more on discord

src/script.org

@@ -18,6 +18,24 @@ nowadays i'd have to add "generational" to that trigger list.
 meanwhile, someone had made an imgur bot that detects reposts, and then posts stats about how many times it's seen the image since the first time it saw it, and when it was posted with better quality. you can measure how dumb an imgurian is by how virulent his hatred for repost bot is.
 Like i say, they were really growing to love reposts. rather than being the technology that enables the sharing of memes, it degraded into a place for people to socialize through posting.
 I regret being too lazy or depressed or whatever to have actually written the damn thing. Alas, what could have been.
+** rivals
+unlike discord themselves, i am not under the impression that i'm the first person to write a chatbot. shtikbot has some friendly competition.
+*** serybot
+the slightly less bad solution to the viewer seller bot problem is SeryBot, made by.. you guessed it, sery. it's his do-everything twitch bot, as one does, but you'll see serybot everywhere, providing its 2 core features:
+1) ban *that particular* spambot when it shows up
+2) condescendingly tell viewers to not bitch about the ads
+it also helps mislead twitch viewers: whenever you say "good bot", sery bot responds, under the assumption you're talking to him. some twitchists seem to think serybot is the only bot. i swear i should do a video that just explains to people, for the millionth time, nightbot is not automod.
+*** nightbot
+speaking of nightbot.. i used to like nightbot.
+- to date, it's the only other 2-platform bot i've ever seen.
+- it has the one, fairly simple feature that comprises the vast majority of what a given twitch streamer needs: arbitrary commands. by custom, instead of a slash, you use an exclamation point. you pick the prompt. you can set security on the commands, to have mods-only commands, and so on. the paradigm is common enough that you'll occasionally see randos mystified that a streamer hasn't set up a particular command.
+- link permits are a great concept. twitch itself will let you either fully allow or fully block links. nightbot has the ability to delete links if it sees them, and allow you to tell it to permit a person to post a link. that's Great.
+- you can give your mods partial ability to configure nightbot for you!
+however, nightbot is dead to me. as the web gets more and more overrun by charlatans, the concept of security is degrading.
+at some point, nightbot switched to an authorization model that demands way, *way* too many permissions. presumably it /can/ do everything in the twitch API, so it /might/ need any or all of those permissions at some point. but if i just want to log into mod view to see someone else's nightbot command list, nightbot demands that i let it take moderator actions on my behalf, in channels i moderate, *as me*. unacceptable.
+*** discord bots
+the discord bot ecosystem actually grew to a pretty good state, before stagnating. there's a slew of do-everything bots, naturally. but there's a lot of narrow-purpose bots, which is great. most twitchists have a discord guild as a given, so you'll see streamcord around a lot. I find streamcord is frustratingly slow so i just use a webhook and a python script.
+one bot i genuinely really like is timezone buddy. users tell it their timezone, and when the bot sees a time mentioned, it reacts with a clock. if you react with a clock, it dms you the time translated for you. very cool! naturally that's a direct contradiction of discord's insistence on bots being less bot-like.
 ** predecessor - magnificent charamote
 remember TwitchPlaysPokemon? quick tangent if you don't: in 2014, an anonymous Australian programmer hooked up an emulator playing pokemon red to a twitch stream, and a bot that listened to chat to translate that into input. it was incredible. unprecedented, and only possible with that level of realtime interaction and livestreaming.
 twitch, the company, didn't do shit to make that happen. But they /desparately/ want to recapture that good fortune. So how can they differentiate themselves from all the other services that could be summarized as "internet panhandling, but it's a hot girl"? (...sometimes)?
@@ -130,41 +148,40 @@ Discord has been pushing developers to start developing games that exist within
 after all of that, 2023 was inflicted on us all, so discord made their first chatbot, claude. all prior bots had their tag of "bot" changed to "app", and claude was given the tag "AI". Then it was forced into servers.
 Claude, in how many servers, just hooked up your chat messages to some LLM. nothing else.
 [squidward going "FUTURE. FUTURE."]
+like any tech company, discord is not run by technology people, it's run by businessmen. It's never about making a thing that people use, it's about telling investors you're making a new thing that /more/ people are going to /start/ using.
+always line go up.
+if you have the power to make decisions in society, you're a soulless business husk - you don't know anything about the technology, you just come up with business features to nail on the front.
 where's that scrumble your wumpus meme?
 [must find that meme about "scrumble your wumpus"]
-discord is happy to say "use an app bro, c'mon use an app". so if you go to the attachments tab, you'll see that they caught up to Matrix by introducing built-in polls... but it's hidden behind "USE AN APP"
+that's why discord doesn't like chat bots - that makes them just a communication channel. they put actual effort into being your one-stop shop for all human experience.
+and how do you get other people to build that level of market dominance for you? push "apps".
+discord is constantly saying "use an app bro, c'mon use an app". so if you go to the attachments tab, you'll see that they caught up to Matrix by introducing built-in polls... but it's hidden behind "USE AN APP".
+At some point they introduced the ability for you to insert a timestamp, which localizes for you. However, they never implemented a native slash command to make it work - they leave that to unpaid external developers; check out sesh.fyi.
 discord wants you to use stickers... which are just paid gifs. i guess they saw everyone dunking on NFTs and said "but no one can right-click /our/ apes"?
 discord introduced "orbs", the old "store credit" model.  
-
 meanwhile, as for people making features that range from equally as useless as all that to arguably actually useful...
 I'm like 10% sure it used to be possible to invite a bot to a group chat.
 i'm definitely sure the file size limit has always been described as 10MB, but at least for my bot it's actually 8MB. i'm pretty sure if the bot asks discord what its attachment limit is, discord tells it 10MB.
 over time it became a much more successful company, and therefore worse and worse. They allowed bots, but the goal was always for a bot to be a way for /you/ to improve /their/ product. that's why they've been hellbent on slash commands the whole time - if it's successful enough, you have to justify to discord why your chatbot should be allowed to chat on the chat platform you're working on.
