Thinking Out Loud
If you want to buy a grapefruit spoon with an inlaid mother of pearl handle or 25Kg of exotic aquarium gravel, then a simple Google search (other search engines are available) will yield a multitude of results. However, the search engine does not fare so well with finding online communities. Many years ago I joined The LAMB (Large Association of Movie Blogs), which at the time claimed to be the world's largest movie blog directory/community. It was a useful website. From what I can see, this site is now partially dormant. New reviews are being posted but the directory service of other movie related websites seems unavailable. Hence I am looking for a comparable online community where I can share my film reviews and read other peoples. Trying to find one is proving quite difficult.
Policing Our Online Communities
It would appear that Discord has a toxicity problem. No, I’m not at all surprised either. Online social platforms attract such issues by their very nature. Discord is far from unique in this respect and is simply the latest online service to join an ever growing list of social platforms to become a hotbed of iniquity. However, I do applaud them for their transparency. They regularly publish reports on the “state” of their service and they don’t try to hide the problem. In fact to combat the problem Discord have recently acquired Sentropy Technologies, who have developed an AI designed to combat toxic behaviour with its “data-driven moderation tools”. Naturally all parties have high hopes that they can tackle the issue. I, on the other hand, do not. Because technology alone is not the solution to the problem. It never is. Has facial recognition software, CCTV and biometric passports solved all the problems that they were supposed to? No they have not.