So long as you have the nitro.

I’m with you and I think it’s entirely ignorance and hubris. To be fair to discord, I think they know this. They know their product market fit, they know their audience. Their customers are those community managers that like shiny things and surveillance powers. The fault is entirely on those community managers thinking their customers would like it too.

> So long as you have the nitro.

What do you mean? Nitro doesn't offer much besides using cross-server emojis and custom profiles.

Do you run a community on Discord? Nitro levels enable more community features.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

I miss IRC, man... a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server... a Matrix homeserver is a rich man's IRC server...

a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server..

that natively supports emojis, stickers, embeds, non-ip-leaking voice chat, screenshare with audio, rich permissions, avatars, attachments

oh, and chat history. Because everyone loves needing an irc bouncer to be able to assimilate the context of the active conversation when they log in.

Exactly. Back in 2012 or so I wrote a web chat system that had all that (minus the screenshare & voice chat) and it was quite a challenge supporting all the permutations of links, images, emoji's, bbcode, etc. It's a pos in today's standards but back before slack it was "on the right track". Slack pretty much came out of nowhere and killed the effort though. To your point about a bouncer, I think a lot of folks are nostalgic and forget what a shitty system IRC was. Net-splits, bouncers, no filters or mod tools other than kick. No embedded media unless your client did magic. It was some folks' first foray into online community so naturally they want that feeling back.

I'm glad to see this pushback against centralized monopolies. The open-web needs more openness.

It’s it interesting how many meaningful conversations we’ve all had on IRC, lacking all those essential features you mention?

IRC is dead in any meaningful way, though. It's a decent technology that's lost to services with all those essential features. We also used to have great conversations while riding bikes with our friends when we were kids. Does that mean employers would be served to hold all of their meetings on bikes?

irc has 2 killer features: 1) it takes some effort to get and stay on. web chatters leave pretty fast. 2) people leave for digital prisons.

the freenode exodus was great, there was no discussion, nothing to explain.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

False. IRC is still alive and kicking.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

It's interesting how many meaningful conversations I've had over email too, the medium doesn't matter, but it doesn't mean the features aren't useful.

I don't miss IRC. I use it :)

To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it. But the existing user-base that knows the platform always pushes back against changes - such as loading screen tips being un-gamerified and the general design of promotional material going from being a gaming chat platform[0] to a general purpose chat thing[1]

0: https://rr.judge.sh/Chickadee/43748a/chrome_DXEAHYhlJF.png

1: https://discord.com/

> To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it.

Instead of focusing on worthless stickers and Nitro upgrades, how about they allow users to rebind keys for most, if not all, shortcuts on the desktop client.

Read your comment but believe me when I say I don't get a single reason why you do not like Discord.

As a very technically able person, can you get into more detail on what is "utterly insufferable"? I hopped the boat in 2016 so I am probably blinded by using it from pretty much the start.

Back in the wii home brew days, I used to hang around in their irc channels. Those channels were a main way for people to get help with what we would now call "jailbreaking" their wii. Sure some sites and forums existed with instructions, but if you ran into a weird edge case or just misunderstood what some kid wrote on a forum you'd be stuck till you found how to get on irc and asked in those channels. During the peak of that scene's activity, once you get in there you would have top notch support from several volunteers handholding you though every step of the way. The actual people who wrote the tools you were having problems with would help you out. Sometimes they'd give you a debug version comoiled just for you. Often, your bug would get fixed and a new point release made while you wait. The people writing guides would camp out in there and take note of the most common questions their guides cause and go fix them to head off problems early.

To me, forums felt like a place information went to die. Your answer would be on page 5 of a 30 page rambling thread but you wouldn't ever know because you wouldn't read that far. Read page one and maybe two, then jump to the end to see if it's solved and instead they are on another topic entirely.

IRC meanwhile was always 100% relevant and timely.

You really hit the nail on the head. I'm technically capable but discord really gives me the vibes of corp slack channels where I don't care to participate in, because they're not paying me to.

I still can't seem to get how this is a real social media outlet.

You can’t seem to get it because of that bias. GenY and GenZ haven’t had that experience (yet) so to them, it’s the bees knees, or lit, or slay, or whatever they are using to express their approval.