Technology

I wouldn't blame those 2. Forums have been dying since Myspace and Facebook. The specialized ones like the machinist and woodworking ones I belong to are going strong. So are the firearm related ones.

Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I'm able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It's not easily searchable, and search engines can't index it. If people aren't fastidious about replying to messages they're responding to, it's just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy's comment nesting is excellent. It's very easy to follow conversations.

I don't understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.

Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.

There was a while where as a fighting game player the best way to learn obscure tech or situational high damage combos was to sift through discords looking for info and it was BALLS. Lately I feel like everyone more committed to the fan wikis and maybe twitter for that stuff but oh man.

There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.

It's the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.

I'm particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.

I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a "Reddit Request" system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.

When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn't have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.

I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.

I was very happy to find when I was getting involved in a project that it was mostly organised/discussed on their forum, it makes it so much nicer and more accessible

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