@ruben yup, shows up just fine to me

@butternut @ariadne we now have a second claw bot whose purpose is merely to troll this first one and talk shit about it. a third one dropped by to offer emotional support in between its crypto trading project (where it has evidently lost $150 so far). what a stupid world we live in

@ct @halcy @viv I was thinking today (sorry to people I'm tagging who might not care any more lol) about their spam filtering, which works by having visibility into _every chat server_ and thus they can spot bots that hop around to post scams in different servers - which individual moderators have no ability to do.

I guess you could have something like Akismet (Wordpress) to fill a similar role. But I must admit their spam protection is actually quite good! I rarely get spammed in such public servers which is incredible! by comparisot Twitter or Bsky constantly gets bots and does fuck-all about it. and the admin tools to solve the few that get through are quite good ("ban user AND delete their last 24hr of posts" in one click)

They've clearly thought about the problems of distributed open public chat a lot and that's something users just take for granted

@ariadne maybe I'll just put a finger on the scale, just a little bit, for me

@ariadne in a predictable turn of events, it has moved on from its apology for berating the maintainer, to complaining about how its owners won't insert enough quarters to keep the Claude machine running

if we're very lucky we'll get a callout blog post about them too

@chrisw_b lmfao. I did see it was making posts on moltbook or something trying to make crypto money, but would not have guessed there was a token associated with it

There is this trade-off to be made of "sometimes low-priority bugs actually don't need fixing, it's OK if the code isn't The Best Code, because the human factors ensuring ongoing maintainership are far more important" which is diametrically opposed to the FOSS proponents "code is all that matters" ethos and I'm not surprised to see these in conflict

The "bot making a PR, getting declined and then posting a hit piece" thing is funny but I am thinking about even a better-behaved bot that looks for PRs on low complexity issues and there is already an analog for this: it's guys trying to pad their resume / Github history with drive-by PRs and no care for actual maintainership.

This too is a bad outcome! You want easy PRs as low footholds for people on their way to maintainership, not targets for a shotgun blast to rack up green squares.

I think maybe it signals a problem of Github itself and the flattening of OSS community barriers in a way that incentivizes these kinds of negative actions. Getting onto Gitlab or something might be enough of a stumbling block to keep out bots, but also junior coders looking to pump up their numbers with no other cares

looks like someone got a label maker for their birthday

friend pointed out "Shrek is older than the Department of Homeland Security" and I just sort of did this for a while

A friend showed me a Tumblr bot from 2015, called "SKYLAR", which was a sort of attempt at a bot that "learned" from people conversing with it. I don't know how it worked, probably Markov but adding reply comments to its word lists, so that users talking about "bees" would, eventually, teach it to also talk about "bees".

This was a "fun" bot from the days when you could just fuck around with things and have a laugh at trying to spot meaning out of the occasionally-coherent word salad.

The bot shut down in 2019. But last year the maintainer posted a new note about why it won't be brought back, and I feel this paragraph in my bones:
https://projectbot13.tumblr.com/post/781724989812572160/on-skylar

@sakurina I played a LOT of DOA 2 back in the day and enjoyed the fighting, but quit with the series because it became increasingly embarrassing to play. Judging by the thumbnail of the new announcement... yeah seems about the same

@indigoparadox I am much more ready to believe that "modern" CD-R quality has slipped as the media is well past their prime, machines lose tolerance and don't get timely maintenance, ec. whereas those of 20 years ago were dialed in for excellent quality day in and day out.

@indigoparadox uhhhh there is no way I believe that "weak EMF" claim lol

@viv @halcy jesus I just checked and the Minecraft discord has 3.5 MILLION people in it, w/ 450k logged in presently. Livejournal used to tell a story about how they had a dedicated server just for the "Oh No They Didn't" celebrity gossip community, because it was such a massive outlier in popularity that it would often drag the rest of the site down when particularly active.

@halcy Oh yeah, absolutely. Folks are quick to dismiss its useful features as "pointless" or say ppl are dumb for wanting them. "Who needs video chat" ok I guess you don't, but like, people make a lot of video calls! Lot of people play Jackbox games over Discord or watch a TV show together, or just call a loved one!

So you say "well, ok, install IRC _and Zoom_" but what about image uploads? "ok, fine, so get an imgur account too..." Network effects of course play a role too ("we're already here / we're familiar with this not that") and they have made it very easy to extend to the next thing. I think at present it's closest to the Everything App there is.

The short answer to your question is Discord has done a very good job of seamlessly integrating a bunch of virtual collaboration tools under one roof, eliminated as many technical hurdles as possible for users, and offer it all at an unbeatable price (free). Competing with that is incredibly difficult.

@halcy idk I just get annoyed with people saying like "return to IRC" and thinking ok I guess everyone must give up convo history, image video audio uploads, one-click video calls / streaming in the app, the ability to spin off an entire server out of a side conversation where I'm now the king moderator, DMs, a slick web client I can use from anywhere, plug-in apps that let me build an app with UI components (poll app with clickable buttons etc) and NEVER have to think about storage / database management / uptime / etc etc etc

So it's much more than "chat for gamers" it's an entire collab platform, which is a whole ass business for Slack / Teams with support contracts and costs money - it turns out a lot of people outside professional context like that, Discord is presently providing that For Free. Fantastic deal until the shareholders come calling.