>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)
> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.
All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.
When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).
Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers
From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.
My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.
I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
Yeah, after he was forcibly injected with drugs against his will.
>Mr. Wright said the hospital later apologized to him and gave him a $50 gift card for a restaurant. The crisis center also apologized and gave him a $25 Walmart gift card.
That alone would be enough to drive me clinically insane
Sure, that was the first responders on the scene. The question isn’t about whether mistakes are made, it’s that once they’re made, will they be recognized and fixed? The commenters article doesn’t show what they claim (if not proving the opposite).
I don’t think you are thinking rationally about the issue. Medical mistakes are significant events, and $75 in gift cards, much less than minimum wage, fixes very little except the consciences of the “mental health providers”.
Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.
If you know any scripting language you know GDScript. How much time are you wasting when it takes one afternoon to learn? And nowadays it even has gradual typing support for those that are scared of dynamic types.
I have seen C# devs coming to Godot being super prejudiced against GDScript and then end up using GDScript anyway because it is just more pleasant to use.
Still doesn't have full static typing support to my knowledge, which is a dealbreaker to me.
The other things are that it just has less support for structuring your code in different ways, and of course the performance is vastly worse. My game does some state space exploration for the enemy AI, so having code that runs an order of magnitude slower just doesn't work for me.
It has support for typing Arrays and Dictionaries these days. Yes, nested Arrays are still a problem but I am sure they will get to it.
As for performance well the GDExtension support has also gotten much better. You can always go down to C++, Rust, Nim, Zig or whatever. It is really easy to set up.
But then I have to code in those other languages, languages that require manual memory management that I'm not as familiar with. C# is many times faster than gdscript, and I don't have to think about memory hardly at all. And it's easy enough to code the whole game in it.
You can use C#. It is well supported except for the (currently) missing web target and Microsoft is funding C# support so it will not get abandoned.
You can also use other garbage collected languages. I once tried the Lua bindings and they worked fine.
The problem with C# is that its garbadge collection is not really suited for game dev. The creator of the Mono runtime actually calls using C# his Multi-million dollar mistake and instead works on swift bindings for Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo
But if you really love C# nothing is stopping you. I prefer GDScript.
This line of reasoning is silly, because no one in their right mind would choose to use gdscript for any program that was not in Godot. You can't even type a nested array, among many other issues. That is because gdscript is a bad language objectively. It being part of Godot doesn't change that. Why would I choose to write my game, the thing that is very hard and will take years, in an objectively bad language? I would not choose that, because that doesn't make any sense to do. Writing code is like 90% of the work if I hire artists. I am not going to do 90% of years of work in a shitty language, because I don't have to do that, being a skilled developer in real languages.
So when people come out and defend gdscript for being not that bad, it's like, okay, but it's still really shitty compared to any normal language like C# or even Python. It is made by a game engine, used by thousands of people, instead of being made by gorillions of dollars poured into it by tech companies and used by millions of people. I'm just going to use good languages instead.
GDScript might be a bad general purpose language but it is a good language for Godot.
You say Python is a "normal" language for me while I love Python, modern Python has gotten way too complicated and clunky with lots of new features added. For me GDScript feels much closer to the original pythonic ideal. Plus it is much easier to learn for people that are not professional programmers.
Maybe you don't enjoy using GDScript and that is fine but saying it is a "objectively bad" language is really uncalled for. For many devs it is the right fit.
If you’re being objective about a programming language, its strengths and weaknesses are always going to a reflection of the game you’re trying to make. Python’s ecosystem will get you very far making web services, but less so with cert on consoles.
C# and GDScript are no different. They both have made design decisions for particular reasons.
You’re a skilled developer in real languages, so I’d encourage you to explore why other developers might prefer a DSL for their needs!
Mostly because I don't like the Python-style use of significant whitespace. But functions aren't first class citizens, making closures and lambdas awkward, type hinting isn't supported everywhere (such as with callables). I could probably come up with more petty gripes if I opened up a project and played with it. "pass" is an abomination to God.
It's a lot better than it used to be and it gets the job done but I still find it ugly and awkward as a language.
A more general complaint I have is that Godot tries to load every script regardless of whether it's actually included in the game hierarchy.
Without agreeing (or disagreeing) with their larger point, dynamic types become more of liability as a project gets larger
Like "schemaless" database applications, there's always types/schema somewhere: the choice is if they'll be explicitly defined at the place of construction, or implicitly spread out across all the places data happens to flow in your application. And the more places there are, the more spread out they'll be.
Static typing is also really nice for game dev since proper unit tests are harder (but not impossible) compared to your average CRUD app.
The other side of the argument is that dynamic typing is great for prototyping and can allow for more compact code.
The discussion is exhausting because many people don't understand the difference between weak typing and dynamic typing. You basically never want weak typing but dynamic typing has legit uses. Yes JS is both weakly and dynamically typed and that sucks but Common Lisp shows you can have very strong typing and dynamic types.
Lots of very complex software has been writing in dynamically typed languages. The whole Erlang/Elixir world is dynamically typed though Elixir is getting gradual typing.
There is a good reason gradual typing is getting popular, you get the best of both world. You can prototype quickly and then add types and make everything more solid later.
