How many freeform interactions like this did we lose because of the Internet's illusion of being connected?
Yeah, bouncers exist, but it should have been baked into the spec at some point.
Discord has a million deserted "servers" with redundant general channels. Peak IRC had a dozen or so large networks that often bundled a lot of e.g. adjacent FOSS projects. The chances of running into someone interesting a la the article anecdote was just higher.
Discord is a massive net negative for chatting on the internet because of this flaw imho.
The thing is, my experience is different, but of course similarly anecdotal. I essentially got my entire professional network and career on IRC, and that includes contacts all over the modern tech stack and adjacent interests, being on just two IRC "servers". And I could connect many other people in the same way.
On Discord, there seem to be just more barriers against this. Getting someone into a new place doesn't just require hopping into a new channel with a single /join command, but an entire new "server" with a new crowd. There's more inhibition against that.
Of course, the (massive) counterpoint is that you get to talk to way fewer people, particularly if they're more than half an hour traveling away. Quantity versus quality, but by having a lot of quantity through more diverse online interactions, you can find the conversations that have a lot of quality for you (overlapping fields of work, hobbies, or just a personality match).
Which is better? Probably something in the middle, where you hang out in chat rooms but are also conscious of the advantages of arranging to meet up. I do find it inspirational (too strong a word, but you get the idea) to hear of other times or cultures where things are done differently
People may say that Discord and similar will compensate, greatly, as the number of interactions can grow a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the experience is comparable to fully focusing on the person you're eating in person with.
Are Discord discussions indexed by any public search engines? What about communities that are invite-only (without much actual reason to be so)? What about community admins who decide to take their whole thing down, communities that break site-wide rules and get removed by site admins, etc? Does Discord Inc. make any commitments towards publishing discussions that have archival/historical value?
How much knowledge is already irrecoverably stuck in Slack's bit bucket, as people flocked away to the next walled-garden chat app?
With the rise of AIs-hoovering-up-everything-reachable-on-the-public-web I'm not sure I want every conversation indexed either.
C'mon dude. The opportunity for people to talk to one another about this stuff is unimaginably better than it was back then. Like, here we are, right now, me telling you you're full of shit. What are the chances of us being able to do that in 1999?
(I'm sorry to be mean, but I remember 1999 very well and it was much harder to get good information about things, and discuss things with others interested in the same topics, than it is today. And it was already markedly better then than it was even 5 years prior to that!)
I had plenty of online conversations on Usenet, IRC and email with guys like Abrash and Jez San etc. It was a much smaller community back then and there was no gatekeeping -- everyone's contact info was out there and inbox zero was still achievable.
The challenge of course is finding your way there. They're not exactly discoverable, and unlike with a job, it's usually through some pretty odd connections that you end up there.