Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.

But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that

- Can't be found in search engines

- Abysmal search functionality

- Abysmal discoverability

Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.

And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...

But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.

But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.

Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)

Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.

A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.

The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.

If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.

Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.

yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.

[dead]