I'm not sure if I want to keep posting on lobste.rs after seeing some recent discussions...
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@lina @pushcx I’m reminded of this post by @filippo, which I bookmarked as the moderator of a different community as somewhat of a “guiding principle”. I didn’t remember it was about lobste.rs until I went and dug it back out, however…
Filippo Valsorda (@filippo@abyssdomain.expert)
Attached: 1 image There's a bit of commotion on Lobsters because an unpleasant-but-technically-correct user finally got banned, and I realized that an unpopular opinion of mine is that moderators are always right. I don't care about the letter of the CoC. I don't care about transparency, even. Moderation is the fundamentally human and nuanced big-picture job that shapes a community.
Mastodon (abyssdomain.expert)
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@hjvt @laund If your answer to "Discord is bad" is "use Zulip and Discourse" then you, like apparently quite a few people in that thread, have no idea what normal people use Discord for.
Yes, Discord is bad at the things you'd use those tools for. That is not what most people use Discord for.
I don't know where this straw man that "people use Discord to replace forums and support sites and knowledge bases" came from but I'm really tired of it. Yes, some people use Discord for those things, and yes it's bad at those things. The solution is not to use it for those things. That doesn't mean you get to extrapolate from "Discord is bad for one use case" to "Discord is bad".
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@hjvt @laund If your answer to "Discord is bad" is "use Zulip and Discourse" then you, like apparently quite a few people in that thread, have no idea what normal people use Discord for.
Yes, Discord is bad at the things you'd use those tools for. That is not what most people use Discord for.
I don't know where this straw man that "people use Discord to replace forums and support sites and knowledge bases" came from but I'm really tired of it. Yes, some people use Discord for those things, and yes it's bad at those things. The solution is not to use it for those things. That doesn't mean you get to extrapolate from "Discord is bad for one use case" to "Discord is bad".
@hjvt @laund I just had a support chat with someone using my software on Discord earlier today. It was efficient and friendly and productive. Because it was real time. It was much faster than it would've been on an asynchronous platform.
Is that information going to get lost in the depths of a random Discord server? No, because I'm either going to file and fix the bug or document whatever needs to be documented on the project documentation, where it belongs.
It also turns out that for ecosystem reasons, it's likely that the vast, vast majority of my users are on Discord, and therefore I'm providing a better, easier support experience for them by myself being on Discord. You may not like that, but I'd rather make things easy for my users than die on the hill of using an alternative platform.
And if you don't like Discord, you're still free to file a GitHub issue and go the asynchronous way. It's just going to take longer because I don't keep GitHub logged in on my phone (among others, for security reasons) so I'm not going to be helping you while having dinner, like I did over Discord.
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@hjvt @laund I just had a support chat with someone using my software on Discord earlier today. It was efficient and friendly and productive. Because it was real time. It was much faster than it would've been on an asynchronous platform.
Is that information going to get lost in the depths of a random Discord server? No, because I'm either going to file and fix the bug or document whatever needs to be documented on the project documentation, where it belongs.
It also turns out that for ecosystem reasons, it's likely that the vast, vast majority of my users are on Discord, and therefore I'm providing a better, easier support experience for them by myself being on Discord. You may not like that, but I'd rather make things easy for my users than die on the hill of using an alternative platform.
And if you don't like Discord, you're still free to file a GitHub issue and go the asynchronous way. It's just going to take longer because I don't keep GitHub logged in on my phone (among others, for security reasons) so I'm not going to be helping you while having dinner, like I did over Discord.
@hjvt @laund And that's just the corner case of software support. The majority of what I do on Discord, and what most people do on Discord, has nothing to do with that. We're mostly on there to make friends and participate in communities, sometimes start our own.
Linear text channels are what you *want* for a small to medium community because that's how you get people to talk to each other. And Discord has threads for when you really need to split off a chat. And if you think O(1k) users is an unmanageable chatty mess, you don't have much experience with community management and open communities. Most people are lurkers, and when a community has multiple channels, the chat volume per channel quickly becomes slow and comfortable. The chat rate in my server (1600 members) is a message every few minutes during active conversation, and several hours of quiet when people are away, and that's for the busiest channels.
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@hjvt @laund And that's just the corner case of software support. The majority of what I do on Discord, and what most people do on Discord, has nothing to do with that. We're mostly on there to make friends and participate in communities, sometimes start our own.
