• 8 Posts
  • 592 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • No, it isn’t.

    Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.

    By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.

    Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.

    Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.

    Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.

    This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.


  • Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.

    Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…

    What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.

    Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.


  • Rant

    I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.

    The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.

    I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.

    However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord…

    Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.

    The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.

    I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.

    I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.

    I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.

    screams into void

    Gamers are so confidently stupid.

    Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.







  • The form factor of switch/steam deck is expanding, valve doesn’t by any means have a stranglehold over it, they are by far the biggest player but the benefits to linux gaming are shared across the board which opens up the entire industry not closes it down?

    Not saying I trust Valve or think they are somehow a company but good but yeah out of the current options I will happily give Valve my money.

    But I admit I am compromised - I spend too much time gaming, being retired its easy to lose track of time. Honestly, I feel like a vegan who wraps bacon in thick wholemeal sandwiches and pretends they are not really eating pigs since its mainly bread.

    Fuck that noise, play video games, they expand and stimulate your mind and you don’t hurt anyone or waste any significant amount of resources playing them!


  • Gaming is 100 percent not ‘on par’ I’ve exclusively used Linux for years now, and consistently run into issues not present on windows.

    I have a LARGE diverse library of games I bought when I was gaming on windows.

    Literally all of them work fine on my steam deck except a handful of AAA games from companies hostile to linux (“anticheat” bs, they don’t want linux gaming to suceed for business reasons), some really ancient DOS games actually work better like Steel Panthers/winspmbt.

    I am sorry but especially if you are into indie games even a little, your perspective is no longer indicative for the experience of gaming on linux in general.





  • Gimp 3.0.0 is fucking awesome, haters gonna hate.

    There is already a killer plugin for Gimp 3.0.0 called “Batcher” that lets you batch edit and convert images (including pdfs) either with a GUI interface or from the command line. There are already plenty of tools that can do this from the command line, or that are commercial paid software… but this is a pretty damn powerful utility to have attached to a fully featured free and open source image editor that you could teach someone who is uncomfortable with scripting how to make a bunch of edits across a large amount of image files with.

    https://github.com/kamilburda/batcher