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Comment by ganoushoreilly | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.

Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.

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im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police

But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.

Both things can be true.

i doubt it is true for the majority, though.

in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.

Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.

You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.

I've found that people with terrible opinions aren't happy to stay in their own groups. They want to be part of the nice groups.

Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.

I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.

The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.

Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.

I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.

Sure, but there are listings of the most popular Discords. Just scroll through them: https://top.gg/discord/servers/list/largest

The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.

I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.

That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.

Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.

I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?

Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.

But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.

That's not at all why my WoW guild moved to Discord.

I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.

Lemmy seems the likely reddit replacement, so much so that many Lemmy comments report it is forbidden to mention on reddit.

https://lemmy.world

Counter to 'the narrative' or not, the twitter approach to social media means there's always a risk of suddenly gaining a lot of negative attention, and the 'global town square' approach seems to actively encourage that kind of thing to happen. It's not surprising people got tired of it, and it doesn't require some grand conspiracy towards or against a particular set of beliefs.

Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?

On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.

You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".

Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.

Discussion of Linux has been forbidden on /r/opensource because there's AI generated code in it.

That's just wild.

https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1xfursg/adjustm... That's not true, their rules are unclear and problematic, but they specifically didn't ban Linux.

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