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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

    I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

    In that regard, fuck Discord.


  • I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

    We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

    In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

    Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

    And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

    I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

    That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

    “Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”














  • Depends on who is leaving, I’d say. The biggest draw to Twitter, from my outside perspective anyway, is news. Headlines, sure, but especially live, on the ground coverage.

    If news orgs quit X, that’ll be a big blow. Some left already, but I can’t remember who it was off the top of my head.

    But if breaking news, like protesters posting updates live, start coming majority from somewhere other than X (most likely Bluesky at this point), that will really signal the beginning of the end for Xs relevancy.

    Just my $.02, to be taken with a large grain of salt.