(Which also why you want to always use a statically typed language in the corporate world because there is never a "later" and the bigger the team the more important it is to have the lang enforcing discipline. But not every programming is corporate.)
People that are dogmatic about static typing show their immaturity. The older I get the more I realize that there is no right or wrong way to program, everything it tradeoffs and "it depends".
> there's always types/schema somewhere: the choice is if they'll be explicitly defined at the place of construction, or implicitly spread out across all the places data happens to flow in your application.
> And the more places there are, the more spread out they'll be.
You can still have schema validation at the borders of the application(data in/out) without static typing.
I think there are many other factors that come into play when it comes to maintaniblity of large projects. I'd easily choose to maintain a large Elixir or Common Lisp codebase over a Java one, assuming they were all using the Best Practices™ of their respective languages.
There is research out there, and there is absolutely zero evidence that static typing catches more bugs than dynamic types. My experience is that immutability, functional programming, simplicity and testing pays a MUCH bigger role in maintainability than static typing.
Dynamic typing has trade-offs, and so does static typing, HUGE trade-offs by the way. But for some reason, no one seems to mention them... ever.
Silly me for falling for the bait after two one-word replies in a row.
If I need to specify this is about data flow inside your application when we're talking about typing, I don't want think we're having the same conversation.
Hopefully someone else will want to mud wrestle on this.
I'm developing a game in Godot using C# and my experience with it is very good. I guess it depends on how deeply you integrate with Godot. I try as far as its possible to write my game headless. My opinion may change when I have gotten to the point of actually shipping a game though, so this take needs a grain of salt.
For me the real headaches emerged when I started writing [Tool] classes in C# for scripting within the editor itself. I don't know enough about the lower level nitty-gritty stuff to explain it, but I basically had to close and re-open the editor every time I recompiled. It had something to do with not being able to load assemblies, for example if I had a Tool script which referenced a sqlite library. There were also some concerning instances of Exported properties losing their saved values, though in that case they can at least be restored from previous versions of the .tscn file from version control
Anecdotally, I have mentioned PRISM to several non-techie friends over the years and none of them knew what I was talking about, they know 'Snowden' but not 'PRISM'. The amount of people who actually cared about the Snowden leaks is practically a rounding error
Most people don't care about the details. Neither does the media. I've seen national scandals that the media pushed one way disproven during discovery in a legal trial. People only remember headlines, the retractions are never re-published or remembered.
It's using information to influence public opinion in a calculated manner. Said information can include facts. It can even be entirely factual.
Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or whether the information displayed is factual or not. Those things make zero difference.
This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's contradictory.
If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.
You're subtly misattributing me though. "Convincing someone" is a superset which contains intentional manipulation of the information someone is exposed to but also lots of other things.
As you said, how you do it matters a lot.
You've also gone and (IIUC) equated the general biases of an outlet with propaganda which I certainly wouldn't agree with. They're similar, and the former can certainly morph into the latter, but they aren't the same thing.
That can be part of it, but usually it's not necessary - certain facts, or certain aspects of facts (e.g. exclude some context) can just get exaggerated to have the desired effect on a larger population.
What do you mean? When a Fremen dies they extract all the water from their body- Paul is given the water extracted from the Fremen he killed in a duel. And when the Fremen first encounter Paul and Jessica I think one of the first things they say is basically "so why shouldnt we just kill you for your water right now?", meaning the water in their bodies
I mean fremen killing each other for their water. There is much made of recovering their water after death, but not of inter-sietch raids to harvest the water of conquered.
Yes, but there were practical limits to currency debasement when the currency was a physical commodity with intrinsic value. People notice when their coins start getting filled with lead, and there were serious political repercussions for it. You cant just conjure a trillion gold/silver coins out of nothing like you can with fiat, and the ability to do so is 100% guaranteed to be abused.
> there were practical limits to currency debasement when the currency was a physical commodity
"In the second century, a modius of wheat (approximately nine liters), during normal times, had sold for ½ Denarius…. the same modius of wheat sold in 335 AD for over 6000 denarii, and in 338 AD for over 10,000" [1].
Note that inflation can also occur with zero debasement if the economy around the fixed money supply collapses. This happened in Rome when Pompey and later Augustus were trashing trade routes. It may have even led to the collapse of India's ancient democracies.
> there were serious political repercussions for it
There weren't. The state historically borrowed from the hilt of the sword. Economic collapse constrained kings and emperors. Not politics.
And as far as the PRISM comparison goes, I'd rather mass surveillance not be done at all, but if it's being done no matter what I'd rather it be illegitimate than official policy. At least they have to jump through some hoops for parallel construction that way, and it doesn't normalize the practice as morally/socially acceptable- it's a "secret" because its embarrassing and shameful for it to exist in a "free" society. If its not a secret and nobody is ashamed of it then you dont even have the pretense of a free society anymore
If it's done in the open they can be taken to court. When done in secret, the first challenge is when their defense attorney tells the prosecution to prove it even happens.
Otherwise it would suggest you think the problem is they didn't ask? When was the last time you saw a customer read a terms of service? Or better yet reject a product because of said terms once they hit that part of the customer journey?
The issue isn't about asking it's that for take your pick of reasons no one ever says no. The asking is thus pro forma and irrelevant.
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
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