I'm not sure if I want to keep posting on lobste.rs after seeing some recent discussions...
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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 What you said about a lack of downvotes makes me wonder if the design accidentally encouraged people to get ratio'd without anyone realising that's what's happening. I'd be curious to see user numbers to see if that's lead to them shedding users but thinking everything is okay because the users still on are engaging with each other.
I do agree 1,600 members in a discord server is a large community, but I at least acknowledge my opinion on that might be skewed due to finding Discord servers with 1,000+ people sensory hell. Do I think they shouldn't exist? Not really, but I'm probably getting too into the weeds on something that is besides the point.
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@lina hot take: you should be able to own all replies to your messages and hide them for everyone
@Profpatsch The Bluesky Way. Sometimes it's really nice, ngl.
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@Profpatsch The Bluesky Way. Sometimes it's really nice, ngl.
I mean with reply control would be… technically doable once is extended. Right now only gts and main wafrn do this (we are in beta in dev and no nuking a reply is still not doable and there are some stuff i need to get other people to agree probably)
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@lina What you said about a lack of downvotes makes me wonder if the design accidentally encouraged people to get ratio'd without anyone realising that's what's happening. I'd be curious to see user numbers to see if that's lead to them shedding users but thinking everything is okay because the users still on are engaging with each other.
I do agree 1,600 members in a discord server is a large community, but I at least acknowledge my opinion on that might be skewed due to finding Discord servers with 1,000+ people sensory hell. Do I think they shouldn't exist? Not really, but I'm probably getting too into the weeds on something that is besides the point.
@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.
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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 what's your issue with "discord is bad and you can choose to not use it"????? It mightve been worded in a way more obnoxious way, but on the face of it, both parts of that statement are true.
Discord is both bad as a company, and as a product (abysmal search, zero discoverability for threads, unacceptable laggy UI) + for specific usecase of a large community: linear text channels break down when there are hundreds of people in them.
You could instead host an instance of discourse or zulip instead, both being way better at discovering previous discussions, and better at segregating discussions to avoid the "it is never my turn to speak" blocker that popolous text channels have, discourse eleminating that one completely due to being asynchronous.
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I'm not sure if I want to keep posting on lobste.rs after seeing some recent discussions...
It's not like Hacker News level bad, but there's just... a particular kind of person that seems to be taking over some discussions, the kind that isn't breaking any rules but just... makes insufferable arguments that are blatantly unproductive and makes me not want to be around them.
I flagged a few recent ones as "Unkind" but I don't know if the moderation policy applies (some of them even touch on multiple flag options without being too in your face about any single one, which is another issue). Honestly, it feels like the feature set is just not right to avoid this. Without downvotes, there's no feedback possible that a comment is negative (without necessarily breaking the rules). All you see is upvotes from people who agree, even if they're in the minority, and then the rest are forced to read those comments. And without even a private block/mute feature, we can't even personally hide these kinds of people (not that this is the best solution, because it creates a weird disconnect where people are privately ignored if they are unlikeable but this has no repercussions on them, and no effect on what other users see).
I don't know, it just feels like "community moderation" is broken in the face of people who push just hard enough to be annoying to the rest but not hard enough to warrant hard mod action.
@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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@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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@lina what's your issue with "discord is bad and you can choose to not use it"????? It mightve been worded in a way more obnoxious way, but on the face of it, both parts of that statement are true.
Discord is both bad as a company, and as a product (abysmal search, zero discoverability for threads, unacceptable laggy UI) + for specific usecase of a large community: linear text channels break down when there are hundreds of people in them.
You could instead host an instance of discourse or zulip instead, both being way better at discovering previous discussions, and better at segregating discussions to avoid the "it is never my turn to speak" blocker that popolous text channels have, discourse eleminating that one completely due to being asynchronous.
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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.
