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Comment by bookofjoe | Hacker News Reader

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

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..

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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