[Ninety-Six]

Maybe I've just looked at the exact wrong/correct times, but I've only seen this number of guests continue to grow. They linger on threads and never seem to move off. This includes dead hours.



I may just be paranoid but this seems unnatural to me and looks like something could be breaking.

[Dr.Panico]

It could be bots, or just a glitch in the counter.

Knowing modern Internet, it's most likely the former.

[Ninety-Six]

Dr.Panico, on 18 February 2026 - 07:32 AM, said:

It could be bots, or just a glitch in the counter.

Knowing modern Internet, it's most likely the former.

But why so many all of a sudden? This isn't exactly the most active forum out there anymore.

[Reaper_Man]

I've been seeing this on the sites/forums that I run (some that are even more dead than this place), it's mostly all AI related bots. Whether it's crawlers indexing pages, or someone asks ChatGPT how to write in CON and it spawns 1 billion AI agents all searching the forum simultaneously.

[Ninety-Six]

Reaper_Man, on 18 February 2026 - 12:34 PM, said:

I've been seeing this on the sites/forums that I run (some that are even more dead than this place), it's mostly all AI related bots. Whether it's crawlers indexing pages, or someone asks ChatGPT how to write in CON and it spawns 1 billion AI agents all searching the forum simultaneously.

Oh, I see.



so justified paranoia then

[Reaper_Man]

Not sure I understand what's paranoia about it. Bots and crawlers and spiders have always been a thing. The only thing that's changed here is the volume of them. I don't think there's any reason to assume something is breaking, you just likely never paid attention when it was 1 or 2 digit "guests", instead of 3 or 4.

[ck3D]

It is because Duke has been dead and so Proton's Techbots have been feeding off his corpse. Thankfully, it's 2026 and, for the past couple of years, our hero's body has been mostly G-Fuel, thus ensuring him a postmortem victory by shortcutting of the robot parts, poisoning of the organic parts, and suffocating mediocrity of the scenario.

[Ninety-Six]

Reaper_Man, on 20 February 2026 - 08:00 AM, said:

Not sure I understand what's paranoia about it. Bots and crawlers and spiders have always been a thing. The only thing that's changed here is the volume of them. I don't think there's any reason to assume something is breaking, you just likely never paid attention when it was 1 or 2 digit "guests", instead of 3 or 4.

I was half-joking with that "justified paranoia" comment. The half-serious part was not being particularly keen on having our posts harvested by AI. Indexers are one thing.

[NNC]

This forum is dead, everybody moved on to Discord (or moved on from Duke in general).

[DNS]

NNC, on 24 February 2026 - 04:57 AM, said:

This forum is dead, everybody moved on to Discord.

And how's that worked out?

https://www.pcmag.co...r-user-backlash

Why the sheep blindly capitulated and created accounts for such a shitty platform instead of rejecting the bullshit so that information would continue to remain public facing/searchable will forever be an illogical mystery.

[ck3D]

I would suppose it actually must be rather logical to explain, people go online looking for information also through feedback via interaction, and when the flow is as intense as it is on such platforms the brain gets constant dopamine bursts to the point where it can forget how to live without it. Unless you only use it for insider communication on projects (but that can be a gateway for the curious), it is so easy to turn into a doomscroller before you realize it and become as passive as caught in the flow. It doesn't really help that social media at large was marketed as the ideal platform for independents for a long time until it became common knowledge how user data was being sold and now years of your work you may have naively trusted to upload definitely stolen by AI and profiting some unknown entity.

[Reaper_Man]

Even ignoring all of the problems with Discord, specifically, as a company or platform: The real shame is that it seems the entire internet abandoned archival information sources like web forums to move to chat rooms, which are objectively the worst way to catalog and archive information, tutorials, etc. It's the same issue of moving from written guides to video guides for everything. The solution isn't "a better chat room company", it's moving off of chat rooms entirely.

