by Doc – Owner, Founder, Wouldn’t Be Upset If the Age of the Platform Ended
Discord has announced platform-wide age verification using biometric data that supposedly “never” leaves your device. If you’re at all familiar with digital security and the sheer number of data hacks that goes on everyday, you’ll know that it will be less than a week before your driver’s license, face, password and so on are available everywhere. I don’t imagine Discord will survive this if this policy sticks.
Here’s the thing: there’s a massive number of information-based hobbies that require central platforms to share information, and they all basically use either Discord or Reddit. If it’s at all the kind of hobby that requires sharing information of some kind in some way, or requires people to communicate with each other as relative equals (instead of something like Youtube where there is one content creator and thousands of consumers) then it’s happening on Discord or Reddit. Video game communities, hobbies, political stuff, all of it.
This isn’t how the internet used to be, not even fifteen years ago. I can distinctly remember my first exposures to the internet (hell, even to amiibo training, which is now all on Discord) being through internet forums customized to a specific set of interests. If you liked Animal Crossing, you went to Animal Crossing Community (which is, awesomely, still alive). If you liked Civilization, you went to CivFanatics. Smash Bros? Smashboards. Everything had a forum, and it was actually really well-organized and often had a forum culture that was quite… quaint. You’d see the same usernames across different “threads” so you’d end up interacting with them and maybe playing some games together, and if you had a question that had been answered by someone previously they’d link you to the thread as a reference. With a few minutes of reading you could learn most of what you needed to learn about something, and if you learned something to add to the stack you could make your own thread. It truly was a community centered around an interest.
I remember back when I was playing Animal Crossing on the Gamecube and discovered a way to farm Coelacanths on the Island, and nobody had ever done that before. (You just waited for it to rain and, if your beach was shaped correctly, ran back and forth between the tiles, causing the fish to reroll. It was pretty mindblowing when I was fifteen.) I read through all the previous threads on the mechanics of the island across the Animal Crossing Community forums in the “AC:GC” section, sent a few DMs to people who had posted things over the years whom I knew were still active users, and when I confirmed that it was new information, I posted a thread on it!
That kind of information tracking isn’t possible anymore. Reddit tends to be better about this than Discord, but unless something is stickied at the top of a subreddit, megathread or whatever the kids call it these days (I haven’t used Reddit in years, forgive me) it’s information that’s going to get lost everywhere besides specific Google results. Sure, you can leave a comment explaining your discovery in a relevant thread, but if a moderator decides to ban you for some infraction down the line, your past contributions are destroyed. Reddit feels like it started as a combination of all the forums put together, but it’s basically just a reference library for nerds that gets heavily censored now. I spent enough time on Reddit back in the day to know that moderators are petty and rather… picky about who they allow to post on their corner of the internet.
Discord’s no better, because if you first have to join the Discord, assuming it’s still maintained, and then jump through the hoops of acquiring roles by reading through a stack of rules and finding the one that tells you how to get to the channels you want to ask a question in. Then once you do, it’s probably a question that’s been answered at some point previously so the regular users of the Discord are tired of answering it. But how were you supposed to know that until you ask? And besides, the contents of Discord servers aren’t accessible by Google, so often times there’s specific knowledge that can only be obtained by reading through all the freakin’ comments in a Discord server that occurred over the span of possibly years, or you’re just… SOL.
I hope that, given the bad news that Discord is so fond of putting out, internet forums make a return and stay the heck away from Reddit. It’s high time the internet started feeling like a place again and not like a vertical scroll feed.
Amiibo Doctor 