jkap

CEO of posting

butch jewish dyke
part of @staff, cohost user #1
married to @kadybat

This user can say it
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not anymore lol

jkap
@jkap

gonna be honest, one of the worst impacts for Me Personally of losing reddit (Apollo is essential to my Reddit Experience, their overall trajectory indicates that old.reddit likely isn't long for this world either) is that all of the subreddits i'm in (mostly sports) are going to move to discord.

i understand that everyone's got beef with discord (in general, the executive team and product leadership are on a hot streak of bad decisions) but even disregarding that, i straight up can not use discord. i have some sort of mental block that makes it impossible to meaningfully spend time in a discord server, even the ones that are exclusively my friends. just can't do it. my brain doesn't work that way. the only server i'm even remotely active in is the one we use for work, and that's because i kind of have to be.

the idea of needing to join a server for every single sports subreddit is a fucking nightmare. i can't do that. i will just opt to lose any knowledge of anything happening instead.

as we lose more platforms, the internet keeps getting smaller with no viable replacements. we're in the middle of a major culture shift here and it's really not fun. can say for certain that i'm having a bad time with it.


jkap
@jkap

i often see people bring up forums as a potential solution to this but unfortunately i always had the same problem with forums! reddit worked well for me from a lurking/keeping track/occasionally commenting standpoint. forums are noisy and hard to keep track of. i realize it's a personal problem, but that model doesn't work for me either. oh well!


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in reply to @jkap's post:

unfortunately, doing that would require kind of a comically large amount of capital for us to essentially build an entirely new product. while i feel incredibly confident in our team's ability to do that, i don't feel confident in our ability to do that without neglecting the rest of the site. so we'd need staff, which means we need money, etc etc etc. our top priorities rn kind of have to be Revenue b/c we need money to live and are way behind on everything (doesn't help that i was effectively a non-entity for the first quarter)

first they’d need to roll out Cohost Stories™, then Cohost Shorts™, Cohost Pivot to Video™, Cohost Live™, Cohost Voice Messages™, and Eggbug’s Big Rig Over the Wheel Racing™

This is me but a thousand of disparate hobbyist groups. I’m already in too many discord servers I don’t pay attention to.

I’m gonna look and see how the Federated™️ Open Source alternatives are doing, but I don’t have high hopes.

This sucks. Reddit was a cesspool but it also ended up becoming a huge repository of knowledge and general communities.

big same - discord's the only "social media" app i have left on my phone and it always feels like they're one gross business decision away from me pounding the eject button on it, and then the only interaction i'll have with anybody online is via cohost or fightcade's NES Yoshi's Cookie lobby.

Yeahh same tbh. The pace and culture on discord is just Different in a way that my brain doesn't handle well. I tried joining some public discords for certain shows and games and stuff but I just can't do it lol. It's like forums but worse because you can't search and read the threads but people still expect you to intuit the etiquette and not ask basic questions. The only discord I use now is the one my friends made to replace our group text for making plans and stuff.

You actually can search pretty far back in Discord but yeah the platform is really hostile to that idea design wise. Like if someone sends a new message and you aren’t far enough back in time it auto-scrolls you to the current message. It’s absolutely a “here and now” platform.

It is fine to have a "here and now" platform - Discord works for IRC's niche, after all, and Skype's niche - but it makes a TERRIBLE knowledge-base. That's not what it's for, but people keep trying to use it for that.

God, yeah. It's miserable. I'm so bad at spending time in discords, so I end up just missing what's going on in most of them. I just fundamentally can't deal with everything moving inside this one app.

The "culture shift" feels more like the thing we feared in ~2009 (Facebook-likes as the only model of online interaction allowed) is finally happening.

I like Discord a lot but how long before they ruin it, y'know?

Yeah I relate. If I'm really invested I might stay up on things for a while, but the instant it starts to lose my interest I just totally disengage. It's impossible to keep up with the deluge and there's no skimmable summary of what was talked about that day.

Reading this post and your other one about the Fediverse I was thinking Reddit-style sites could actually work really well as a bunch of decentralized communities; every subreddit would essentially be its own server. If you want an aggregated timeline each server could output its “front page” as an RSS feed.

Of course this problem is 99% social, so having a technical solution to this problem isn’t really a solution, but it could be a start.

in reply to @jkap's post:

yeah for its faults reddit seemingly did a pretty good job of separating responsibility for site administration from responsibility for community management, so people who really love doing community management1 could step in and run stuff they cared about


  1. an idea I find incredibly alien

What do you think the difference is between forums and reddit as software that works better for you? Is it purely presentation or is it the inability to "bump" a post, making it appear and disappear by voting alone?