[DNS]

ck3D, on 27 February 2026 - 04:25 AM, said:

I would suppose it actually must be rather logical to explain, people go online looking for information also through feedback via interaction, and when the flow is as intense as it is on such platforms the brain gets constant dopamine bursts to the point where it can forget how to live without it. Unless you only use it for insider communication on projects (but that can be a gateway for the curious), it is so easy to turn into a doomscroller before you realize it and become as passive as caught in the flow. It doesn't really help that social media at large was marketed as the ideal platform for independents for a long time until it became common knowledge how user data was being sold and now years of your work you may have naively trusted to upload definitely stolen by AI and profiting some unknown entity.

I don't buy that. Chat rooms which discord is just a glorified version of always coexisted along side forums (or message boards which they were initially called) since the inception of user accessible internet but served very different purposes. What changed is that when gen z came along they failed to understand where that line was and that information such as help/tutorials which were historically findable via a search engine no longer are because said information is now hidden behind a private wall of garbage like discord. My point is that the previous generations that knew better decided to follow and to such a blantantly stupid degree that basic shit like support is now hidden exclusively behind this wall. Now rather than being able to find the solution yourself, you have to go through the arduous and completely unnecessary process of creating an account while providing a phone number to a private entity so that you can ask the same question that's already been asked a thousand times. This has nothing to do with how the human race reacts to social media. Social media has always existed in one form or another. It has to do with the relatively new ideology that discord should be the inefficient default dumping ground for everything.

[DNS]

Reaper_Man, on 27 February 2026 - 06:42 AM, said:

Even ignoring all of the problems with Discord, specifically, as a company or platform: The real shame is that it seems the entire internet abandoned archival information sources like web forums to move to chat rooms, which are objectively the worst way to catalog and archive information, tutorials, etc. It's the same issue of moving from written guides to video guides for everything. The solution isn't "a better chat room company", it's moving off of chat rooms entirely.

Don't even get me started on videos. The monetization of youtube has created a clickbait cesspit where it's almost impossible to find specific information in a lot of cases because rather than creating a video title that explains what it's about, "creators" use sensationalist generic widely appealing crap for attention. Good for clicks that drive revenue but absolutely terrible for the longevity of preserving said information because no one has the time to sift through hundreds of hours of video footage to find what they are seeking or at minimum what part of the video it's in even if you happen to find the correct one.

[ck3D]

DNS, on 27 February 2026 - 08:15 AM, said:

I don't buy that. Chat rooms which discord is just a glorified version of always coexisted along side forums (or message boards which they were initially called) since the inception of user accessible internet but served very different purposes. What changed is that when gen z came along they failed to understand where that line was and that information such as help/tutorials which were historically findable via a search engine no longer are because said information is now hidden behind a private wall of garbage like discord. My point is that the previous generations that knew better decided to follow and to such a blantantly stupid degree that basic shit like support is now hidden exclusively behind this wall. Now rather than being able to find the solution yourself, you have to go through the arduous and completely unnecessary process of creating an account while providing a phone number to a private entity so that you can ask the same question that's already been asked a thousand times. This has nothing to do with how the human race reacts to social media. Social media has always existed in one form or another. It has to do with the relatively new ideology that discord should be the inefficient default dumping ground for everything.

The bridge (that's not for sale) you are missing between your original point and mine (but perhaps I failed to build it) is, while you call it mysterious why an entire generation suddenly seems to lack reason, I don't think that's innate but instead has to do with developing in a societal context where the same excessive and sometimes intrusive commercialization you decry in your next post about YouTube has progressively been sabotaging cognition and shaping compulsive taught behaviors by rewarding them, increasingly so throughout the past two decades. That doesn't just affect the given platforms but society as an organism, resulting in short-term thinkers and an environment where serious devotion to whatever craft that isn't immediately profitable makes one a laughing stock, and fleeting superficiality is celebrated. The things I observe used to not exist would be the current sized markets for user data banks (since we are on the topic of digital platforms), and number of eyes on potential ad space for the price of dwindling investment in quality of service. It is fine if you happen to disagree, I am not interested in arguing but from my perspective just see no mystery and so thought I would explain it.

