I can only second what SilkSkull said. General communities without a "gimmick" are a dime a dozen. Does your social club have a certain demographic, a hobby or subculture or aesthetic you all have in common? Capitalize on that if you can. This will help you stand out.
Even this forum, as general-use as it is, I keep coming back to because it has a unique look and feel to it, and I like the community and its focus on the small/indie/oldrevival web, technology and expression. If it was just some forum without a "gimmick", I'd probably have forgotten about it.
So, for your convenience: grok (v.) 1. to understand sth. or sb. intuitively 2. to grasp sth.'s or sb.'s essence, meaning or reason
Example 1: "Plenty of newer TTRPG players don't grok the concept of old-school dungeon crawlers and why characters should not be powerful super-heroes all of the time." Example 2: "It took me a long time to grok the Tcl programming language, but now I can't go back to anything else!" Example 3: "He didn't grok Julian Bashir, like, at all, so we just wouldn't fit with each other."
I have been playing Pokémon Black for DS on my 3DS lately (it's my first Pokémon game, super excited!) and something that made me sad was seeing all of the cool features that are now almost impossible to use these days. Street Pass, the questionnaire thing where people you pass by and you exchange interests and short greetings and stuff, and everything built into the 3DS operating system itself! Since no one carries around a DS/3DS anymore, let alone one actively running Pokémon, this is kind of impossible these days.
I feel like these days any feature like this would either be used as spyware, to advertise slippery things, for harassment, or would simply not be implemented.
Since Iwata died it in general felt to me that Nintendo's unique and playful identity (Miis, menu music, cute themes, playful animations everywhere) also died. The Switch feels soulless and corporate in comparison to the Wii/DS/3DS era with its flat design, nothing-SFX, no music and only two themes, lack of Mii integration and inside jokes, and cute little child-oriented social features. I feel like video games are no longer designed for kids and that also hurts adults who liked said design choices.
I actually work with conversational systems like this! =)
The thing is, when you think about so-called "AI" like ChatGPT which you are probably referring to, they're literally just statistical word generators. They take their ton of input information they were once trained with and then, to the prompts you enter, spit out a probable word chain. They do not "know" anything, they do not consider anything, they actually cannot do anything intelligent at all; all they are is a mathematical model that puts out statistically probable chains of words. That's also why it talks (though grammatically perfect) "nonsense" all the time: it does not "know" anything, "know how to do" anything, or has the ability to access external information. It's JUST a word generator.
The other "type" of machine chat bot is the traditional variant: a conversational system that is hand built by a bunch of engineers, with no machine learning involved at all. As opposed to systems like ChatGPT, it will only be able to respond to those certain requests the engineers specifically implemented (e.g. you might be able to ask the ticket machine at the station to give you train schedule information or even tell a joke, but you cannot ask it to write you a poem or ask for the current going rate of Robux). On the other hand, we actually try to model knowledge here, it CAN access external information, and generally it can also be relied upon for its information (as long as the sources are correct). It can retain knowledge about the world and past conversations, its limits, opinions, habits and talking style are able to be controlled and configured by the engineer. It's not just a statistical probability word generator, it genuinely has data structures that represent, say, your name, your destination, your location, the connection to the train info supplier and so on. For what it's worth though, these systems commonly do not "impress" anymore since Siri and Alexa are ubiquitous and frustration with "I'm sorry, I did not understand that" is everywhere, and therefore research into this does not get funding anymore compared to ChatGPT charlatanry.
The kicker is: both variants vitally require processing your interactions, with audio and transcription, in order to work properly and to improve the overall model. Without "listening in" on real interactions and finding fault points, we could never have built these complex systems in the first place. Without the masses of non-consensually harvested input data, no machine learning system would have ever worked.
Therefore I think privacy-friendly chatbot "stochastic parroting" bots like ChatGPT will never exist. Privacy-friendly traditional chatbots might exist (like Mycroft), but in order to get anywhere close to "good quality" they will NEED to monitor real interactions.
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