yeah it’s another one of these i’m sorry

(this time in particular is inspired by the pokerogue kerfuffle)

obviously i’m not saying that transphobia is inherent to the mechanics of shitty chat apps and whatnot. but seeing that in this situation in particular, the mess was exacerbated by promoting two “long-standing members of the community” to be mods, it highlights one of the main weaknesses of discord as a hub of information: it is fucking impossible to search for it. thus it creates this outsized importance on people whose qualifications are just: they’ve been there since the beginning, and thus are able to answer questions and provide information. stuff that should’ve been written on sticky threads or faq pages. it is impossible to learn any of it without joining the chat and having to ask for it.

a mode of internet community-creation that is anathema to “lurk moar” is just no good, isn’t it? at this point a subreddit would be better. i’m rather unplugged from almost all stuff (jstpst is genuinely my “main” social media right now) so i’d like to believe that they keep on creating discord servers because they’ve weighed the available options and decided that this is the best one, but is the inertia of “everyone’s already there” too hard and heavy after all?

(with regard to the pokerogue discord in particular: i don’t play pokerogue nor use discord, so i’m saying this as a pure bystander, but: at this point it’s a net positive to nuke the server, right? at least like that we’ll stop fucking torturing volunteer mods trying to wrangle this monstrosity. i don’t even want to think about the job that they’re having to do.)