Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
It actually is, you’re just not connecting the dots.
The people use discord already to game and talk with buddies, developers of various apps/services then use it for similar and answering questions or troubleshooting issues in real-time.
Forums are archaic and difficult by comparison, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the situation either, but I understand how and why we got to this place, and what would solve the problem is if that data was indexed in a way that search engines could use them, but because you have to have a discord account and join the server and have access to that particular section because of how discord is designed it is not really possible.
I actually freaurntly find helpful information in discord servers using search, but again, agree that it is not designed well for what its been forced into by network effect and convenience.
Edit: I’ll also point out forums aren’t permanent either lol, like 99% of forums I used to frequent are completely gone.
There’s nothing intrinsically bad or “archaic” about forums. It’s the forum platforms that sucked for some people. It took some thought and work to manage a forum. The only advantage a Discord server had was that it’s simple enough, a brain damaged squirrel could run one. It saved you from having to do your homework and just created a simple plug-and-play space that required no skill on the owner/mods part.
I literally used forums for over a decade, grew up on them, ran my own phpbb and vBulletin, forums suck when real time communication with the same features and MORE exists.
Edit: The world is never going back to IRC or forums, get over it.
What we can do, is build a better platform learning from the failures of existing platforms. It seems everyone here doesn’t understand that is exactly what I’m saying.
Forums are archaic, which is why they died and platforms like reddit and discord flourished.
I obviously have problems with both of those platforms, which is why I’m on Lemmy and love the idea of federation.
I like the idea of Matrix, however I don’t see any indication in the slightest that it is going to solve the real problem with how discord is used in relation to being a “troubleshooting/ticketing/solutions” gateway, as far as I’m aware they are not indexable and accessible outside of using a matrix client.
The best of both worlds would be federated, have features built with indexability and discoverability in mind, while still retaining the real-time communication aspects that discord has.