HarkMahlberg

Well there’s the disaster that was hexbear…

The Baltics catching strays: “and I took that personally”

Yeah they were never learned to begin with.

Wow… That’s quite the journey. Thank you for sharing it.

It’s particularly enlightening is that the diversity of information presented to you is what helped you change. Not just one “gotcha” quote from some online commenter, one snippy remark about a noticeable hypocrisy. Not one source of disruption, but many. I think that’s fascinating, and extremely helpful for those of us with family who only get their news and opinions and politics from one place.

Again, thanks for telling your story.

I missed an opportunity to say the bunkiest of funches, and I’ll never forgive myself.

hear ye hear ye, behold the funkiest of bunches

I’m with you. I used to build maps, models, and textures for Battlefront 2 and share the files for free on Filefront. I got into programming for the joy of creating things that make people happy, or solve some little problems they have. I still make mods, the communities are out there and I’m glad I found them.

But tech evangelists and bro culture ruined the idea of programming as a career for me. The greed of late stage capitalism infected our industry the moment Facebook hit the scene, crypto accelerated it, and AI may as well be the final nail in the coffin. It’s no longer a worthy or noble profession.

Small world, I’m also on the balatro/other games modding discord boat, and it is a rough ocean out here. The perennial argument is that users don’t know how to use an old school forum, nobody wants to moderate it, nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure.

All those fall flat to me. Nobody even bothers to use discord’s “forums” or pinned messages for their bug reports/troubleshooting, no they just post straight to general, “this doesnt work can someone help” with no details whatsoever. Not like it would be any better or worse on a forum. It’s also not like BBS forums don’t have moderation tools, it’s not some lost art from an ancient civilization. As for paying for it… the whole discord server is propped up by nitro users. Like come on. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Pray tell what changed your view?

I wouldn’t say a monopoly, but my counterpoint is pointing to how discord swallowed up all the BBS forums that reddit hadn’t. So it’s not like that’s much better.

@Xanza@lemm.ee Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.

Don’t get me started on the “rewards”…