Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.

While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.

Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.

The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.

I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.

In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.

The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.

I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.

- bots (like we had on IRC) - first class clients on all platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, browser) - voice chat - video chat

Telegram and Discord are the only ones that satisfy all these.

And of these Telegram is just one channel, on Discord we can separate subjects by channels in seconds. If I see a message on #general, I go check what it is. On #memes I know it's not urgent.

Matrix if you want to play IT support on your free time.

What Discord does so well is that you start using it for gaming but then it also becomes the space for all kinds of things. We discuss news there, music/popculture, organize events etc

Whatsapp is more for the "formal" stuff and when it's time critical since not everybody has Discord notifications enabled.

I'd say Discord is definitely more popular among gen-z (or even younger) and gamers but it's kinda become reddit 2.0 where every niche has its discord.

I'm in a friend Discord server. It's naturally invisible unless someone sends you an invite.

And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.

But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).

The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).

Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.

So what's wrong with that?

"Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list.

Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media".

HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.

Let's remember that the original idea was to connect with people in your college/university. I faintly recall this time period because I tried to sign up for it only to find out that while there had been an announcement that it was opened up internationally, it still only let you sign up with a dot EDU email address, which none of the universities in my country had.

In the early years "social media" was a lot more about having a place to express yourself or share your ideas and opinions so other people you know could check up on them. Many remember the GIF anarchy and crimes against HTML of Geocities but that aesthetic also carried over to MySpace while sites like Live Journal or Tumblr more heavily emphasized prose. This was all also in the context of a more open "blogosphere" where (mostly) tech nerds would run their own blogs and connect intentionally much like "webrings" did in the earlier days for private homepages and such before search engine indexing mostly obliterated their main use.

Facebook pretty much created modern "social media" by creating the global "timeline", forcing users to compete with each other (and corporate brands) for each other's attention while also focusing the experience more on consumption and "reaction" than creation and self-expression. This in turn resulted in more "engagement" which eventually led to algorithmic timelines trying to optimize for engagement and ad placement / "suggested content".

HN actually follows the "link aggregator" or "news aggregator" lineage of sites like Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc (there were also "bookmark aggregators" like stumbleupon but most of those died out to). In terms of social interactions it's more like e.g. the Slashdot comment section even though the "feed" is somewhat "engagement driven" like on social media sites. But as you said, it lacks all the features that would normally be expected like the ability to "curate" your timeline (or in fact, having a personalized view of the timeline at all) or being able to "follow" specific people. You can't even block people.

"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook. (And if you are one of the 3% or whatever of old.reddit users, you are probably clueless, like those powermods who got deposed.)

Better back button handling and fixing the location bugs in event creation may well be entirely beyond Llama, sadly.

Our extended family has a WhatsApp group, but that's about it. I'm not convincing a bunch of 60+ year olds to switch to a new platform they're not used to.

Instagram has been read-only for me for half a decade, I still poke my head on FB now and then to spy on people I used to know.

you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested

The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.

Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.

When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.

In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.

In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.

Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.

You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.

/server irc.someserver.net

/join #hello

/me says Hello

I think I'll stick with that.

At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.

1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.

All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.

There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.

Yes IRCv3 exists and can do the backlog filling thing. Nobody uses that.

If "privacy" was an issue for you, you do know that IRC server admins could and still can see every single message on their servers unless everyone is using an encryption plugin on the channel?

The thing that Discord replicates with IRC is limited audience. Unless the server is public, I know I can be more open because I trust the people in there not to be assholes and share private stuff with others.

5 minutes after the first social network became famous. It never really has been just about knowing people IRL, that was only in the beginning, until people started connecting with everyone and their mother.

Now it's about people and them connecting and socializing. If there are persons, then it's social. HN has profiles where you can "follow" people, thus, it's social on a minimal level. Though, we could dispute whether it's just media or a mature network. Because there obviously are notable differences in terms of social-related features between HN or Facebook.