Re: YT videos, if looking around for technical, Build-related info, you should be aware that false information also is a huge problem on that platform and you literally have channels with tens of thousands of followers downright inventing what they are on about (which is all the more fascinating that the topic isn't something abstract). Might as well be asking a Reddit rando, or the next person at the bus stop. The only two current channels with credibility in that regard on that platform would be High Treason's and oasiz/Max Y.'s.

[Dr.Panico]

Well I know I went to Discord because TerminX was posting first-hand prototype content there, and I didn't want to miss a thing.
Also Discord is more dynamic than the forums, for quick conversations at least, being a spiritual successor of the good ol' IRC. But yeah, for archival purposes and formal threads, it sucks.

We also have wikis, but these have their own share of problems as well. But, no matter where you go, it's all the same. Bots are taking over, privacy is becoming a thing of the past, and niche communites like ours are getting dragged out of the grid by corporate greed and government overreach.

The future looks so bright, you gotta need shades...

[DNS]

ck3D, on 27 February 2026 - 11:48 AM, said:

The bridge (that's not for sale) you are missing between your original point and mine (but perhaps I failed to build it) is, while you call it mysterious why an entire generation suddenly seems to lack reason, I don't think that's innate but instead has to do with developing in a societal context where the same excessive and sometimes intrusive commercialization you decry in your next post about YouTube has progressively been sabotaging cognition and shaping compulsive taught behaviors by rewarding them, increasingly so throughout the past two decades. That doesn't just affect the given platforms but society as an organism, resulting in short-term thinkers and an environment where serious devotion to whatever craft that isn't immediately profitable makes one a laughing stock, and fleeting superficiality is celebrated. The things I observe used to not exist would be the current sized markets for user data banks (since we are on the topic of digital platforms), and number of eyes on potential ad space for the price of dwindling investment in quality of service. It is fine if you happen to disagree, I am not interested in arguing but from my perspective just see no mystery and so thought I would explain it.

Re: YT videos, if looking around for technical, Build-related info, you should be aware that false information also is a huge problem on that platform and you literally have channels with tens of thousands of followers downright inventing what they are on about (which is all the more fascinating that the topic isn't something abstract). Might as well be asking a Reddit rando, or the next person at the bus stop. The only two current channels with credibility in that regard on that platform would be High Treason's and oasiz/Max Y.'s.

So what's the excuse for discord then? Are you saying it's not commercialized? It's a far more egregious example of commerciazation than backwoods forums like this one. Discord offers paid accounts for christ's sake. You also haven't explained why the sheep followed gen z onto the sinking ship to begin with rather than rejecting it and maintaining status quo which was far superior to the mess we have now.

Regarding youtube, this isn't just about the build engine. It's about nearly everything. Let's say that you're trying to find a review of a specific item, often it's difficult to even find it because of shitty clickbait titles like "OMG this monitor is amazing!" Instead of simply "*model name* monitor review". False information has also always been around. It was simply called bullshit and people were actually able to think critically to decipher the trash from reality in the past. Now "misinformation" as has been politically corrected has been made a scapegoat for censorship.

The bottom line is that every observable metric has been made worse by discord and monitization of youtube to a some what lesser extent because that website can be avoided. Discord in a lot of cases can't be anymore since basic things are now exclusive to that platform.

[ck3D]

I am not making excuses for the app nor for the model, hopefully it's apparent in my posts that I am not disagreeing with you in this thread (I find the nuance between an explanation and an excuse to be very important yet so commonly ignored; an explanation simply retraces the path, usually to critique it and not to justify it like an excuse would). Maybe that I'm not making a special case for Discord so much is what originally confused you because whilst it is one specific phenomenon that is emblematic of the times, really it is just one symptom of a larger scale trend (really the solution to mystery often is to uncrop) and so I am willing to throw most modern platforms under the same umbrella (it's probably subjective which platforms feel mandatory when really none of them are), not because it's all 'social media' but because they all stopped being social a long time ago and oriented the rewards.

