Back in the 90s early 00s the internet made us mesh together because each one of us there was a specific person. We had forum signatures and every single post was clearly made by a person, for a person.
Then social media took over and relegated every single person into a tiny unidentifiable avatar next to a non-prominent name, not unlike NPCs in CRPGs.
In turn this has been exploited by the powers that be to ensure the social glue gets even weaker: a society barely held together won't revolt. There's only one thing left to do: productivity, productivity, productivity.
The political opponent is no longer a person. Just a nameless, faceless NPC (personifying everything that's wrong) spawned there to be defeated and collect their social loot tokens.
But I might just be an old fart rambling about the good, old days.
Go on Discord. People have usernames, avatars. Discord Profile Bios are just as unique as forum signatures.
Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.
Maybe you should join better servers. I'll also add that this was common back in the forum days too. Most admins would just... admin the site.
> Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
Wrong on both counts.
> I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same.
I did not present it as an "opposite to social media" - I presented it as a counter to the idea that we've lost the personality GP is talking about
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
In any case, I see no reason to believe any higher % of people paid any particular attention to forum signatures back in the day.
And running them was awful and drove the people who did it insane, mostly because you had to fight spambots.