 There's a discord developers discord - and the most common phrase on it is "that's not a valid use case for message reading. just use slash commands." now don't get me wrong, slash commands are a very cool extension, for savvy users. but if you're tech savvy, you don't like discord.
+**** the ID thing
+you know the whole age gate thing, right? Ok, so discord is not something your boss forces you to use (e.g., MS Teams), therefore people think "it's inherently unprofessional, it's for kids".
+which means now the wealthy class can command the legal class to legislate, because they can preface with "won't someone please think of the children".
+so we're seeing meta (i.e., facebook) bribing government. Not only to keep their surveillance capitalism legal, but to begin the process of the opposite; making it mandatory.
+discord, of course, is a company. and therefore, what they do is reap as much user data as possible, and sell it as much as possible. How can discord make this data more valuable to the kind of advertisers (or just private stalkers) who would want to buy it?
+by specifying; "this person here is probably a minor. this person here definitely isn't."
+and they sweeten the deal; by forcing /adults/ to verify "to protect the children", a buyer looking for identification data on minors also gets plausible deniability that that's what they're looking to buy.
+after all, not selling data this way would be less profitable, so obviously they will do the more profitable thing.
+...just remember all of that the next time someone says that for some arbitrary reason we can't deem corporations either evil or good.
 *** twitch
 i talked about the madness of the twitch API. Fortunately, GLORIOUSLY, the chat part has been mostly compliant with RFC1459 and IRCv3 - so for shtikbot, intending to be /its own bot/, rather than /a twitch bot/, theoretically everything could be done through that.
 Great. That was all that was ever needed. /however/, that was the E2 phase. Twitch is moving forward to [[https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/deprecation-of-chat-commands-through-irc/40486][Extinguish]]. Now ok, fine, they had to wrangle their several different APIs into one, and as long as they're on a roll with that, might as well finish what you started. so that's tolerable. what's inexcusable is how brazenly they abuse a stupidly conception of security.
-for a long long time, twitch has been plagued by bots trying to sell viewers. Honestly, the fact that twitch *cannot* seem to fix that problem makes me think maybe bot viewers would fool twitch's system.
+for a long long time, twitch has been plagued by bots trying to sell viewers. Honestly, the fact that twitch *cannot* seem to fix that problem makes me think maybe bot viewers /would/ fool twitch's system. presumably you'd still lose money.
 twitch's solution is to tell streamers to just demand that all your chatters surrender their cellphone number. it's for security, so if anyone utters an objection, they're suspicious.
+//TODO: more on twitch, the platform. where's the article woolie mentioned a while ago where twitch describes their streamers as sharecroppers? he has been known to horribly misremember things in the past this way.
+*** people
+//TODO: above talk about platforms, down here talk about "well i'm not going off platform"
 Now, us twitch viewers aren't /quite/ as dumb as imgurians, but i'm pretty sure 95% of twitchists actually believe that giving more data to twitch does in fact increase their security.
-** rivals
-*** serybot
-the slightly less bad solution to the viewer seller bot problem is SeryBot, made by.. you guessed it, sery. it's his do-everything twitch bot, as one does, but you'll see serybot everywhere, providing its 2 core features:
-1) ban *that particular* spambot when it shows up
-2) condescendingly tell viewers to not bitch about the ads
-it also helps mislead twitch viewers: whenever you say "good bot", sery bot responds, under the assumption you're talking to him. twitchists seem to think serybot is the only bot. i swear i should do a video that just explains to people, for the millionth time, nightbot is not automod.
-*** nightbot
-speaking of nightbot.. i used to like nightbot.
-- to date, it's the only other 2-platform bot i've ever seen.
-- it has the one, fairly simple feature that comprises the vast majority of what a given twitch streamer needs: arbitrary commands. by custom, instead of a slash, you use an exclamation point. you pick the prompt. you can set security on the commands, to have mods-only commands, and so on.
-- link permits are a great concept. twitch itself will let you either fully allow or fully block links. nightbot has the ability to delete links if it sees them, and allow you to tell it to permit a person to post a link. now that's amazing.
-- you can give your mods partial ability to configure nightbot for you!
-however, nightbot is dead to me. as the web gets more and more overrun by charlatans, the concept of security is degrading.
-at some point, nightbot switched to an authorization model that demands way, *way* too many permissions. presumably it /can/ do everything in the twitch API, so it /might/ need any or all of those permissions at some point. but if i just want to log into mod view to see someone else's nightbot command list, nightbot demands that i let it take moderator actions on my behalf, in channels i moderate, *as me*.
-unacceptable.
-*** discord bots
-the discord bot ecosystem actually grew to a pretty good state, before stagnating. there's a slew of do-everything bots, naturally. but there's a lot of narrow-purpose bots, which is great. most twitchists have a discord guild as a given, so you'll see streamcord around a lot. I find streamcord is frustratingly slow so i just use a webhook and a python script.
-one bot i genuinely really like is timezone buddy. users tell it their timezone, and when the bot sees a time mentioned, it reacts with a clock. if you react with a clock, it dms you the time translated for you. very cool! naturally that's a direct contradiction of discord's insistence on bots being less bot-like.
 ** end
 i figured i'd give a whack to debugging the issue where shtikbot can't join twitch channels. we summon it, and then.. it doesn't join? let's see... the message we get back is that /my/ channel is requiring users to submit to surveillance capitalism. absolutely disgusting how often platforms like to shift blame to their serfs, let me just double-check... yep, i have that setting on minimum security... let's bring out the web interface for that account...
 there's some kind of mark on shtikbot's account.