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  • I'm not saying that discord servers for support are a good solution -- I think the problems with archiving and search alone should disqualify it as a support platform.

    But forums have their own problems. I think it's weird that forum advocates don't seem to consider why it started to fade as a medium. Individual accounts for each forum, the need for active moderation of threads for relevancy, and practices that made for negative user experiences like rules against necroing are all valid reasons (among others) for why people moved away from forums. And I can't think of a great way to prevent the "I need help!!" thread titles besides having moderators or approvals.

    Knowledge management is hard, there's a reason why library science is a master's level degree lol

  • I love “old school forums” as much as anyone else drawn to the fediverse, but there is no denying that discord in particular has a very specific flow and community structure that does not exist on forums. Just like you can’t get the full forum experience on discord. It’s not about emojis, it’s that all these services have their own sauce when it comes to how the users interact. Clearly “traditional” forums are not great for everything, otherwise we would not be on the fediverse!

    It’s impossible to have a real time conversation, for starters. Also I have one server in particular where we use voice a ton. The ability to see Miss Lee jump from something that is not quite a forum, not quite instant messaging, but also has a voice/video features, is incredibly convenient.

    The problem with Discord is the company for the most part. If you took 80% of the current features and package them the same as idk five years ago? It would be unbelievable. I’ve seen some projects like guilded and revolt attempting to make an open source alternative, and they actually don’t run poorly at all, but it’s the classic problem of trying to get everybody over to it when the big client is fine for 99% of people on it.

  • You can do forums for a community on Steam.

    You can do real time chatting on Steam.

    You even have a huge set of emojis!

    You can also do real time voice comms via Steam, even in a group setting.

    You can also stream your game, or with a little bit of tomfoolerly, your desktop, or other applications, via Steam.

    This all works on basically all OSs at this point, and a large part of it works on mobile as well.

    Steam is also way, waaay more secure than Discord.

    And you also get MySpace-esque customizable personal homepages for yourself.

    From a technical standpoint... here you go here is your solution for basically all kinds of social media/online interaction.

    Why do more people not recognize this or use it this way?

    /Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./

    When it comes to socializing on the internet, the vast, vast majority of people will /say/ they would prefer to use some kind of system that works some kind of way, and then not actually do that and instead just go with whatever most of their friends are using, or with what is wildly popular, or with whatever some niche community they are interested in is using.

    If you have ever looked at much market research data, for basically anything really, but especially tech and double especially video games, you will soon realize the vast majority of people are hypocritical and inconsistent about a great many things, and seem to /think/ they care about things that their /actions/ clearly indicate they do not really actually care about.

    • /Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./

      I offer a less patronizing explanation:

      Social interaction requires other people to interact with. A platform with more people can provide more social interaction. The average person does not make the choice to use larger platforms because they are uninformed or affected by peer pressure. They make that choice because the thing they value most in social media is a large userbase.

      The average person does not claim to want something more out of social media. They don't care what advantages or disadvantages a platform has.

      There are of course people who claim to care about these things and still continue to use more popular and worse platforms, but they are far less common than you seem to think. Also the fact they aren't changing their behavior doesn't mean they don't actually care, it just means they care more about other things.

      • What you have said is true, but does not make what I said false.

        Maybe this is just my way of speaking, but if you say you care about something, or want some feature, and you are presented with it, and then... now it also needs to be something else, or something specific other thing that has that something else...

        Then you did not /actually/ want the thing you said you wanted.

        Yes, in that case, you are correct that this person wanted something /more/ than something else.

        Look I think the easiest way to explain this is that if you take say large and thorough political polls of Americans, it is so very obvious and easy to see with the data that an astounding amount of people hold positions that are obviously logically contradictory to hold at the same time, that this is why /decades/ ago political campaigns have been focusing on key words and phrases that sound nice over non ambiguous and concrete policy positions, which generally are less popular than using certain phrases.

        There are tons of people who think they care about something and will say they care about it a lot, but when push comes to shove, they will do something, engage in some behavior that evidences they dont /actually/ care about it when push comes to shove. That they will then qualify their position and start rationalizing extra conditions that make them for some reason exempt in this specific case.

        I dunno, perhaps I am ranting pointlessly, but to me it seems utterly uncontroversial to say many people are hypocrites to some degree, or have inconsistent wants or beliefs, to me that seems pretty well evidenced by the entire field of psychology.

    • If only Steam mobile apps weren't so goddamn awful, you might have had a point.

131 comments