Chat Apps, Consolidation, and The Future

[I.C. Weiner]

From the nearly eight years I've spent on the Internet, I have seen the fall of local forums and "decentralized" chat programs in favor of more centralized platforms, like Discord, Twitter, and Reddit. For the local forums, Steam, for example, back in the mid 2010s, Steam groups for dedicated servers for games like TF2 and CS:GO had their own active group chats, forums, and events, all confined to the Steam group. Some Steam groups were dedicated to certain friend groups, usually containing regulars from a certain game's forum.

Voice chats were even more disjointed; nearly every person you talked to used a different platform to speak, with Teamspeak and Mumble being the two biggest platforms, and both of them required paid subscriptions and had a very convoluted UI if memory serves right. Needless to say, that this would cause a lot of trouble with communication.

Within 2016, a game changer for both voice and text chat was becoming popular; Discord. Able to combine the features of text and voice chats with lots of permissions and customization, doubled with the super user friendly UI, all for completely free! This would contribute massively to it's popularity, where even some of the most normie boomers use it to talk to people. But this popularity would lead to the slow decline of the local forums. For example, if you look at some of the Steam groups from that era today, they'll either be an absolute ghost town or have openly migrated to Discord.

This consolidation into a singular platform would lead into nepotism, corruption, and selectivism. People who post too many edgy words or memes are banned immediately, but open zoophile groups are perfectly fine! It has gotten to the point to where 99% of public servers for games have been sanitized to shit and infested with room-temperature IQ troons, where saying anything remotely out of line will get you banned. Previously, if you wanted to look for people to play a game with, you could reach out to the aforementioned forum or Steam group. Now, you have to go to their Discord server and deal with the bugman infestation and walk on eggshells to not get banned. A few games still have dedicated forums outside of Steam, but those tend to be games that had a local forum for years (Dungeon Defenders), games that have a huge following (Warframe), or both (Terraria), and even then, their official Discord servers have far more activity than their forums.

The corruption wasn't just confined to Discord, however. Many other platforms have had similar corruption. Twitter and Youtube being two major offenders, with their blatant selectivism, banning people for naughty no no posts, and in some cases even deleting decade old videos that were previously within ToS and were grandfathered to be safe from their rules. The platforms would operate under "private company", and many people took their "don't like it? Make your own." to heart. With Youtube, there's Bitchute and Odyssee for alts, Twitter has Gab and Fediverse, and Discord has Guilded. Even if more convenient than the days of isolated forums and needing 5 different platforms just to keep in touch with friends, the death of small-scale forums is definitely concerning.

Also with the alt platforms, one day, there is a possibility that one of them would become the new version of their old predecessor, and enforce similar draconian rules that the sites they fled from had, with an inevitable cycle. What's the "perfect" balance between accessibility and preventing a media monopoly?

 

[DumbDude43]

Voice chats were even more disjointed; nearly every person you talked to used a different platform to speak, with Teamspeak and Mumble being the two biggest platforms, and both of them required paid subscriptions and had a very convoluted UI if memory serves right. Needless to say, that this would cause a lot of trouble with communication.

teamspeak doesnt require paid subscription, but if you want to have your own server you need a webserver to run it on, and webservers tend to cost money. there are (were) specialized hosting providers that would offer teamspeak servers for a couple dollars a month, that's where the money comes in.

the big selling point with discord is that the discord corporation itself essentially provides you with free servers, eliminating the need to rent one from a third party webhost. the downside of this is that you don't actually own or fully control "your" server. discord admins can shut it down at any time for any reason, with teamspeak that was impossible. but as we all know, normies value convenience above anything else, so discord quickly captured the market.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

The Fediverse already came up to a working solution to this problem within its own niche (Twitter style communications)... then everybody instantly defederated each other over hurt fee fees.

People these days just want an echo chamber. They don't care how.

