Does it really make a sound?
Recently, the Mario Kart Wii players page officially stopped accepting submissions through the designated "Time Submission" thread on the forum. You can now only submit times through the Discord. As someone who is not apart of said server, it effectively walls me out of submitting times to the Player's Page and renders the website nothing more than a formality. This got me thinking to all of the previous instances in which this has occurred over the years; it's far from the first time this has happened to me, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
When I last played Ro-Football, I essentially gave up on competitive play since it was illegal to play in leagues if you weren't in the league's Discord server. Funnily enough, my last time actually playing in the OFL was technically illegal and against the rules because I wasn't in the server. Nobody noticed though. Well, besides our team's head coach whom had no issue with it because of how generally, everyone joined without much issue. So he knew nobody would find out anyways in all likelihood. In the worst scenario in which they did somehow find out, we had been mathematically elminated from the playoffs by that time so a forfeit wouldn't have mattered. Ended up winning the final game but coming up 1 game short, sad stuff. But back to the topic at hand, you're probably thinking I sound like a prude. I mean, it's just a public server after all.
"Dude you only have to join it and never look at it again!" or "Dude you only have to make an account, you don't have to post with it!"
Is a very common sentiment that I received from many friends and people attempting to recruit me into leagues in the past. Yet even with this in mind, I still cannot bring myself to do it in most cases. To have my tag available to so many eyes, to have whatever links I might have on my profile easily accessed by people in the community whom I don't want accessing them, all of it doesn't sit quite right with me. These are merely vague feelings of unease though, not the main reason why.
On a forum I browse, I read a post where someone coined the term "Discord sludge". I think that's the best way I've ever heard it described. All large Discord servers feel the exact same. You'll have the same #memes channel where people repost the same images that are being posted in every other Discord server. In fact, you have the same channels in general. #general, #gaming, #anime, #tv-shows, the channel for typing while in VC, #sports, #bot-commands, the literature channel that nobody ever posts in, the shitposting or "off topic" channel which ends up just being mindless spam, did I miss any? You have the same ironic sense of humor, that witty-all-lowercase zinger style of typing which is masked by 20 layers of irony. Same bots. Same channels. Same culture. It's all the same save for whatever the server primarily focuses on, which in the end is pretty much just window dressing for the sludge itself.
Not only are large Discord servers homogenized to a sickening degree, they carry with them a sense of mediocrity. This stems from the fact that these servers have to appeal to as many sensibilities as they can. I think this plays no small part of where the sludge originates from in the first place. The rules are generally the same. You can't say anything that offends X or Y, but then this other thing that offends Z is okay. It's all totally arbitrary where the lines are drawn so it ends up coming down to the personal whims of the mods.
Furthermore, if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting with Discord moderators you know they'll just ban you regardless of the rules if they happened to wake up that day with morning wood. I just find everything about these communities detestable to the highest degree. Due to their insular nature, they tend to profilierate circlejerks and echochambers. Even if the server is officially public, if you join and happen to interrupt the regulars or if your "vibes" are off you'll be ostracized or muted usually.
"So what's your point? Public discord servers bad? What does this have to do with the above point of just joining or making an account and ignoring it?"
I'm getting to it. In essence, while these gripes are apart of why I am so naturally resistant to joining these places, there's one more that stands above the rest for me. That being how we've collectively decided to just... not have websites anymore. Nope. Run it all through the Discord server. How many people do you think will go out of their way to join a server for some niche interest? It's a far smaller amount than the ones who will view it on publicly accessible platforms that don't require an account, such as a dedicated website or even other places like YouTube.
It's insane to me that you have video game communities comprised of people who are genuinely the best in the world at what they do, yet if you aren't in that server they basically don't exist at all. Every so often when I'm watching a Mario Kart Wii Youtube vid I'll hear the commentator go, "Oh yeah this guy's one of the best online players in the world btw!" and it's so jarring because I've never even seen their name before. These people have mastered a skill, rather it's the Mario Kart Wii example for online play or the Ro-Football example for OFL, and they receive no notoriety or attention for it outside of these small, insular groups. They have no presence outside of Discord, they may as well not exist at all outside of them.
What happens if an admin wakes up with ill intent one day and just nukes the server? Does that mean that the rankings cease to exist and the history all goes up in flames? After all, you can't back up a Discord server. When something is gone on Discord, it's gone. This is especially troublesome with the trend of people hosting mods through servers.
For an example, CFB revamped is a mod for NCAA 14 which became very popular. You had YouTubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers playing with it. These YouTubers make up the majority of how people experience NCAA 14 in the current year and give the game far more publicity than it'd have otherwise. Yet many of them, even the ones who were apart of the servers because of how nightmarish they are to navigate, would be unaware of submods that further improved the gameplay.
For NCAA 14 specifically, there was an AI mod that made the CPU make more intelligent decisions. This made the game significantly harder and more realistic, and it was painful to watch these YouTubers playing without it abusing the AI because they had no idea it existed. If even the YouTubers who were IN THE SERVER!!! didn't know about it... the ones who spend hours editing their videos and who have very nerdy passion for the game mind you, how many of the people who watched those videos did? A vanishingly small number, to be sure.
Hell, you even have breaking news locked behind X. A while ago, I was put under a tornado warning. The only place I could find anything about this warning was on X, and I couldn't view it since I don't have an account. I also cut the cord long ago, so I was unable to tune into the news. Fortunately nothing happened that day and I later discovered that my local news has a stream online that I've used since then whenever an emergency alert comes up. But what about people who don't have a news station that does that? Do they just have to stay in shelter the entire time during a tornado warning (which can last hours), having no idea if it's coming or not?
I just find it all very regrettable. You have fantastic mods for games that most people will never use because they're locked behind Discord. You have incredibly talented players pulling off one of a kind achievements that most people will never be aware of unless they're uploaded to YouTube. This also hurts the players, who don't receive the notoriety that they deserve. The servergoers sacrificing so many potential benefits for the sake of a little more convenience, and it also screws over the people who aren't in them that won't be able to know thanks to their actions. It's all around a losing proposition that's somehow become normalized because of the tumor that is internet consolidation. A pitiful reflection on the modern world as a whole.
When these communities die, rather it's in 5 years or 30 years, there will be no internet archive-equivalent for them. These mods, these achievements, the history of these communities, these moments in time, they will be lost for good and become nothing but memories. In what can only be described as the ultimate irony, it will be the artists behind these things who are at fault for it. Public communities can be archived, are more accessible, and are also usually more friendly owing to their nature of being able to be discovered by anyone.
As such I can only express my utmost disappointment at seeing the Mario Kart Wii scene become exclusive to Discord servers after 16 years of tenure as a public-facing community. I'd have loved to continued submitting my times to the players page, but now I guess I'll have to get to work on making a timesheet here on my website instead.