Linear text channels are what you *want* for a small to medium community because that's how you get people to talk to each other. And Discord has threads for when you really need to split off a chat. And if you think O(1k) users is an unmanageable chatty mess, you don't have much experience with community management and open communities. Most people are lurkers, and when a community has multiple channels, the chat volume per channel quickly becomes slow and comfortable. The chat rate in my server (1600 members) is a message every few minutes during active conversation, and several hours of quiet when people are away, and that's for the busiest channels.
@hjvt @laund And honestly this whole debate is just extremely pretentious and off-putting because it implies that people like you know better than the actual users what tools work well for what they want to do.
Discord didn't take off in a vacuum. It took off because it's *good*. Yes it has issues, but it also does enough things better than everything else that people want to use it.
If you don't see that, you are not the target market for Discord, and you should stop participating in discussions about alternatives to Discord, because your opinion, as someone uninterested in and unimpressed by Discord, is *completely irrelevant* to the user base at hand, who are people who like and use Discord.
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@hjvt @laund I just had a support chat with someone using my software on Discord earlier today. It was efficient and friendly and productive. Because it was real time. It was much faster than it would've been on an asynchronous platform.
Is that information going to get lost in the depths of a random Discord server? No, because I'm either going to file and fix the bug or document whatever needs to be documented on the project documentation, where it belongs.
It also turns out that for ecosystem reasons, it's likely that the vast, vast majority of my users are on Discord, and therefore I'm providing a better, easier support experience for them by myself being on Discord. You may not like that, but I'd rather make things easy for my users than die on the hill of using an alternative platform.
And if you don't like Discord, you're still free to file a GitHub issue and go the asynchronous way. It's just going to take longer because I don't keep GitHub logged in on my phone (among others, for security reasons) so I'm not going to be helping you while having dinner, like I did over Discord.
@lina @laund
Discord and it's firehouse of text is literally hostile to me personally. I do not feel comfortable about asking for support there, because when I do there's a 50/50 chance of either getting washed away by spam, or someone going "uggh, I'm tired of answering this over and over".
And I need to stay glued to discord in case anybody asks clarifying questions and doesn't use the reply feature.Which is a common occurrence, because I my experience discord just "unreplies" your messages half the time.
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@hjvt @laund And honestly this whole debate is just extremely pretentious and off-putting because it implies that people like you know better than the actual users what tools work well for what they want to do.
Discord didn't take off in a vacuum. It took off because it's *good*. Yes it has issues, but it also does enough things better than everything else that people want to use it.
If you don't see that, you are not the target market for Discord, and you should stop participating in discussions about alternatives to Discord, because your opinion, as someone uninterested in and unimpressed by Discord, is *completely irrelevant* to the user base at hand, who are people who like and use Discord.
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@hjvt @laund If your answer to "Discord is bad" is "use Zulip and Discourse" then you, like apparently quite a few people in that thread, have no idea what normal people use Discord for.
Yes, Discord is bad at the things you'd use those tools for. That is not what most people use Discord for.
I don't know where this straw man that "people use Discord to replace forums and support sites and knowledge bases" came from but I'm really tired of it. Yes, some people use Discord for those things, and yes it's bad at those things. The solution is not to use it for those things. That doesn't mean you get to extrapolate from "Discord is bad for one use case" to "Discord is bad".
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@Profpatsch The Bluesky Way. Sometimes it's really nice, ngl.
@lina oh so not so hot take
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@lina @laund
Discord and it's firehouse of text is literally hostile to me personally. I do not feel comfortable about asking for support there, because when I do there's a 50/50 chance of either getting washed away by spam, or someone going "uggh, I'm tired of answering this over and over".
And I need to stay glued to discord in case anybody asks clarifying questions and doesn't use the reply feature.Which is a common occurrence, because I my experience discord just "unreplies" your messages half the time.
@hjvt @laund Then you are not the target market for Discord, and you should stick to asynchronous channels and avoid inserting your personal opinion into discussions about alternatives to Discord. You are not offering alternatives to Discord, you are offering different things which are not alternatives, that you just happen to like while disliking Discord.
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@hjvt @laund Continuing to shout into the void about how you hate Discord and how it has X problem in Y situation is not, in fact, going to convince anyone to move off of Discord, because the people on Discord aren't having X problem in Y situation all the time, or else they wouldn't be using Discord.
Please stop. You are not required to like every tool, and every tool is not required to cater to your liking.
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> What is your actual problem with Zulip?
I have no problem with Zulip. It is a different tool, for a different job, which I have also used.
> It's just as async as discord,
Technically perhaps, in terms of the actual usage it encourages, not really.
> but has actually usable topics and search.
