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Man, this reminds me of a community I used to be a part of for something like 15 years, from my childhood through my early 30's. Started off as a bunch of nerdy kids who liked a thing and created their own space to talk about it. Then we grew up, and politics got more and more involved. Then it became almost entirely about arguing politics and trolling one another's trigger points. We had a benevolent autistic overlord who owned the space and maintained strict neutrality, as most of the old internet used to. Then one user launched a coup, stole the domain name, redirected it to his own servers, and banned everyone he disagreed with. Shortly after he shut the place down entirely because banning us wasn't enough, he wanted there to be no public record of him ever having associated with us what so ever, he considered us so politically untouchable.
Canadians, eh?
Eventually most of us that got banned coalesced around a private discord group one of us set up. But it's just no the same, and many of us still grieve the loss of that community.
That is the part spoken quietly, I think that Discord's simple framework and the very detailed permissions system for server channels has made naked shilling and aggressive status jockeying in this vein much easier and more viable. Especially for culture warriors and clout-chasing
highschoolerssociopaths who are good at (and enjoy) stuff like this but would normally get filtered by the technicalities of setting up their own domain. Discord groomers/kittens are memes for a reason.Man, tell me about it. The discord I'm on is literally just a private space for old internet friends who've known each other for 20+ years to shoot the shit and stay in touch. Share pictures of our kids without using facebook. Crap like that.
Every other Discord I've been on, despite ostensibly being about a video game, manga, tv show, youtube channel, etc still has like 20% of the conversation dominated by adults talking about the divergent gender identity, their polycules, etc and god damned children in the same discord participating inquisitively and with a mixture of yearning and conformance.
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