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

The consolidation of the internet has been an objective disaster for the population and atrocity upon open discussion. Pre 2016 the consolidation had been growing to the point that youtwitgoogchanredblr were already close to monolithic but I dont recall anyone complaining and why would they? There wasnt a problem with current affairs regarding the consolidation. The censorship engine had not been started yet and you could see open discussion about anything on most sites, with the exception of reddit's natural hivemind and seemingly perpetual powetripping jannies (how long was ghislaine maxwell a powermod on a bunch of big named subs? I forget). Youtube seldom took anything down so long as it never irked the copyright holders (seemingly the only real threat to the net at those times), various altchans still existed and were lively with activity, tumblr as much as I loathe to say it was active, google was still a top quality search engine, social media was always awful but somehow they innovated continuously in being worse in every way. Forums were on a slow decline but still occasionally used and as said in op VoIP was extremely diverse and mostly decentralized, finally to top it off wikipedia was trusted by almost everyone who wasnt an academic

The 2016 election is what I call the paradigm shift, slowly but steadily the censorship engine was started. First with fringe and odd stuff in the corners of youtube that could easily be described as wignats and naziboos but it didnt stop there, with every major event the engine was kicked into a higher gear, examples being the autism of Charlottesville and christchurch. New methods developed and deployed to suppress what was at first wacko content to anything that went against the narrative, prime examples being demonetization for lighter offenses to deplatforming, aggressive algorithms to bury content, up to increasingly concerning use of AI censors to supplement the unelected mods, jannies, and other associated cadres in their quest to combat misinformation against presented status quo. The open web is becoming closer and closer to being as sanitized as TV and its content forced to resembled the slurry of manufactured consent that is the press. The entire phenomena that is breadtube I consider fully to be the result of support from yougoog to push batshit insane leftist content to counter the explosion (and subsequent fizzle) of rightist content that had built in the few years before 2018

It seems as though the consolidation is becoming almost as hard as concrete. I can think of a dozen sites made post 2016 specifically for open content in what could have been wrapped up as alt tech, almost all of which are either dead or so inactive they may aswell be dead, especially with the chan scene. Other than the OG's of 2 and 4 which chans are either still active or even still around? The only one I can think of is 8kun which is the down syndrome child of 8ch which that already had dementia by the end of its run. When the other alt tech sites are active they are so drowned in politics they resemble the catalog of /pol/. You could bring up a bunch of different reasons for the failure of alt tech but I think a big one is the network effect. Normies go where the content is and normies create content, why leave the green pastures to go play with the schizoposters, skinheads, Qboomers, and what else have you? Without a critical mass of ordinary people the sheer autism would angle a site to be almost purely political, go take a gander at the front page of bitchute and tell me if your regular joe wants to be apart of that mess. There are other explanations like the tech bubble empowering these mega corporations, the leftist madness of these companies being a kneejerk reaction to the 2016 election, hostile search engine algorithms (how many functional search engine index's are there? How many are not big tech, russian, or ghetto to the point of near uselessness) or if you want to get schizo and hopefully not correct the feds, or even more schizo (disconcertingly plausible) of an international conspiracy

Want to see some effects of this? In that facebook congressional hearing it was confirmed faceberg actively fucked around and manipulated public opinion during elections, in the musk threads some people claimed twatter does the same but much more hardcore, whether these claims are true or not I was to lazy to dig into it but I fully believe them. Reddit has been a perpetual authoritarian shithole and a pioneer in skeezy censorship tactics, the fact they can simultaneously get continuously worse yet bigger and bigger is proof things are out of wack. Wikipedia (conveniently regarded by academics as being perfectly acceptable now) is a mess of edited propagandist drivel, someone here had an archive from 2017 and it felt like finding a brick of solid gold. Tumblr as I was not the least bit sad to see fizzle got merked by apple, by having their arm twisted and being forced to ban porn they disenfranchised enough of their audience to cause an exodus, sadly to the rest of the net. The technocratic elite is a real thing and it is getting scary how many of kaczynski's bleak predictions are coming true.

A problem ive had since 2020 was the censorship engine having finally been pushed to maximum overdrive, as a result it became impossible to get accurate information on any happening since the only things that wasnt instantly censored was speech that aligned to the narrative, which essentially was propaganda. As a result actual information had to be mixed in with objective schizoposting and plausible schizoposting. Every ounce of information felt like it was a coin flip if it was real or horse shit be it from the cadre or the demagogue. I have the word misinformation permanently embedded in my mind as meaning opposite of what authority currently supports, regardless if it is actually misinformation or the truth. Infact come to think of it, the explosion of transexuals. I recall my only experience with them was in the strange corners of the SS13 community and even that was rare, this absolutely microscopic demographic is being forcibly shoved down the general populations throat, and somehow they are permitted and encouraged to act as unacceptably as possible when they desire. Before 2019 excluding specific cattle on the farms how often was a troon spotted in the wild on the web? Now it feels as though this tiny demograph is everywhere despite being in such small numbers.

