Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform.
It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using.
> It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream.
The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.
I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel?
They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is.
Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.
It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.