

Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…

Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.

Does Signal scale?

Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.

It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.

Won't disagree about channels and mindshare, but will note that Signal got public group links in 2020, not that recent.

https://signal.org/blog/group-links/

Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.

It does in the Bay Area

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