> * Blind is a toxic hellscape and redditors are broadly pretty dim.
Reddit is, at this point, a literal mirror held up to reality.
Everything you read there isn't happening.
Maybe people want it to happen and think if they spam it enough times people will believe it is happening and report that it is happening, but it isn't.
If you read something on reddit, believe the opposite.
It's progressively gotten worse, but the point for me was when they removed access for third party apps. Many people who contributed meaningfully left in protest.
The comments were delusionally disparate from reality for a long time before that.
Reddit always leant left, but pre... idk, 2014 you could imagine the conversations you read on there occurring with someone you might conceivably meet in real life, even if they would be a bit of an outlier.
After that, no chance - everyone on there had the personality of a delusionally dug-in activist, the type of person you'd instinctively flee from if you met on the street. And the level of bullying you'd encounter if you went against 'the narrative' went up by a huge factor, as in, instant bans in just about every subreddit, 'if you're not on this side of the issue you're supporting genocide, this is a fact not an opinion' type of interactions. Then reddit updated their blocking system so that blocking someone cut _them_ off from contributing further, which basically made every user a mini-moderator, which was (and is) of course massively abused.
The place is long overdue to go under; offlining it would remove about 50% of the overall negativity from the internet, and considering it's such a small space compared with FB/Twitter that's really saying something.
Ha. A decade and a half ago I remember the community similar to today. Some people are helpful, some people aren't. Some people are decent and some people aren't. And those two groups often don't overlap.
The platform itself is a much worse experience though.
There's a lot of very weird optimism here for technologies that are VISIBLY making the world worse or aren't appropriate for the use case.
So many comments praising Discord in the 'why you shouldn't use Discord for FOSS' thread, all of which were basically 'yeah you should use it; it's cool and has a great UI' and zero substantial discussion of how it meets the needs of a support platform (because it doesn't, the searchability and retrievability is terrible.)
> everyone starts to take computer security seriously
Weren't the last big attacks literally carried out by hackers exploiting security software? As in, the solarwinds thing, which was carried out on systems which were 'textbook secure' ?
If you want a secure system, my advice would be to fall back to using dumb hardware terminals, VT100 style. Anything more complicated than that will have a backdoor.
Reuters said, "[t]he problems began last week after hackers gained access to Change Healthcare's information technology systems [...]" so it was probably because some airhead gave their login to the hacker over the phone. Social engineering accounts for 98% of all cyber-attacks. Highly intelligent people who are only accustomed to employing software don't understand this, because the only thing they're afraid of is their software getting exploited.
My money is on some un-upgraded backend/frontend stuff due to "compatibility" and/or lack of budget to hire people to keep things patched and up-to-date.
Blah, when it comes to a target that large, hackers will insert a contractor into the role who can secure the relevant credentials.
This is another reason the remote-work scenario is such an issue - it's so trivial when large numbers of people are working remotely to gain access to secure systems.
Why are we shipping software that’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside? We know our customers have employees that will be socially engineered. Heck, let’s not be smug, “we” have employees that will be too.
> software that’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside
So are tanks. And so are humans.
Security is opposite to usefulness. If you harden your system thoroughly to the limit of possibility, it becomes a rock. Systems are made to do something, so some parts need to actually do that thing.
The issue is, actually having that discussion becomes very hard, because a lot of 'security consultants' basically rely on the commissions they get from selling that type of inherently-creating-a-single-point-of-compromise managementware.
So all of the 'experts' you might draft in to give you helpful advice will be telling you exactly the opposite of what you should be doing, which is reducing your attack surface as much as possible; cutting down, not increasing, the number of apps installed.
And don't get me started on MDMs, which are basically a rootkit that's only as benign as the guy sitting behind the operator panel.
When a user installs an app that platform can then summon that user on demand. That gives you something like 1000x as much user retention and 'callbackability' as a passive 'location' that the user has to consciously visit.
