Maybe the issue is this perception that "the Internet" consists mainly of the big 4 social media sites.
Go on Discord. People have usernames, avatars. Discord Profile Bios are just as unique as forum signatures.
Maybe the issue is this perception that "the Internet" consists mainly of the big 4 social media sites.
Go on Discord. People have usernames, avatars. Discord Profile Bios are just as unique as forum signatures.
I am on Discord and the balkanization+homogeneization is still as prominent there as everywhere else.
Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.
> Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged. Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Maybe you should join better servers. I'll also add that this was common back in the forum days too. Most admins would just... admin the site.
> Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
Wrong on both counts.
> I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same.
I did not present it as an "opposite to social media" - I presented it as a counter to the idea that we've lost the personality GP is talking about
You're one of the 1% who reads profile bios.
Of course, because the alternative - that they're wrong, and more people actually do read bios - couldn't possibly be true.
In any case, I see no reason to believe any higher % of people paid any particular attention to forum signatures back in the day.
“Paid attention”, you're probably right. Seen them enough to remember? Forum signatures were far harder to miss than Discord bios.
Discord also is a centralized piece of proprietary totalitarianism. No thanks.
Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
IRC works in the browser now thanks to IRCv3. Matrix is another option
The invitation system gives a false sense of privacy. There are bots that crawl publicly posted invites, public IRC channels, etc. Eventually people will understand that IRC and discord are public in the same way we understand usenet to have been public
> before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules.
And running them was awful and drove the people who did it insane, mostly because you had to fight spambots.
Yeah, sadly it is the spambots which have killed off independent platforms more than anything else. It sounds like something which could easily give rise to conspiracy theories from people putting the spammers into the same mental baskets as the controlling companies. It isn't the expense of having to leave on a raspberry pi running a server.
But you can enjoy it before enshittification arrives!
All praise our VC overlords.