I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you've made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay-- people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

This obviously isn't true of all communities, but I think it's a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then... you're good, for the most part.

Pfft. My gramgram self-hosts on her own LFS build with a hardened kernel and custom written SELinux policies. All your grandparents need to get on her level.

Disclaimer: Everything here is a lie.

Because it has significantly more features than IRC and it's dead simple to spin up your own "server" where you aren't beholden much to "admins" or whatever.

fancy IRC

IRC was already "caveman playing with sticks and pebbles" a decade before discord became a thing. It's really not a good point of comparison and questioning.

Discord became popular for one simple reason: anyone could make a server, share it with a crossplatform link, and others could then try out that link without installing anything. In other words, it became popular because it literally copied Slack and because the Skype era was atrociously bad customization and ease of use-wise compared to the preceding.

Every time I see Slack/Discord et Al. described as such, I wonder if any of these people actually used any of those. By use, I mean actually try out its features, not just treating it as IRC ("just" channels, messages and DMs for text convos).

I hate Discord with a passion, but pretending like it's just "fancy IRC" is IMHO pretty absurd.

If you legitimately don't understand why it's popular, you are seriously out of touch.

• Better moderation tools
• Easier to do voice/video channels
• Easy to create your own server
• Huge amount of useful bots created by the community
• Features like replies, threads, onboarding screens, and custom emotes

Don't get me wrong, I wish that we could use a FOSS platform instead of Discord, but 1: people are already using Discord and it's hard to get everyone to switch platform, and 2: there is no comparable alternative right now

Crypto enthusiasts don't really care or understand decentralization. If you talk to crypto bros you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are very very low IQ morons.

I was at an event and met a crypto bro. He tried to explain to a group of us that btc is like moss and the world is the forest. A couple people legitimately "got it" and began to get excited about crypto.

And that's where you realize that them defending decentralization is just trying to have a nice-sounding argument instead of assuming their dreams of getting rich with new tech

You must be a monster. To me it's very chaotic and hass too many shit going on.