chat

Discord was innovative for it's time

Its innovation was migrating people from the paid services (usually, although it was invisible to regular members) of ventrillo (sp?)and teamspeak, etc. for the other ones forgotten by me to time.

It also added a neat instant message feature combined with the voice/video features, slapped some gaming stickers on it, and honestly it was superior for that purpose compared to available options. Purely from a consumer's standpoint, of course.

but there were other evil plots afoot...

Maybe not evil, but inevitable is the better word. Discord monopolized the formally somewhat-competitive land of video game and conference VoIP stuff. It's totally free to use, so it's open for children, teens, adults, poor and rich, first and third world. Just like twitter or facebook or whatever else of course it was popular. And of course once a "first to market" (first to be popular) concept gets real steam (no pun!) behind it, that snowball will roll for miles and years to come. Discord is just now, in my view, hitting that like 2015-ish (very roughly) era compared to Facebook. It's a known entity, it's been co-opted by various shitty groups, it's a malignant tumor growing and growing.

The sad part is there are alternatives however people, and this isn't blame because I'm not better nor is it our individual choice to a great degree, will refuse until the end and past the end to move to those alternatives. There are literally (literally) Discord ripoffs essentially which are totally open source and "free" the "free" being somehow has to host it. There's always a price to pay though in a capitalist system. Discord isn't free. In the literal sense, more and more is paywalled by the month. But in the more intangible sense, they control who gets banned and for what, they control all the servers and info contained therein, they decide what the FBI, et al. has access to without warrant or real reason, they control any advertising going forward, etc. It's the most plain definition of why centralization within internet "social media" (or adjacent like I'd call Discord, lemmy, reddit) is absolutely dogshit and must be ended as a practice. But most people don't know and/or don't care. Maybe they don't understand. More likely they have an idea of it all and shrug like "what can you do?" and open reddit or discord to hate-respond to AdolfsBestBud88.

You know? And I'm guilty of that too, as are all of us probably. We're on lemmy and hexbear, etc. so we could play that card, but we're also on discord like it or not. I have to go there for general FAQ style out sourced community question asking. Which on one hand, is amazing. I can just pop in to a small dev with a program on github's discord and ask them for tips on installing whatever, some docker container or whatever, to whatever OS and then get a response from the creator themselves! I mean, that's amazing. On the other hand, it's totally become a crutch for devs (and again, none of this is personal blame necessarily) to avoid doing full FAQs. Or even having a community member write one up. It's now a short FAQ and install section and at the end "more questions? Discord link." Something about all of this reliance on discord is bad. Github has like a discussion and questions and issues sections and people certainly use them, but just from experience, if I go on discord and search there I find the answer like 10x faster because it gets asked there more frequently and recently.

It's like a lot of things where there's a clear issue, many see it, most don't care and all of us know, deep down, nothing will change for a long time and there's nothing we can do about it. Feels really bad.