Destructive Convenience · Volpeon Destructive Convenience

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Online Culture<br>Destructive Convenience<br>The first online community I joined was focused on the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, featuring a website with an upload system to share your creations, and a forum as a gathering place where you could talk about the games, get help for game-related issues, organize contests and more. In addition to that, people would often use instant messengers to stay in contact with some members. It was the typical anatomy of online communities at the time.<br>Today, 20 years later, the landscape is very different and I'm left with a growing feeling of frustration. Forums have been replaced by microblogging and Discord, two types of platforms which can't possibly fulfill the same role since they are (closer to) ephemeral real-time communication than asynchronous communication. The kind of interaction I like -- discussions spanning weeks or months or even years -- has become a rarity buried under a never-ending onslaught of small talk, text bites and memes.<br>I get it. Not having much of a barrier to overcome makes it so much easier to share your thoughts on anything that comes to your mind, and it's for this reason that I use the fediverse very actively myself. Small interactions certainly aren't worthless, but sometimes I want substance. I want to read pages of discussion about a topic which draws me in with interesting insights and different perspectives and without any distractions between every post. Forums gave me exactly that, whereas the platforms that succeeded them don't.

Volpeon 18:07A prompt to talk about a topic with a lot of potential for insightful perspectives.

Cody 18:10morning, guys

@Cody morning, guys

Lycanroc 18:10

@Cody morning, guys

Felix 18:10Hey Cody

Felix 18:10Did you find your way home yesterday?

Otter 18:10Morning Cody and Lycanroc

@Felix Did you find your way home yesterday?

Cody 18:10yeah, kinda XD

Cody 18:10good thing I don't have work today

Cody 18:10

Volpitron 18:10A reply to @Volpeon's post which is easy to miss because there's so much noise in chats.

@Felix Did you find your way home yesterday?

Volpitron 18:10I wish I didn't have to leave so early

@Cody yeah, kinda XD

Felix 18:10

@Cody good thing I don't have work today

Otter 18:10Jealous

Send the message and watch what happens.<br>Does this feel familiar?

Discord simply isn't a good replacement for forums, even though it tried to introduce some structuring features with threads and forum channels. Nobody uses the former, and the latter rarely have any activity or merely serve as showcases for art or hobbies. To its users, Discord remains a regular chat platform first and foremost, and that experience sucks with a lot of members.<br>You get small groups of people who flock together and dominate most activity on the server or the #general channel with blabber and make it hard for others to join in. Conversations of any kind are hard to follow, with multiple of them taking place in parallel and people replying to posts way up in the chat history because they still wanted to contribute to a topic even though they were late. Everyone tries to have the advantages of asynchronous communication on a platform which simply doesn't handle it appropriately, turning the chat history into a chaotic mess.<br>In that fake channel above, someone replied to my post. Did you see it? Now imagine that with a real chat with continuous activity and you found the reason why I dropped Discord.<br>Microblogging is almost real-time, but rather than having casual interactions, its focus lies on sharing your thoughts with the world. If there were communities as a feature and no character limit, it could be suitable for quality discussions: Combined with the fact that it's not as fast-paced, longer posts would be feasible and visible to audiences you hope to get good and relevant responses from.<br>What we're getting instead is a comically bad "global town square" pile of garbage causing nothing but problems and incentivizing shallow posting tuned to elicit a high number of reactions. The advantage of not being actually real-time is completely negated by the lack of structure which forces people to deal with one huge feed and which means that anything you post will rapidly disappear in the void and not get much attention. And if that's the case, why put in effort? Even on the fediverse with its lack of an effective character limit, this kind of posting is prevalent for this reason.<br>Other platforms all have similar drawbacks of their own.<br>Why have communities switched to Discord as their main hub despite being a chat platform? Why do the features Discord added in response to this trend -- threads and forum channels -- get so little use? Why do people stick with...