I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
><i>I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.</i><p>it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not <i>great</i>, but as a chat room it's fine.
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped
Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.<p>Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police
Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.
Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.
But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.
Both things can be true.
I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.<p>The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.<p>Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.
I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.
Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.
That's not at all why my WoW guild moved to Discord.
>Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues<p>This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.<p>Discord become popular because they capitalized on the emerging online gaming community in the 2010s by offering a convenient and most importantly FREE platform for people to hop online and game with friends/talk with strangers who shared a similar interest.
Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.<p>No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.
This is true but I think it's both.<p>The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.<p><i>And</i> reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.
> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.<p>"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"<p>Proving his point in real time
Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?
On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.<p>You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
Are you really questioning if there is reprisal against users or communities that don't toe the line? Cancel culture?<p>Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender, etc. Ironically look at Bluesky last year and the efforts to <i>switch</i> because there was no longer suppression of certain opinions? (How'd that work out).
>Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender,<p>Let's not. Your cherry picked list of topics reveals you'd never listen to opposition/reality.
It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.
>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord<p>This was a feature.<p>This was desired.<p>This was welcomed by all actors involved.<p>(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.<p>These are just network effects.
Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.
I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.
"through *googling* " might've been a better phrasing
It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.
I've never gotten into using Discord because I find the interface to be way too busy.
I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.
For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.<p>I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.
Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.
Do Fluxer, etc., solve the problem of discoverability that this is supposed to help with? Or is it just a not-closed platform?
How does it compare to Zulip?
How does Discord compare to Zulip? Fluxer is functionally equivalent to Discord from a users perspective.<p>AFAIK, Zulip doesn't have any sort of built in calling, streaming, etc. right? Fluxer has that I'm addition to the Discord style chat features.
why Flxuer and not any of the other dozen or so replacements that have been mentioned every time a discord thread pops up?
Fluxer is amazing.<p>Quick self-promo to my website: <a href="https://mirror.forum" rel="nofollow">https://mirror.forum</a> which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.<p>I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?
> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.<p>Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.<p>> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),<p>It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.<p>(Full story for those curious)<p>It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475</a> (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)<p>(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)<p>[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and <a href="https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/" rel="nofollow">https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/</a> and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]<p>It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.<p>But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.<p>I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.<p>Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.<p>Have a nice day :-D
phpBB!
You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.
I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process<p>Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?<p>A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
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