b-b-but muh communism
lennivelkant
joined 1 year ago
As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I'm starting to regard paywalls as a more "honest" type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn't need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don't fault them for it.
And how does the host pay for them?
I heard the Eldar have a really fascinating new-
Why are you all aiming at me?
Short version to save others a click: Proton's CEO tweeted an endorsement of Trump's FTC pick, going on to praise how apparently the Republicans are now the party for the "little guys" and crediting the ongoing antitrust proceedings to Trump's first term.
And if "yourself" is just not likeable, working on that is also hard in a number of ways, from first realising and acknowledging the things you can improve to actually committing to self-improvement. But for the same reason, someone will appreciate it at some point. If being yourself is respectable, being a better version of yourself is even more so.
I mean, I get it. If I'm working on something and hit a snag, posting in a forum where the response time may be measured in days or more until someone replies with further questions, to which I then reply at my earliest convenience and wait another day for a response, then have to see when I next have time to try the advice and hope that settles it...
Well, I'd certainly prefer to get input right when I'm working on it, while I have the time and mindspace for it. In that light, maybe forums simply aren't the best solution anymore, or at least not by themselves. But integrated chats have been tried before, haven't they? What was wrong with them?
Oh but there's a shit ton of documentation that's only available on discord and that's not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.
I absolutely agree. That's part of the point I'm trying to make: The death of Discord might well cause those things to be lost. Hoping for it to crash and burn is counterproductive because thay will only do damage.
Instead, we should figure out why people moved to Discord in the first place, because...
Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions
...clearly, whatever makes forums "the best" isn't enough. Then what is it that Discord does better? How can forums work to match it and entice people back?
I don't know. I'm not one of the people that preferred Discord and I can't speak for them. But maybe we should listen first instead of wishing ill on them and hoping their favourite places die.
Well, you have one part right: it won't disappear magically. If it does, it will do so quite naturally, unless someone actively preserves it, e.g. by archiving the chat histories.
Of course, you might mean the people with the knowledge that wrote those histories in the first place. You know, the people that used Discord instead of forums. The people that left forums. The people that apparently didn't want to use forums.
Why would you assume they'd move to forums? Clearly there was some reason they chose to use Discord, so why wouldn't they just find a replacement?
Discord isn't the issue. I mean, Discord has plenty of issues, but this particular one is a cultural one. Unless we find a way to entice people back to forums (or some other publically indexable platform), they'll just keep going elsewhere.
So maybe instead of condemning Discord we should ask "Why do people prefer it?" Then we can figure out how to address that and actually do something about the root of the issue.
They probably don't intentionally use it to store information so much as quickly and conveniently exchange answers and questions. Forums have evidently proven inadequate for that purpose, so unless people find a better solution and make it stick, the lesson sure won't.
assuming Discord wouldn't be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access
That's what I mean by issue of culture. I don't think the habit of gathering on discord-like services to quickly exchange info will change, and if the explosion of bsky is anything to go by, people will just find the next shiny, pretty and well-funded platform that totally definitely won't enshittify somewhere down the line to pay back their venture capital investors.
We'd be cutting the weed without pulling the root.
Oat is GOAT
(The acronym, not the animal)