> I wonder if this is because people are lonely..? Just wondering out loud here.
Discord has propped up my social life for years now. And I mean outside of the internet as well! I also engage in independent, more traditional social engagement and it usually ends in nothing more than a hangover.
Not unexpectedly, the internet makes it easier to bring people with similar interests/believes/personalities together. There’s also some weird demographic issue where apparently the internet is the only place where people my age seem to exist. I meet a ton of people irl m, mostly much older, with some only several years younger or several years older. In the past year for example, I’ve met maybe 2-3 people who were within a year of myself.
Also I often find myself mindless swapping discord channels or refreshing HN or Twitter constantly, when I’m bored and want to talk/argue/whatever, typically at night.
I have found that people who grew up on the internet tend to have a "third place" that's online, which it sounds like for you is discord. That kind of makes that your priority over a real-life third place like a pub or something, since it's where all the people you are super familiar with are it's easier just to stick around that.
For me all my online third places disappeared (specific IRC chats and forums), and I never really found another. I'm on discord but they're very shallow places for me now. I spend most of my time online just on YouTube, and the rest of my time at work, with my partner or family, and doing hobbies. It's a very reasonable offline-life but I do find myself missing a third-place. Maybe I need to join a gaming clan or something.
Home and work, the third place is somewhere you go regularly which helps form strong relationships with the people there. As some other people mentioned, church often played that role. University can be a third place, community centers, your local pub, sports clubs and so on.
Discord is most likely the most
phallocentric large scale platform ever made. It is an abysmally terrible place to go to meet people, and particularly to go argue. Ever seen what the most popular politics server on discord looks like? 4chan is tame by comparison...
The issue isn't discord, discord is in essence just IRC again. IRC wasn't exactly a bastion of intelligent conversation in all corners, but one of the biggest issues I think the internet currently faces is that everyone is here now. Every brain with a thought no matter how vapid or vile is now joining the conversation.
But just like with IRC, it's all about the specific community you've joined, not the platform. You can definitely find good communities on discord.
In the real world we have a natural protection from these idiotic or demeaning posts: shame. It is a very important component and mechanism in social connections that is completely missing online (unless your handle is tied to your real identity like VIP Twitter).
How could it translate online where anonymity is like a shell protecting you from shame?
In small online communities that is still how it works, people don't want to disappoint their peers and their handle is their identity with built up socia capital to lose, so they behave or get excluded in some fashion.
The internet really enables large groups and strangers to join those without any kind of social capital buy in to the community. I think one of our biggest mistakes in online communities was thinking you could just open the doors, invite thousands of people in, and expect that to go well. That doesn't go well in the real world when there are real world consequences. Any concert or protest or big sporting event always has bad eggs in it. Think soccer fan riots or protests turned sour or concerts with heaps of assault going on.
I think you're right in some sense it's just that the influences of social mechanisms are different online. Anonymity is often just psuedo-anonymity inside small online communities. People still don't want their online handle tarnished as they use that persona to be part of communities, and they would lose their social capital with that handle if it went south. But it's also possible for strangers with worthless handles to show up and be horrible with zero consequences.
It started out as a pc gaming type thing, so yeah, most of it is men, but the choice of server matters and they have expanded and rebranded a lot. If you are going on political servers it's already not worth it and you missed the point with discord, stick to small servers made by friends, people to play games with, or communities dedicated around 1 thing like open source projects or some specific media, etc. Once servers become too general or inclusive the system breaks, but even then on large servers (political or not), 4chan is not tame in comparison.
Deep rock Galactic is a video game that actually has a decent Discord integration, to the point where I feel like I gain value from being there.
The general chats are whatever, but having a collection of people who may respond to an LFG call is great for when I want a higher-quality batch of compatriots for the more 'hardcore' parts of the game. Plus, they have a bunch of pre-made voice pods that cap at a game's player limit, and have built support for direct-in-Discord lobby invitations.
Discord has propped up my social life for years now. And I mean outside of the internet as well! I also engage in independent, more traditional social engagement and it usually ends in nothing more than a hangover.
Not unexpectedly, the internet makes it easier to bring people with similar interests/believes/personalities together. There’s also some weird demographic issue where apparently the internet is the only place where people my age seem to exist. I meet a ton of people irl m, mostly much older, with some only several years younger or several years older. In the past year for example, I’ve met maybe 2-3 people who were within a year of myself.
Also I often find myself mindless swapping discord channels or refreshing HN or Twitter constantly, when I’m bored and want to talk/argue/whatever, typically at night.