I don't understand why (mostly) young people put so much effort into remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them and that they do not like. Does the convenience of remaining on a service you don't like the management of outweigh the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

▲ zahlman 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

Calling it a "mild effort" assumes skills that older generations took for granted but many young people seem to have been actively trained out of. We're past the era where I take for granted that aspiring programmers need to have the basics of a terminal or shell explained to them, into one where they might need an explanation for the basics of a file system and paths. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that hardly any of them could touch-type, either. (I wonder what the speed record is for cell phone text input...)

Yes, they can query a search engine (kind of) or, I guess nowadays, ask ChatGPT. But there's going to be more to setting up an alternative than that. And they need to have the idea that an alternative might exist. (After all, they're asking ChatGPT, not some alternative offering from a company that provides alternatives to Google services....)

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nine_k 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's beyond their comprehension to ask: "how can I have a chat system that I personally control?" The rest will be taken care of.

Look at the Amnezia VPN. It's an app that helps you buy a VPS from a range of cloud provides, then sets it up, completely from the phone, as an exit node under user control.

I don't see why a chat server cannot be set up and managed this way. It only takes one dedicated developer to produce.

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sli 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even considering that one can personally control their own chat service is already a pretty big leap in technical knowledge. Many, many average users don't even know that's an option, nevermind how it's even done.

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johnnyanmac 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>The rest will be taken care of.

by a system with a incentive to keep them in centralized black boxes, yes.

>The rest will be taken care of.

It's never the tech hat's hard, but the networks. If people were able to just jump on a whim a lot of dynamics of modern corruption would fall apart.

	▲	nine_k 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Now we're having an event when networks would be shedding kids en masse, all at approximately the same time. It the best possible time for switching, when clinging to the old discord / snapchat / other centralized blackbox becomes hard or impossible.

▲ oliyoung 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't understand why (mostly) young people put so much effort into remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them

The Network Effect.

That's it. Their friends are there so they're there.

▲ SabrinaJewson 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re ignoring the obvious reason, aside from the network effect: there are no alternative solutions. Some people are building Discord alternatives but they are far from production-ready, often lacking critical features (e.g. Matrix not being able to delete rooms, or still having trouble with decrypting messages). It is simply the case at this point in time that Discord is factually the least bad option for many many use cases.

▲ Anonbrit 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't control most of the discord communities I'm in. Some have been going a long time, and every platform migration sheds and shreds members. The 'mild effort' to move an old community to a new platform more often than not killed the community

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GaryBluto 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> and every platform migration sheds and shreds members.

What's the problem? You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there. People who want to participate will move to an acceptable service and those who feel that is too much effort probably weren't participating much (if at all) anyway - in that case the only difference is the visible list of people with accounts going down, not the actual "users".

	▲	Gigachad 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The people will just recreate the same community on the same platform without you as the owner. They don’t care about you running it. It’s also a futile effort since age checks for adult content is becoming the law around the world so soon any platform you move to will have the same checks.
	▲	ipdashc 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In most cases, I would like to speak with those people and would miss them if I lost regular contact because they didn't want to change platforms. Most people just care about being able to talk to each other, not their devotion to some "group or society".
	▲	KittenInABox 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I disagree with this sentiment. It is entirely possible that there will be people who are regulars on one platform who are just unable (actually unable or perceives themselves unable) to migrate and the morale lost from losing their regulars is huge. Or a subset who insist on staying, forming their own sub-community, and neither the migrating group nor the people who insist on staying produce enough engagement for the members and so the community as a whole fizzles out. This is all squishiness. There is a reason why deplatforming appears to work in reducing the effectiveness of political groups, even if the people who remain in the community post-deplatforming are hardened in their loyalty to the political policy of the group.
	▲	johnnyanmac 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there. You underestimate how many people would rather do nothing than be inconvenienced, sadly. If you're not the personality that the community is rotating around, you'll find the migration pretty lonely. Heck, even esablished personalities can only do so much. Remember that Microsoft paid top Twitch streamers 10s of milllions to move to Mixer for exclusive streaming. Even that wasn't enough to give a leg up.

▲ Gigachad 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do middle aged people still use Facebook marketplace rather than another platform? Because even if you put in the effort to use something different, you’ll be the only one there.

The effort to coordinate everyone to move at the same time is bordering on impossible.

▲ ddtaylor 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

First mover advantage with network effects

	▲	dpkirchner 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm the first and only one of my friend group on my IRC server. It's an elite claim, I know.

▲ dmitrygr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

  > Facebook marketplace rather than another platform

which? I'd love to, but FB marketplace is the platform.

	▲	Gigachad 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. And discord is _the_ platform for others.

▲ corndoge an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Network effects apply but also there is no equivalent service that combines all of the salient functionality of discord.

▲ jwkerr 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people don’t really care that their privacy is violated, at least not any more than a superficial “oh well it’s obvious they’re doing that, but what can you do about it!”, no point switching platform if there’s no one there to talk to.

▲ unleaded 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The network effect as seen in the other comments plays a big part, but also discord offers a useful service that really nobody else does well. there's a lot wrong with it but you can still create a community in a few clicks and you have text messages, photos, videos, gifs, voice chats, screenshare, a comprehensive permission/role system, tons of bots.. all for free and without needing to be too tech savvy, that's pretty damn cool.

▲ diath 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No other chat platform has as many seamless features and such a big userbase. The friction of verifying the identity for a random person that doesn't care about privacy is not really a big deal compared to the downgrade that migrating to another platform would be.

▲ jtolmar 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I was a kid, we'd host the pics we want to post on forums on geocities and rename the file extensions to .txt to get past its "no hotlinking images" policy. So it's not like much has changed.

