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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

All social media is a drug, and I lump Discord in there as Social Media, especially if WhatsApp is social media for many outside of the US.

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Some are harder drugs than others. I'd say that HN is caffeine, discord and whatsapp are alcohol, and Instagram is meth.

I would lump Tik Tok as the direct IG competitor imho. It doesn't make sense because that was not its roots, but the way I see people use IG is the way I also see people use Tik Tok.

Somehow WhatsApp implemented Snapchat-esque stories, and also channels that broadcast such stories (e.g. I can subscribe to updates from FC Barcelona), because hey, Zuck probably thought "who needs shame, we're going to copy functionaliy in order to destroy the competition".

You mean my "away" autoresponse I set for MSN for an hour or wast it AIM? jokes aside, yeah they all copied it, look at YouTube too.

Discord doesn't fundamentally do anything that IRC didn't do, except work reliably on a smartphone. If that's a drug, then that seems pretty close to saying that any kind of online interaction with other human beings is a drug.

The notification spam on your phone is something that did not exist in the 2000s, no?

I remember that with the advent of smartphones suddenly all websites wanted to send status updates...

No, and I would've wanted it for the IRC channels I was in at the time, just as I typically want notifications (that I can enable/disable at will) for some chats I'm in on more modern realtime communication software.

You havent met people who are terminally on Discord yet have you? I don't know that IRC had that level of addiction. People become insanely attached to 'servers' on Discord.

IRC and Newsgroups definitely had that level of addiction going on. Just smaller population size due by technical friction that kept the general population away.

I might count as terminally on Discord myself - what are your standards for "insanely attached" to a specific social environment, and how important do you think the specific software people use to talk with people in that environment is?

One thing that Discord reliably does is to lock me off the account and force me to go through _all_, complete verification hops (starting form the sms to my phone).

Nothing changes between my sessions, IP from the same ISP, same device, same times, not even new servers, just a normal, human pattern of use on the decent, old account.

Just discord being discord.

Yeah I've been having this a lot too. It asks me to verify then logs me in and then 20 minutes later I'm logged out again with a message I need to verify my email. So annoying.

Irc had screensharing and group video chat i had no idea

i agree that discord is social media but the absence of instagram's individually targeted algorithmic curation is an important distinction when it comes to being "drug"-like for me

This is a fair call out, though I agree and disagree to a point. Some people get really into specific communities, if banned they will spin up as many new accounts as they can get in just to be in again, its really weird to me, I just move on from communities I am no longer allowed in.

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