>Discord
Literally breeding grounds for cult like groups, and no I'm not talking about the usual kind that's brought up. Giving everyone "roles", hiding channels based on "roles", special privilieges tied to those roles in general (Nitro vs Non nitro users) and close friends socially shaming you if you don't abide to the servers rules creates a discourse that's far more personal than say social media drama of the week and getting blocked by randoms.

Also, this one is a bit more personal to my own interests, but I absolutely despise tech projects that only use Discord as their means of communication and support. Like you have to play their silly little social games just to say "hey this is broken". Their search function is garbage too, and even if someone provided the solution to an issue I wouldn't be able to find it easily without scrolling for ages.

As for other socials, I only have basic socials for work purposes; I don't keep up with what who says what very deeply and only do the bare minimum to look active ("Look what I finished for this job" kind of posts every couple of months).

>>27411
I've always avoided servers. I don't like people enough to put up with that sort of thing.
>I absolutely despise tech projects that only use Discord as their means of communication and support.
You and me both. I avoid it at all costs. I haven't really run into it much, fortunately. It's a hassle and also seems rather amateurish. Wouldn't a forum be better suited for that sort of thing?

I detest all forms of real-time communication for all the reasons others have mentioned. Mailing lists (for serious things) and imageboards (for casual communication) are by far superior mediums since you're able to put thought into long-form responses.

I tried discord when for one of the imagebords I used to post on. I didn't like it, I don't really like that kind of socialisation or the kind of people that use it plus I don't like the transient nature of it, It's more like having a conversation than making a post. So I did not use it for long.

However, I started using it for video game discords for certain games, if there is a game that warrants a lot of discussion I can go to the game's discord and ask any question or talk about any part of it I like and there will be lots of people there to talk with about it with.

I used Discord out of necessity a few times, and there's a constant: those whose avatars are anime girls are obnoxious faggots.

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.

>>27419
> I also find myself constantly concerned about saying and doing things that might make the group reject me
Exactly why I hate any non-anonymous form of communication. It exerts a chilling effect that gradually leads to more and more anodyne posts that no one will disagree with.

>>27419
>they're filled with -15 year olds who all want to be heard but have nothing to say
I'm not sure when this was, but there are plenty of people in their early 20's today that are more or less the same. It's something I deeply resent. Hard to find decent conversation most places. At least now I can avoid it.

>>27420
Yeah while I don't want to alienate myself, I also don't want to sacrifice my individuality to turn into a sheep. I still have my unpopular opinions, I just try to be careful about how far I go with them. There's been a number of times I started down that road, and realized it was going to piss some people off and lead to a lot of arguing, so I'd stop myself right then and there.

I registered some years ago, to download Ygopro, I haven't really used much. I joined a few servers, but as has already been said in the above posts, it was disappointing and not really my thing. One interesting interaction did happen though. One day I was bored out of my mind, and had to "watch" a one hour lecture online for classes, and saw that for some reason I had one guy on my conversations tab, and I never had talked to this guy. I think I accidentally clicked his name when downloading something from a server. But for some reason I felt adventurous and clicked a button that said "wave to [name]". I figured I had a long boring hour ahead of me and wanted to see how this guy would react. He waved back immediately, and we began chatting. We talked about our days and he told me he liked Vtubers. I discovered this guy was the real life Sherlock Holmes of Vtubing. We talked about other things for an hour until he told me had been awake all night on games and had to sleep. But the thing was I just didn't had anything else to talk about after that day, so we stopped at that. I tried this dm'ing random people technique other times but they were not as receptive.

Finally said fuck it and deleted my discord account. I don't really feel any sort of way about it.

For IRL personal stuff: at some point I thought that using fecebook and maintaining a profile there is a thing I should do. It is not. Deleted all my posts and comments. I still have an account where I sometimes communicate with family and close friends, but I don't have profile pic and don't upload anything.

For art: I used to upload stuff to DeviantArt and photos to 500px. 500px was crap to begin with, I left it soon. DA was nice at first. Found cool artists there to talk to. The "like for like" shit was minimal, people actually commented and wrote genuine comments. As time went though, I felt like my art is gently but surely is being pushed into some normie direction. Like "cute" or "epic" stuff was loved but a picture that tried to communicate something or needed some time to look at to really see it was ignored. I also had twitter but that felt like everybody there is a bot so I didn't care much. At some point I felt too fed up with these things (and with many others in my life) and deleted those accounts.

Time went and I decided to make art again. I reinvented myself and now keep uploading stuff semi-regularly since then.

While I was away DA went down the toilet. Spending time on twitter feels no good for my mental health so I just upload my stuff and get the hell out of there. Same for instagram. Disabled all metrics and feed-pages I could.
I made accounts on sites like ArtStation but havent uploaded anything yet.

Programming: I used to ask questions on stackexchange , stackoverflow but people there are so damn nasty (especially the comments section) that I had to run away to reddit for prog questions. So far so good.

I never bothered with discord.

>>27458
Twitter is a terrible place to post art. It's good for people seeking attention and money, first and foremost.