Same reason every store wants you to sign up for their credit card or join their mailing list etc.
After looking at your comment history and seeing your track record of being totally and consistently wrong, I'd say: definitely yeah no. And you replying "No yes" just makes it yeaher and noer. It's you, not "most people".
Your perspective is the product of a rebellious worldview two decades out of date. Your enemies are long dead and your ideas long purposeless. We've contorted ourselves legislating freedom to people who squander it. No group or force limits the common man anymore save himself and the state.
People have shorter lives, less children, lower IQ, lower income, less friends, less wealth, less homes, and less happiness. Your system is broken and your answer is more of the same.
> The main problem with Discord, to me, is that in any popular project, you have about 15 seconds for the right person to read your message before emojis push it off the screen.
It's like... this defines the issue.
I don't see why this point isn't always mentioned front and center when it comes to discussion of Discord as a help vector. It's transient. It's ephemeral.
Forum posts persist, they're asynchronous. People visit forums and catch up, it's considered acceptable to reply to a post that's a couple of weeks old. Yes, you shouldn't necro a thread from a year ago but forums are designed for casual access which is always going to be the majority of a userbase. You can drop in and help as and when it suits you. If you get abused or a toxic reply, there's a good chance you might not even see it because the admin will clean it up before you log in again.
They're searchable and open.
Compared to that, everything about discord appears, to me, to make it completely unsuitable as a support platform. I've tried a few times to use some subreddit discords and they're just bizarrely fast-moving with multiple channels, memes and stuff popping up all over the place - I fail to see how you can get any real value out of that. It's hugely interactive and feels like - to use a very old metaphor - having a boxing match with your computer in which you're constantly ducking stuff being thrown at you. It's a bit exhausting.
It seems... discord, like tiktok, is something you do - it's a two-way street. You use discord, you install the app, the app pings you up when _it_ wants to and you respond to the app, which is a really unhealthy way to interact with technology, having an app endlessly jerking your chain.
Forums, on the other hand are a passive place _you_ visit when _you_ want to - which is a much more human-centric way to interact with technology.
IRC has the same ephemerality attribute. But people were aware of it and set up additional communication channel, like wiki for documentation and guides, forum for support, tracker for discussions, and blog for announcements. IRC was always a place to hangout. Now people expect Discord to be everything above.
It's not true, and people claiming this are just trying to normalize these bizarre weblike corporate structures when in fact they're usually used to make a business law-proof in a way that's very contrary to the intent and purpose of the relevant law.
(If your local gym is structured as 6-8 entities you should probably not go there because you're going to be screwed if you injure yourself.)
I find that microservices and this type of architecture have become a religion - you do it this way because you do it this way. You add another layer of complication because that's what you do now. You add this product because that's what you do now. Now you do it this way. Now you stop doing this thing and do this thing instead. It's all proclamations and a truly insane level of complexity and often a truly stunningly low level of performance achieved from some very powerful hardware because everything is behind at least twenty layers of abstraction and you're like, encrypting traffic which is just being passed between VMs which are on the same hardware, but because you can't guarantee that they're always on the same hardware you have to encrypt and use a proxy and... oh wow
Watching it from the outside is a bit exhausting, it just seems to be so much churn and overhead.
A legit user getting told they are banned can contact the site to try and resolve the issue on why they have been misidentified, getting shadowbanned will possibly never get resolved.
How is that especially relevant? ID.me is just another example in the near endless list of 'public-private partnerships' that have been eroding the public's trust for decades. It certainly didn't start during COVID.
No, but during the pandemic there were a ridiculous number of dubious acquisitions and somewhat-inexplicable business deals that really need to be investigated.
Reddit is, at this point, a literal mirror held up to reality.
Everything you read there isn't happening.
Maybe people want it to happen and think if they spam it enough times people will believe it is happening and report that it is happening, but it isn't.
If you read something on reddit, believe the opposite.