Now the observation of older generations getting on board is good, I believe this more specific movement also can be explained (in a nutshell, would have at least in part to do with 'FOMO' being nothing modern per se but ancient survival instinct that is being exploited), perhaps with more difficulty since closer to complex-soup-of-individual level, but I'd rather not go there on a gaming website, especially if that would read like support for it.

Current public complaint (valid and far from just yours) the way I see it is, everybody hates to see the supposedly rich book of society being summed up to just a private catalog there is nothing left to learn from; now is it really so much of a mystery who/which generation has been doing it, surely it wouldn't be their products in the catalog.

[dnskill]

We all should post more often on the forums like the good 'ol days. It is rather sad that many threads remain dormant that were once so full of activity. Who knows, perhaps this will change over time. It seems things fluctuate here and there in terms of activity. That was already the case before Discord, but Discord has certainly amplified it. Personally, I much prefer the forum for usermap releases, mods, tutorials, discussions, etc. while Discord works more as a general chatroom. What really has bothered me most the past few years is the overwhelmingly doomer attitudes, and no not Doomer as in Doom fans, but doomer as in Debbie fucking downers always trying to shit on Duke. I know most of the time it's just people joking around, but even people I'd least expect are suddenly becoming critical of Duke in ways that really make me wonder why they've gone that route. I don't expect another Duke game, and quite honestly I don't care anymore. What I do care about is the legacy that I grew up with, and the community I've been with since 2010. So keep your head's up high and let's continue to push back against the AI bot uprising.

[DNS]

ck3D, on 27 February 2026 - 08:56 PM, said:

I am not making excuses for the app nor for the model, hopefully it's apparent in my posts that I am not disagreeing with you in this thread (I find the nuance between an explanation and an excuse to be very important yet so commonly ignored; an explanation simply retraces the path, usually to critique it and not to justify it like an excuse would). Maybe that I'm not making a special case for Discord so much is what originally confused you because whilst it is one specific phenomenon that is emblematic of the times, really it is just one symptom of a larger scale trend (really the solution to mystery often is to uncrop) and so I am willing to throw most modern platforms under the same umbrella (it's probably subjective which platforms feel mandatory when really none of them are), not because it's all 'social media' but because they all stopped being social a long time ago and oriented the rewards.

Now the observation of older generations getting on board is good, I believe this more specific movement also can be explained (in a nutshell, would have at least in part to do with 'FOMO' being nothing modern per se but ancient survival instinct that is being exploited), perhaps with more difficulty since closer to complex-soup-of-individual level, but I'd rather not go there on a gaming website, especially if that would read like support for it.

Current public complaint (valid and far from just yours) the way I see it is, everybody hates to see the supposedly rich book of society being summed up to just a private catalog there is nothing left to learn from; now is it really so much of a mystery who/which generation has been doing it, surely it wouldn't be their products in the catalog.

There is no confusion on my end. It seems to me that you're affirming what's taken place that's the problem: the blatant enshittification of the internet. Like I said everything is objectively worse now than it was a decade ago and it's indeed mandatory to use a platform like discord if for example you have a problem with a piece of software and discord is the only place the dev will provide support. Hopefully discord shooting itself in the foot, (yet again) will finally convince the sheep to stop supporting this nonsense. Although I highly doubt that even if a significant exodus took place that these users wouldn't simply move on to the next shiny flavor of the year walled garden rather than returning to the historically proven, tried and true format of an open forum while leaving the circle jerks in private else where. The problem of searching for information has gotten so bad that the same bots that everyone whines about are now similarly being relied upon to scrape for information via "large language models" that is then often hallucinated back to the user requesting said information in an outright wrong or extremely biased narrative. So no, it's not logical to be taken down a path of the dead internet theory coming to fruition which both examples of discord and youtube are symptoms of. I will never agree with that but apparently many don't have a problem cutting off their nose to spite their face.