Hell a question ive had is how the hell do companies like discord produce profit? The service is snappy and VoIP is quality meaning they have the funds but starting a server is free. If it was a flash in the pan running off of investment capital sure but its been proliferating and spreading like a sickness for the past 6 years, to the point it supplanted community forums as was mentioned in OP.

 

[plgfarts]

@WickyWickyWoW 420Chan had a board specifically for trannies back in the day. A lot of the posts were Vocaroo/"Do I Pass" threads. But even though that Chan turned into a sanitized version of it's former self, pre-2016, users were allowed to post shit from that board onto /b/ specifically to laugh at it. Good times were had, then 2016 rolls around, and last I remember visiting 420Chan people were getting banned for calling other posters "retards".

And when it comes to Discord and their cashflow, don't they have a premium subscription service? I'd imagine more than a handful of Cat Ranchers™ shell out monthly/yearly subs. I'm sure they also datamine users and sell their info.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

Hell a question ive had is how the hell do companies like discord produce profit? The service is snappy and VoIP is quality meaning they have the funds but starting a server is free. If it was a flash in the pan running off of investment capital sure but its been proliferating and spreading like a sickness for the past 6 years, to the point it supplanted community forums as was mentioned in OP.

That's the strategy. If you can offer your service free for long enough to kill all competition, you get to be a monopoly and start generating profit. It's been a strategy for probably about 7 or more years with tech companies.

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

@WickyWickyWoW 420Chan had a board specifically for trannies back in the day. A lot of the posts were Vocaroo/"Do I Pass" threads. But even though that Chan turned into a sanitized version of it's former self, pre-2016, users were allowed to post shit from that board onto /b/ specifically to laugh at it. Good times were had, then 2016 rolls around, and last I remember visiting 420Chan people were getting banned for calling other posters "retards".

And when it comes to Discord and their cashflow, don't they have a premium subscription service? I'd imagine more than a handful of Cat Ranchers™ shell out monthly/yearly subs. I'm sure they also datamine users and sell their info.

420chan, wasnt the owner of that involved in some shit with the trucker protest in canada right before the war in Ukraine? Doxing some of the organizers or something like that
And for discord, like I said if it was a flash in the pan sure I could see short term survival, but how many people buy the subscription service? In my circles I see it mocked when mentioned and the datamining cant be that profitable. Is there some other strategy at work or is the venture capital thing just that good?

 

[plgfarts]

420chan, wasnt the owner of that involved in some shit with the trucker protest in canada right before the war in Ukraine? Doxing some of the organizers or something like that
And for discord, like I said if it was a flash in the pan sure I could see short term survival, but how many people buy the subscription service? In my circles I see it mocked when mentioned and the datamining cant be that profitable. Is there some other strategy at work or is the venture capital thing just that good?

Yeah, Kirt turned into a glownigger shortly after the election in 2016 (even though he's Canadian (another Canadian lolcow )). He used to have a sense of humor and that Chan used to be a riot. Now it's just gay. Or at least it was when it was still alive.

And I think we may be underestimating the amount of grooming troons/Minecraft Youtubers that have their own Discord servers. Or maybe it's the government lol

 

[Ice Station Zebra]

teamspeak doesnt require paid subscription,

It's free for end users but freebie servers gotta pay up if they have more than 100 users. OP mentioned Mumble costing money but he's thinking of Ventrilo, Mumble is free and open source.

(another Canadian lolcow )

There's something seriously wrong with Canada. They produce more cows per capita than any other country and frankly I reckon we should shut down all Internet posting from Canada until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

There's something seriously wrong with Canada. They produce more cows per capita than any other country and frankly I reckon we should shut down all Internet posting from Canada until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

I recall a map of the most visited websites recently that excluded search engines, youtube, and twitter and Canada had reddit as number one, coincidence? The question is if falling to the hivemind makes you cattle worthy or if it takes a certain personality type thats common in canada to become those two aforementioned things.

 

[Nol 2]

There's something seriously wrong with Canada.

Outside of Quebec they're a country whos only defining factor is not being the US, so it drives people mad