one thing that annoys me about the proliferation of discords concurrent with the slow death of google for hobbies is that it makes starting or getting into a new hobby WAY more obscure. first you have to know where to find a discord for the interest you want to know more about, and then you join and it’s just overwhelming for ANY new user, much less someone who doesn’t know the difference between this jargon and that one

especially with a hobby you don’t particularly want to delve that deep into? like i’m interested in photography but i’m not particularly interested in getting deep into it past “wanting a film camera to take nice-ish photos with” but if i want to research something new i have to sift thru tons of stuff to figure out what i want to know

wrote this in a comment, feel like its worth adding:

the web used to be full of 65 year old guys just writing about hobbies they love that no one else around them is that into!!!!

which is to say, ppl who wrote with nerdy detail about hobbies used to assume that everyone visiting them would be on the same baseline that everyone around them in person was, which is to say, not much. it feels like now there's an assumption that anyone interested in a hobby enough to research it MUST be at a higher level