[DNS]

dnskill, on 28 February 2026 - 02:03 PM, said:

What really has bothered me most the past few years is the overwhelmingly doomer attitudes, and no not Doomer as in Doom fans, but doomer as in Debbie fucking downers always trying to shit on Duke. I know most of the time it's just people joking around, but even people I'd least expect are suddenly becoming critical of Duke in ways that really make me wonder why they've gone that route. I don't expect another Duke game, and quite honestly I don't care anymore.

Wokism is a disease but is slowly (kicking and screaming) being cured as these puppets finally come to realize the consequences of their virtue signalling when they have to ultimately sleep in the beds they made for themselves. The fantasy utopia they claim to want to live in is no more than censorious communism where you're told what is "acceptable" and if you stray outside the extremely narrow box then you're instantly a bigot. Sure sounds like an "inclusive" environment to me. "Think like the echo chamber or else".

[ck3D]

DNS, on 28 February 2026 - 03:36 PM, said:

There is no confusion on my end. It seems to me that you're affirming what's taken place that's the problem: the blatant enshittification of the internet. Like I said everything is objectively worse now than it was a decade ago and it's indeed mandatory to use a platform like discord if for example you have a problem with a piece of software and discord is the only place the dev will provide support. Hopefully discord shooting itself in the foot, (yet again) will finally convince the sheep to stop supporting this nonsense. Although I highly doubt that even if a significant exodus took place that these users wouldn't simply move on to the next shiny flavor of the year walled garden rather than returning to the historically proven, tried and true format of an open forum while leaving the circle jerks in private else where. The problem of searching for information has gotten so bad that the same bots that everyone whines about are now similarly being relied upon to scrape for information via "large language models" that is then often hallucinated back to the user requesting said information in an outright wrong or extremely biased narrative. So no, it's not logical to be taken down a path of the dead internet theory coming to fruition which both examples of discord and youtube are symptoms of. I will never agree with that but apparently many don't have a problem cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Maybe my perspective has to do with living independently enough of tech that a lot of my equipment is at the very least a decade old (some of it two or three) and somehow I never had to go well out of my way into modernity for technical solutions, it would make sense those would be found in archives of websites too and not in present day Discord channels. But I have been observant of the phenomenon in different ways, for instance remarking that now it takes more private links or paywalls to directly interact with effervescent communities (but they are too effervescent for me), or it has become the go-to for project groups (out of pure convenience due to the responsivity, but it could be found elsewhere). An exodus definitely would just be crowds moving onto the next trendy platform which the Internet has seen happen countless times ever since the AIM/MSN / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / Reddit... timeline essentially is the one of the masses being led by the nose from one competitor to the other, it would take a solid breaking point in the paradigm for the train to derail.

If I were to try and really define the problem I would say it is a much larger picture thing, for instance that privatization of the internet and pollution of information one can find just as omnipresent offline with gentrification privatizing and transforming former public spaces swapping out local shops for chains, or in culture just considering the relative brief history of filmmaking, T.V. and Hollywood just to mention animated visual arts (could be any form, for instance music be it as a whole or sub-genres etc.), really anywhere you look follows the same pattern that is because this system is designed for most any successful enterprise to eventually sell out to increasingly bogus entities that will no longer take risks in creative situations nor ever optimize in a manner that would be at the user's advantage in technical ones, and then once the public can no longer be duped the next magician in line takes over. Also all of the marketing on top in order to keep the bait fresh is a disgusting use of money. The power of marketing in general really shouldn't be understated when it comes to finding just the right triggers in people to have them act irrationally, is what I was trying to say is nothing so mysterious that is happening (but it always is healthy to raise the question). It is anyone's liberty to buy it or not but just from my humble personal experience in various industries, I literally can no longer question that we live in a reality that a big part of already was decided for by some of the largest corporations ten to twenty years in advance.

[Mike Norvak]

Then threads like this prove why Discord is so popular.

[DNS]

Mike Norvak, on 04 March 2026 - 03:10 PM, said:

Then threads like this prove why Discord is so popular.

Your complacency is part of the problem but I guess expecting more out of some than the low IQ exchanges that makes up the majority of content on a platform where the users ae content with being data mined is asking too much.