LexiMax

> Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?

Virtue signaling.

Posts like these are why I am so incredibly glad that HN isn't the only place where the blog post is being discussed.

Good online communities have active and engaged moderation.

That said, Reddit moderation seems stuck in a weird limbo where moderators have a lot of power on paper but completely ineffectual tooling to combat organized and systemic abuse.

Given those limitations I find it hard to imagine Reddit modding ending up any other way.

I'm confused. Where do you think I'm backtracking?

I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm saying that I don't encounter them in the wild. Certainly nowhere near as often as I encounter people who have a loud and obnoxious dislike of Rust.

What I'm trying to say is that if you see Rust evangelists everywhere, your label is either so wide-ranging as to be useless or you need to rm your rust_evangelist_evidence.txt because it's likely taking up a disproportionate amount of headspace.

The only time I've ever seen anything that could be considered Rust evangelist is when someone with a chip on their shoulder shoves a github issue or random comment link in my face. I certainly don't encounter them in the wild.

> Because they are all the consequence of holding it wrong, avoiding RAII solutions.

The reason why C++ is as popular as it is is in large part due to how easy it is to upgrade an existing C codebase in-place. Doing a complete RAII rewrite is at best a long term objective, if not often completely out of the question.

Acknowledging this reality means giving affordances like `defer` that allow upgrading C codebases and C++ code written in a C style easier without having to rewrite the universe. Because if you're asking me to rewrite code in a C++ style all in one go, I might not pick C++.

EDIT: It also occurs to me that destructors also have limitations. They can't throw, which means that if you encounter an issue in a dtor you often have to ignore it and hope it wasn't important.

I ran into this particular annoyance when I was writing my own stream abstractions - I had to hope that closing the stream in the dtor didn't run into trouble.

A long overdue feature.

Though I do wonder what the chances are that the C subset of C++ will ever add this feature. I use my own homespun "scope exit" which runs a lambda in a destructor quite a bit, but every time I use it I wish I could just "defer" instead.

I'll admit that this use case didn't really occur to me, because the signal to noise ratio is so damn bad in matchmade games these days. If I want to play a game on voice call with strangers, I go to the community space first and then organize a team there.

That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.

I'm already using Matrix for a number of open source communities. It's fine as far as it goes.

However, from a community space point of view, it seems to be more similar to IRC than Discord. Much like an IRC server, there's a public list of channels and you join them individually. There is voice and video chat, but as far as I can tell it's only person to person without any voice and video conferencing like Discord has, and I've never actually tried them to see how well they work.

Some organizations, such as Mozilla, run their own Matrix server in order to corral the community into one place, but more often than not I see communities creating a single channel on the primary matrix.org server, and "expand" by adding more channels, IRC style.

As an IRC replacement, I think it's perfect. But if you are expecting something more similar to Discord in terms of functionality, you'll likely be looking elsewhere. Stoat is what I see most frequently touted, but I can't speak to it personally.

The friends list is inconsequential. It's for sending private messages to people you already know and met from a Discord server. Long running group chats are an aberration, people just start up micro-discords instead.

And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.

However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.

> Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's

More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.

There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.

You can still find the essence of community on the traditional internet in places like invite-only discords, smaller mastodon instances, traditional forums, and spaces similar to Lobsters and Tildes.

...and not on Hacker News. Too many pseudo-anonymous jerks, too many throwaways, too much faith placed in gamified moderation tools.