There are a lot of barriers between kids and better solutions, one of which is that anything needs a domain and a server, and that means a credit card.

▲ brooke2k 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think for a lot of people (me included) Discord isn't just a chat service like WhatsApp but more of a "home base" where you can hang out with all your friends, make new friends, share media, chat, play games together, stream games to each other, etc.

In the gaming sphere it's so universally used that all the friends you've ever made while gaming are on it, as well as all your chat history, and the entire history of whatever server you met them on. And if you want to make new friends, say to play a particular game, it's incredibly easy to find the official game server and start talking to people and forming lobbies with them.

My main friend group in particular has a server that we've had running since we were teenagers (all in our mid-20s now) which is a central place for all of the conversations we've ever had, all of the pictures we've ever sent each other, all the videos we've ever shared, and so on. That's something I search back through frequently looking for stuff we talked about years ago.

So I'm not saying it's impossible to move, but understand that it would require:

- Intentionally separating from the entire gaming sphere, making it so, so much harder to make new friends or talk to people. - Getting every single one of your friends that you play games with to agree to downloading and signing up for this new service (in my case that would be approx. a dozen people) - Accepting that this huge repository of history will be wiped out when moving to the new service (I suppose you could always log back in and scroll through it, but it's at least _harder_ to access, and is separated from all your new history)

On top of this, every time I've looked for capable alternatives to Discord I've come up empty-handed. Nothing else, as far as I can tell supports free servers, the ability to be in multiple servers, text chat divided into separate channels, optional threaded communication, voice chat joinable at any time with customizable audio setup (voice gate, push-to-talk, etc), game streaming from the voice chat at any time, and some "friend" system so that DMs and private calls can be made with each other. And even if I found one, then again I can't express enough that in the gaming sphere effectively _zero_ people use it or even know what it is.

Anyways, I'm not saying that nothing could make me abandon Discord, I'm just saying that doing so is a tremendous effort, and the result at the end will be a significantly worse online social life. So not a mild inconvienence.

	▲	duskdozer 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Accepting that this huge repository of history will be wiped out when moving to the new service (I suppose you could always log back in and scroll through it, but it's at least harder to access, and is separated from all your new history) This is true, but one needs to regularly back this up elsewhere if you care about it. If you're not in control of it, it can go away in an instant; Discord could one day decide to ban your server or anything else, and then it's gone.

▲ nomdep 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because they are used to follow limitations since the day they were born, and have all the time in the world

▲ herpdyderp 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them and that they do not like

And yet here we all are, still in an uproar every time GitHub goes down. Change is slow, we can't all leave GitHub in a day. Same with Discord users.

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ddtaylor 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the Discord situation is a bit different.

Getting everyone to switch away from Discord has been hard because getting everyone to spontaneously switch with no clear benefit hasn't worked. They want to just keep using the app and get back into a game with their friend.

It's different to lock a door and task users with getting the key to come back in. This is more similar to an MMORPG that kills their audience because they cause the core group to stop playing and then all of the other players experiences get worse, which causes a downward trend that avalanches.

	▲	elektronika 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> getting everyone to spontaneously switch with no clear benefit hasn't worked Somehow Discord pulled it off. It really didn't have much of an edge over the other chat apps at launch, just was slightly easier to use because it was simpler. A new site launching now could easily have that over Discord.

▲ Barrin92 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them

because that's not how they view it. For most Gen Z users and younger their digital identity already is their identity and they have no problem verifying it because the idea of being anonymous on a social network defeats the purpose of being there in the first place.

▲ areoform 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Universalising any group is dangerous, but this isn't true for even the least informed young people I know.

They grew up being watched. They know what these data harvesting operations are and how dangerous this is. They've got front row seats to the dystopia. The difference is that they can't / couldn't do anything about it.

They think the world is broken and that you broke it. They're pissed off. And powerless. Not a good combination

Even McKinsey is now reporting on it,

   Some Gen Zers push back on a lack of privacy, creating online subcultures that fantasize about anonymity: the pastoral “cottagecore” aesthetic, inspired by tiny cabins and homegrown greens, was one of Gen Z’s first major trends. 
   
   Some opt out; the New York Times recently reported on a group of self-described Luddite teens who found community by kicking smart devices in favor of the humble flip phone. 
   
   Even if you don’t go that far, many young people are veering away from “everyone knows everything” social media to curate a close group of friends and carefully monitor how much they put online.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/email/genz/2023/01...

	▲	Barrin92 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		sorry but the source for the wave of discontent is... a new york times op-ed on kids with flip phones? How many of them are there? I think universalizing is appropriate because unlike previous generations there isn't even a meaningful counter-culture. Even the luddites in all likelihood get more traction as a story on Instagram than the actual thing, where do you think they go to get their cottage core fix? I haven't seen a resurgence in self-hosted blogs. The sentence "cottage core is a major trend" is in itself hilarious. Where was it trending? Looking at the numbers that TikTok or Meta are doing I think you can unequivocally say that the vast majority of young people do not care, at all, the 'luddite teen' is the digital version of, and about as real, as the Gen Z 'trad wife'. If you're going to a CCC event you're much more likely to see resistance in the form of someone like Cory Doctorow, an actually angry middle aged guy who to my knowledge has not converted to flip phone cottage core to stick it to the man.

▲ johnnyanmac 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm more than ready to leave if push really comes to shove. Wouldn't be the first time.

From experience, I know if I leave that few of my friends will follow. So I understand the resistance.

▲ g947o 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, it's called a social network

▲ Computer0 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am sure that is part of the appeal to the developing mind, the adversarial nature.

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GaryBluto 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Nothing more "adversarial" than continuing to allow a service to leach on whatever information you're giving to it despite it kicking you in the face at every opportunity.

	▲	Computer0 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Key word is developing