tylerdaneDiscord: A case study in performance optimization
https://newsletter.fullstack.zip/p/discord-a-case-study-in-performance
Honest question, does anyone appreciate these “case studies”? It seems like they’re always based on some random quote and they go way in detail on what the various technologies are and how they might possibly apply to the subject in question, but with almost no real insight besides “I think this is how it might work”. What kind of case study is that?! If you don’t have real examples how is this better than just presenting the original source for the quote and Wikipedia links to the various technical terms?
>Honest question, does anyone appreciate these “case studies”?
I, for one, do not.
But great that we get into some guy's ideation about how Discord is possibly cool, while it's undergoing a major scandal related to ties to Peter Thiel's surveillance company, Palantir, in the botched rollout of age verification[1].
My personal guess is that appearance of articles that paint Discord in a positive light on this forum (and lack substance otherwise) is simply PR.
[1] https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-...
Their comment is supremely relevant. The timing is not a coincidence and it tastes awful
You think this post was written because of the Discord stuff in the news?
>You think this post was written because of the Discord stuff in the news?
What a preposterously audacious proposition: to think that an article that describes Discord as a "a finely-tuned system that delivers speed, scale, and reliability" (that's a goddamn chat app, glorified IRC) and casts Discord in good light, written while Discord is experiencing a major scandal, might not be entirely unrelated to the scandal.
More so when the said article offers no concrete details about Discord, instead wildly extrapolating from a few quotes from executives, making assumptions, and talking about what could have been done, all in a way that might as well have been ChatGPT's output.
Yeah, we think that shifting the focus from "Discord stuff in the news" (which is: forcing ID verification and face scans while having connections to Peter Thiel's surveillance business), something that benefits both Discord and Thiel, is quite a likely reason for glowing technical articles about Discord taking off on HN all of a sudden.
I think it’s a low quality post but I’m not super convinced it really has anything to do with Discord’s ID verification thing, or even if it does, it seems really bad at doing this? Like I said before I think there is barely any content here and meanwhile everyone and their mother is discussing the policy they rolled out globally. At least on this site at least, it’s basically the most interesting news this week that isn’t AI.