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No. 27419
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I spent a couple years server hopping on discord. I like our IRC channel and the people in it, but I wanted to explore a bit and find a second community to broaden my horizons a little, maybe step a bit out of my comfort zone and meet new people so that I wouldn't be too caught up in an echo chamber where people might only be telling me what they think I want to hear. But I still wanted to meet relatively like minded people I could get along with so as to maybe make friends.
I joined far too many communities to count during this time. Typically related to otaku interests, anime manga games neetdom and such. It was a miserable experience to say the least.
What I found left me feeling a bit like Kino on her travels. I'd join these communities, hang out there for a while, and before long find myself feeling alienated in one form or another and move on. I never got banned from any, but I left many with no intention of ever going back.
A very common problem with discord servers is they're filled with -15 year olds who all want to be heard but have nothing to say. So what do they do? they post random emoji or meme. At best they greet each other, but little if anything more. "hi ___" followed by maybe a hug bot command and an emoji, and that's pretty much the height of your typical conversation. I almost feel sorry for these kids. They have zero social skills but want to socialize, and this is the best they can manage.
I've tried to engage people in actual conversations on these channels, you know, talk to them with words, like a human. They have these knee jerk reactions to seeing any post that's more than a sentence long. In multiple cases, people see these multiple sentence long posts and assume people are fighting or arguing. That's if you even get that far, since kids will still spam the previously mentioned stuff while you're trying to have a conversation. They don't care if it's rude to cut in, if anything they're probably annoyed you're taking their attention away.
The problem only gets worse as these servers grow in size. I've seen discord servers/channels be -nothing- but emoji. In a few cases it was absolute floods of the things, the page would scroll endlessly with all the emoji kids spam.
In the end, a friend ended up getting me into an invite only server he was in. There I was able to meet other older otaku, the type who browse imageboards, irc, still use torrents, keep up with current events in japan and the latest otaku media news, and don't exclusively watch and read mainstream anime or manga. I haven't bothered looking into other servers since. It was jarring just how much I shared in common with these people. I'd watch stuff like Cocotama or Rilu Rilu Fairilu, and feel like the only guy on this side of the planet into those, but then they went and proved me wrong.
I've seen hundreds of anime, seen a thousand movies, played countless games, but some of the people there are so well versed that they managed to put me to shame. They know more, keep up with more, and in many ways are what I was wishing I could find all that time. In a way, it's like when you see those nature documentaries about captive animals that get released into the wild and reunited with their kind.
But I will say, a lot of the users there are a bit rough around the edges, if not flat out jerks. It might be my imagination but it seems like there's a user who contradicts me at every possible opportunity. someone even private messaged me about this, warning me that the users there can be stubborn and argumentative jackasses sometimes, and that I should be careful about disagreeing with what some people there say. It really makes me stop to wonder what that says about myself. I also find myself constantly concerned about saying and doing things that might make the group reject me. I wouldn't want to go back to searching random servers after all, that was pure hell.
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