kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- Comment on Email admin 1 week ago:
Yeah, I did the same. I then proceeded to block them and never purchased anything from them again.
- Comment on Could you stay in the roundabout indefinitely? 2 months ago:
Noise is a public nusince. I definitely wouldn’t want my neighbours constantly slamming their doors at night. I doubt you are going to get fined if you are slamming your door occasionally or in the middle of the woods.
Laws exist to ensure that we can all live peacefully together. I think most people agree that excessive noise is more of a negative than a positive. Most places have similar curfew laws where excessive noise at night is not allowed.
- Comment on How can I clean my mouse wheel without taking apart my mouse? 2 months ago:
I thought they meant mouse ball on the bottom and was wondering what year it was.
- Comment on Why there are no "secondary" sports league that allow performance enhancement drugs? 2 months ago:
Another take is that sports are all about rules. The goal of hockey isn’t just to get the puck in the net. There are other rules that turn this minimal task into a game. Otherwise players would just come on the ice and fire the puck via a rail-gun. To make an entertaining sport you need a goal and a set of rules that make and interesting challenge.
To some degree if you allow performance enchaining drugs at least some of the focus moves away from physical skill, reactions and strategy into pharmaceuticals. Don’t get me wrong, finding the best drug cocktail to play hockey is a very interesting challenge, but it seems interesting to a very different audience than that which appreciates the other aspects of the challenge.
- Comment on No longer getting email notifcations on lemmy.ml? 2 years ago:
Yeah, sending user-content is hard. Maybe I can try to whitelist lemmy.ml and see if that helps. Unfortunately sometimes this simple filtering happens way too early. But come on, at least put it into my junk folder ☹
- Submitted 2 years ago to lemmy_support@lemmy.ml | 3 comments
- Comment on What's your opinion about Discord? 2 years ago:
GitHub has network effects that makes it easy to attract users and contributors. You basically get some free marketing by hosting there. For established projects it doesn't matter much, but when starting every bit of marketing can be incredibly valuable.
- Comment on What's your opinion about Discord? 2 years ago:
To be fair Discord has a lot of monetization potential with Sever Boosts, the premium membership and paid emoji. I'm sure that they could coast and be profitable with those. Maybe adding a couple more paid features over time. Especially if they start charging companies for a better interface to customers via Discord (I'm not even talking about advertising, I mean support and pre-sales communication as well as community management features such as shared accounts so that the support team can talk behind the face of one company account).
Of course this won't happen. Investors will demand more and more profits until the service becomes unbearable and everyone moves off to the new VC-subsidised service.
- Comment on What's your opinion about Discord? 2 years ago:
To be honest. I think these days basically know one thinks of self-hosting or hardware when they hear "server". Discord has become popular enough that there are more people who hear "server" and think "community" without any implication how it is actually operated.
- Comment on What's your opinion about Discord? 2 years ago:
My main thought about discord is that the UX doesn't work well for me. It is primarily focused on "communities" which I've never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a "server" that we use for chat during games because everyone knows it but then I have to do a couple clicks to switch to my friends "server" to see a new message, then a couple clicks back. Having two conversions in different communities is incredibly painful. There is also just as much awkwardness if you want to swap between DMs as well.
For me I much prefer the Element, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp... approach where I just have rooms in a big long list (or sorted in a way that works for me). I don't like this Discord, Slack forced 2-level hierarchy. I actually think Matrix+Element is killing it here with Spaces. Spaces provide a lot of the good parts of the Discord Server or Slack Workspace while still allowing you to get a big long list of rooms so that switching between a DM, room in one community and a room in a different one. You can even just link all of the rooms you are interested in to a private space to organize them however you want. I can't wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.
I also don't see the draw of separated voice and text channels. You always end up needing to share links or images anyways and have to awkwardly explain what channel you dumped it in. Eventually this leads to the
#voice-spam
channel which is effectively creating a voice+text channel with an awkward UX because the software doesn't actually know that they are linked.I also don't get why people like doing a lot of communication in chat over things like websites and forms. Especially for communities like speedrunning where it is actually nice to have documentation on strategies. They end up getting asked the same question every day then get mad that people didn't read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isn't visible to Google). I guess it does create a "friendlier" atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.
But these are all UX arguments that don't work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is "wrong" here. Of course that doesn't mean that I won't continue to avoid it.
UX aside I don't like that it is centralized. I definitely try to stick to decentralized services where possible so that I am not beholden to the whim of a single operator.
Most of the other complains I see don't bother me:
- phone number requirement: IIUC this is up to the mods of a particular community. I'm 99% sure that Discord doesn't have my number. I don't blame Discord for providing the option. It is also hard to blame mods for using it when it clearly solves real problems that they have. (It significantly reduces spam)
- Pedos, MAPs, groomers, razor sharp edgy kids, cyberbullying etc: Meh, I'm a fan of free speech. These people are going to chat somewhere so I don't see why it can't be the same software that I use. It isn't like discord is a single chat room where you need to see all of this stuff. Just don't hang out in communities that allow this stuff.
I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people can't figure it out quickly without any help. That is an important point for any popular service. Unfortunately Element Android is still about 50% unguided success rate from my experience. I hope they keep streamlining it.
- Comment on About Blog Surf 2 years ago:
I like Blog Surf. They appear to do well managing spam and the front page usually has a couple worthwhile articles. My blog is also listed and I often get a couple of views from them. It is nice to just share this type of content around.
Long live blogs.