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Comment by _7acn | Hacker News Reader

I see that no one has mentioned Discord yet. I use it occasionally, and I have quite a few themed spaces there. However, I can't say that I particularly enjoy it. I mostly just check in from time to time. Discord always feels like a place where I miss a true sense of "community", which is very hard for me to define.

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IMHO discord has far too much "community". at best you want to learn about $coolThing and the server is dominated by a handful of terminally online folks. at worst there's rampant extremism and grooming which goes largely unchecked

also even the most benign discord servers are taking what used to be freely accessible (forums, hobby sites, fansites, etc) and walling the content into a proprietary system which demands your phone number, real IP, etc. it's slowly strangulating all other forms of internet community

This. Don't use discord if you have a choice.

I got a 2+ year ban from Discord for being 'inactive' (I didn't properly moderate a server I created), at least to the best of my understanding. Their appeal and discovery process are abysmal.

Which a large variety of communities, sample projects, discussions that I found really useful, I now have 0 access too.

I am just at a loss of what to do with having lost access to useful information, communities, and peers. This is far more prevalent and problematic in gamedev related communities compared to other software communities.

The thing with Discord and Reddit is: using it means very little. The communities make or break it. For example, I play two games regularly: Wordfeud and Warcraft Rumble. For Wordfeud, I seek no community, I only play it with my mother and my wife. For Warcraft Rumble, I like to theorycraft for myself, but if I really am stuck that is one of the places I go to first. So I lurk there, which means I am a user. But I do not participate since I removed my Reddit account a while ago. Similar with Discord (I do have an account): I am member of quite some Discord communities but I almost exclusively lurk. Discord and Reddit are nothing special though, since their ToS are terrible (we own your data, here are some ads, we profile you). The only reason I am there is network effect and the signal to noise ratio regarding info is 'good enough'. You're not even allowed to use your own or a modified client though...

Why is "talk into a black hole" discord so popular? I'm a member of several discord severs, and they are just noise, or someone trying to project manage with Discord (which is a poor project manager) or whomever just assume you're there to work for them for free and they assign you work without asking.

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