>>27458
I never quite liked Twitter for artwork. Yes, everyone and their dog has an account on there, but users who post frequently have their posts pushed more than those who upload monthly for example. It's more like a glorified RSS feed.
DeviantART has a terrible layout, but with Pixiv it's one of the few gallery sites still fairly active.
Even till now I have works on both sites that still get attention due to the main way of finding artwork being a tag based system instead of random algorithm bullshit.
ArtStation scares me...it feels too elite. If you decide to upload, do tell about your experiences.

The stack* sites are like Yahoo answers but way more snobbish ("Why are you doing it like that? Do it my way or don't do it at all" type of responses) and I don't blame you for going to Reddit just to ask questions.

idk how you can use discord to properly socialize, i tried but kinda failed, just walked into random severs and no one noticed. tried starting my own about movies and such but didn't really go anywhere. i still have it but never used it. I try to but can't even fake my way into a social space. as for other social media i tried using twitter cause i didn't like how depressing halfchan is, but i slowly started to feel that same depression. i also didn't make any friends, just stuck myself into circles and didn't go anywhere. just used it for porn then eventually deleted it. can't even seem to make fake friends.

>>27470
Socialization on Discord is a by-product of wanting to talk about your interests with other people. Say for example you go to a server because there's stuff you want to download from there. There usually going to be a chat channel in there somewhere where people talk about the server's content. If you don't feel like knowing other people's opinions and you're not inclined to share your own then socialization is not going to happen.

Also for everyone who dislikes Discord: DO NOT delete your account. In fact, make an account right now. There's lot of content in there that is very hard to find anywhere else because so many people use it as a file sharing place now. The reason I'm telling you to keep your acc or make one is because sites like that tend to get more anal about making accounts as they get bigger. Soon they'll be demanding a phone number just to make an acc there, you watch. It's going to happen like it happened with a bunch of other websites. I remember you could make a gmail acc just by choosing an address and a password. Try to make one now, you'll see how ridiculous it is.

>>27471
>very hard to find anywhere else
What kind of content?

>>27472
In my case Japanese subs for some old TV shows, raw manga with no seeds on nyaa, patches for games nobody cares anymore, RPG books that is impossible to find since thetrove went down and some tools and palettes for Ps and aseprite. But that's just me, there are thousands of file sharing servers on Discord, treat it as one more source for files you might need in the future. Make an account and just forget about it. It takes like 2 minutes. I don't know, imo it's a handy thing to have.

>>27473
I don't get what motivates people to use discord for these things. I guess it's stupidity and extreme laziness. Or maybe it's a clique thing, like private trackers but offloading the cost to a private company. Even google drive is better.

>>27473
Why would people not put those on p2p + some sort of online storage (e.g. mega)? Using discord is extremely idiotic since once the VC bubble bursts and they get serious about revenue, they'll start cracking down on these uses. I guess the one flipside is that it's harder for the content to get DCMA'd since it's harder to discover, but the age-old trick of "upload to mega, post in a semi-private forum" still works and is better.

Edit: Actually, for the subs and game patches, uploading to internet archive would be better, assuming it's obscure enough to not attract any attention from copyright patrol

Post edited on 8th Jun 2022, 10:54am

>>27474
>>27475
I agree and I honestly don't know why Discord either but that's how the internet turned out so far. Honestly I make an account on about every place I find it will be remotely useful, Discord is just one of those places for now. You can use a throwaway email if you want, just make sure to never lose your password.

>>27473
How does one go about finding those things in the first place? I've never used discord, mind you.

>>27478
It usually starts with a duckduckgo search for me. Google hides piracy sites so I had to change to ddg. A typical case would be with the RPG books I mentioned. I tried to access the site I always used but it was down. Looked for the site's name + down on ddgo. Got a bunch of results from reddit of people talking about it. Go to reddit and read what people are talking about. Find a topic of a guy saying a bunch of people who downloaded all the stuff from there is going to share the files on discord. Read through the topic to find an invite. Invite is no longer valid. Find some people complaining the invite is no longer valid. Someone posts a new invite a few hours later. I get in. Download the stuff I want.

That's how it happens for me 99% of the time. I don't start with Discord, that's just where I end up nowadays. Sometimes it's not reddit that sends me there, but a blog post or something in the comments section of another site, or a txt file that I downloaded from a torrent. You know, typical internet lurking.

Once inside Discord people send invites to other places that might be useful in the chat so you check those too and it's just a rabbit hole from there. That's how it goes, usually.

>>27479
These choices coming from reddit users makes sense.

>>27480
I noticed that reddit tends to be the place people go to to complain when something breaks. Another case I remember was this private torrent site that suddenly went down and when I searched online the cause of it, surprise surprise, there were already a lot of people on reddit complaining about it. It's also where they announced the new address a few weeks later. I understand disliking the culture of current age internet hubs but don't let that grievance stop you from getting the info you want, same with discord or any other site.

>>27477
>You can use a throwaway email if you want
Problem is they have an aggressive detection system that will readily ask for a phone number.

>>27419
This is similar to my experience. Always found discussing my interests difficult online but accidentally fell into a small manga sever of old nerds and found myself actually posting daily. The reality is that a lot of 30+ anime and manga nerds have retreated into private spaces that is almost impossible to know about unless your already in them or know someone who's in them.