It puts topics first, which is a *different* paradigm to Discord and therefore works better for some things and *worse for others*. And Discord has usable topics.
> The only thing it is missing is voicechat and screen share, which are not things you need for community building.
I'm a VTuber and voice chat and screen share are two of the absolutely most fundamental tools for VTuber community building. Never mind things like just chilling with friends, having a call for coordinating some action/activity, showing someone an issue you're having in real time on screen, etc. Yes you can do those things on a different service, but that creates friction. Discord eliminates that friction.
Is it really that hard to accept that not everyone is like you, not everyone has the same preferences as you, and not everyone wants the same things out of a collaboration/chat tool as you?
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@disorderlyf For contrast, the OBS discord server has 244,000 members right now. Around a thousand is pretty typical for "I opened up a Discord and I do mildly cool stuff / have some online following and people joined and liked it there".
I'm currently in ~6 servers with that order of magnitude users which are not project oriented, just personal/group/community spaces of some sort. It's not at all on the upper end. It's just what a successful mostly-open-invite community of people with similar interests looks like.
Now obviously they aren't small either, but saying that size is too large to be viable and should not exist (and even further, arguing down thread that should they exist, communities that size should be managed democratically with a nonprofit or whatever controlling it) is just so wildly out of touch it's not even funny.
@lina Yeah...my definition is definitely skewed then...
244 THOUSAND?! Fuck, I have so much more respect for the engineers at Discord now.Still, I never said I think groups that big shouldn't exist. At most, I wonder if a community that large would be better served with an in-house solution instead of Discord. You'd know more about that than I would id you moderate a server that large.
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@lina Yeah...my definition is definitely skewed then...
244 THOUSAND?! Fuck, I have so much more respect for the engineers at Discord now.Still, I never said I think groups that big shouldn't exist. At most, I wonder if a community that large would be better served with an in-house solution instead of Discord. You'd know more about that than I would id you moderate a server that large.
@disorderlyf Well, for one, I don't think the OBS project can afford to spend time and resources and money on building out a custom solution (and they wouldn't get much gain out of it). The OBS discord is huge because... OBS is popular *and* the vast majority of OBS users already use Discord.
They do, however, have quite a bit of automation around their Discord to manage it. That's the beauty of these things, you can build that out gradually as the communty grows, without having to require that people sign up for a different service or committing to manage and administer and host all of it yourself.
The calculus for funding stuff like this is quite skewed. My personal Discord server actually has one more boost than the OBS discord, which means people are technically paying slightly more to "directly" sponsor my Discord than OBS, despite the 3 orders of magnitude difference in size (this is because there's incentive to boost to a point, but not much beyond that, regardless of server size). In practice, what happens is people paying for Nitro in general subsidize large servers like that proportional to user count, in a way that would not work if you outright asked them to pay to access it directly.
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Essentially, I don't have the energy to argue with these kinds of people forever, nor am I comfortable seeing them free to reply to me with their terrible takes (which are nonetheless "appealing" to some naive readers without context, plus bring in more people like them).
I'd rather just not use a site/platform with this issue.
Technical arguments are fine, but having people with takes like "'large' communities like yours should not exist" ('large' = my 1600 member Discord server) or "Discord is bad and you can just choose not to use it" (using the word "Wintel" in the same comment, while comparing using Discord to drinking lead in a linked past comment... you know exactly what kind of person this is) is just... ew. Gross.
@lina my theory: the kind of grump who can't understand the value of modern workflows (discord-like UIs) is ALSO the kind of grump who pines for old-school un-ranked internet discussions (usenet/forums).
I don't use lobste.rs but if these users are the target audience then this incentive structure is a feature because the users may truly believe that "controversial opinions are worth listening to"; the lack of downvotes is therefore not a design consideration but a philosophical one.
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@lina my theory: the kind of grump who can't understand the value of modern workflows (discord-like UIs) is ALSO the kind of grump who pines for old-school un-ranked internet discussions (usenet/forums).
I don't use lobste.rs but if these users are the target audience then this incentive structure is a feature because the users may truly believe that "controversial opinions are worth listening to"; the lack of downvotes is therefore not a design consideration but a philosophical one.
@lina (my personal opinion is that the internet-led rise of fascism shows every opinion should not be treated equally and trolling should be actively disincentivzed, but clearly a lot of people still have that naive 2000s belief that more&flatter communication will usher in the techno-optimist utopia)
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@h4890@alive.bar @lina@vt.social @pushcx@ruby.social sweety, where the fuck do you think you are that y-combinator VC bros will seem leftist in comparison?
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