They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
I’ve grown with ICQ, MSN Messenger, TeamSpeak, Skype, several local chat apps, then people obsessed with Facebook Messenger, then Snapchat… I just know any particular chatting app is a temporary fad that will eventually end, it’s just their cycle. Don’t get attached to them.
Same here. I’m just surprised at how well Signal is holding up.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to get people to switch to it
And they didn’t make it any easier by removing SMS support from the mobile app.
It was pretty easy to get a couple of my friends to switch by saying it’s just another SMS client that also supports highly encrypted messaging with other people that use Signal. Now that it’s standalone, nobody will even fucking touch it.
which is weird, I don’t know any other country that still uses SMS other than the usa, for chatting.
it’s for 2FA from banks (which are now switching to authenticator apps) and bulk scams mostly that I can see.
Canada. Now you know two! Granted, we are basically the 51st state at this point…
America’s hat/touk!
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
“preinstalled”. lol.
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.
I use sms quite a lot when network conditions are bad… with poor service (rural areas) or heavy congestion (sport events) SMS messages piggybacking on voice channels often stand a better chance of getting through than anything that requires an Internet data connection on 4G. That said I do have unusual use cases, the other 99% of the time normal messaging apps work fine.
Yeah I got rid of Signal when they got rid of SMS because literally nobody I’ve ever met uses it and they’re not gonna switch.
It’s unfortunate, I had just gotten a few people to take it up… but that progress is lost. People prefer convenience over all else and having to use 2 different primary message apps sucks.
If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…
door opening sound knock knock
I can still sometimes “hear” ICQ, and that’s going on almost 30 years ago now?
I still have the “uh oh” sound - use it on my phone for notifications.
Same, however, I keep my phone on vibrate so I never actually hear it.
I hear you! 🤣
I so want a smart “watch” just for subtle notifications, with vibration patterns that can be configured.
I’d even pay for an Apple device, if it could be made to work well.
Oh, and it needs a battery that can last 3 days at least, preferably a week.
I can still recite my ICQ number off the top of my head
63094052 add me A/S/L?
And then you wonder WTF you want my age, sex, and location.
I remember mine, and my childhood best friend’s Prodigy account IDs.
Okay, now you guys are making me miss CompuServe.
Big spenders here, NetZero crowd checking in.
Always kept the Netzero around, but the best were the fly-by-nights who were sure they could run a successful business without Juno or Netzero’s investment or technical debt by just asking you to pretty-please use their site as your home page.
Well, “best” for as long as they lasted.
Ha, same. Best thing I can do for my social security number is “That looks about right”.
39148895 add me plz
Mine is 6 digits long and I remember it too. The whiteboard function was particularly fun.
Uh oh!
Oh yeah, I’ve been through the same. Discord was nice while it lasted.
TS and Matrix will hopefully be the replacements I use if I can get people to switch. A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though, which I’m sure they’re banking on to maintain momentum as the service quality continues to degrade.
A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though,
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
As a casual user I find the entrenched communities more of a bug than a feature. Reminds me of reddit cliques. But, I do get your point, and I agree that the inertia will be a challenge when it comes to getting groups to migrate.
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
Sir IRC is still going strong!
The difference is you’re not relying on one corp with IRC.
Hello twin!
In Matrix we trust
One will stick once it’s sensible
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn’t be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don’t hide your support behind a platform that can’t be searched from the web. It’s not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I couldn’t agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it’s being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
If a service ever says discord only when I try to login, that service no longer exists. Find an alternative or make do without it.
You found out about Nostr yet?
I completely agree, fuck discord
On the other hand, after looking for and failing to find an issue I’m facing, discord servers usually have way faster response times compared to forums.
I think this is the main disconnect for people.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We “solved” this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.
Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder’s team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of “collaborative editing”: sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with “I looked for X on Confluence and didn’t find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?”
So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between “what experienced people want” and “what beginners want”, but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.
This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.
I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.
The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.
A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.
People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.
The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.
RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.
If there is one belief that I’ve held for long is that we Free Software would be in a better situation than it is today if we simply dropped the whole idea “community”, “done by amateurs” and “volunteers in their spare time” and really start treating the whole thing as a professional industry. This whole xz crisis further exacerbated this belief.
Almost everyone takes this work for granted and this is why is not properly valued. We should raise the bar at all levels: someone who wants to contribute in a project needs to show that they can deliver everything, maintainers should not accept “half-baked” proposals because “it is better than nothing”, developers should be more than comfortable sending a quote with a proper rate to someone that requests a feature.
And if those people don’t want to do any of that, then let go see how much the commercial alternative would cost them.
I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.
That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.
For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.
My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.
If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.
So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.
I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they’d actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they’re better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.
Remember the emails from 2015? The plan was to have a platform, that just works. No bullshit, no issues, just functional features.
Even when Nitro was originally added, it was 5 bucks to optional support, if you’d like to help the company. Now the same sub is 10 a month, and half of the client is unusable without it.
Not to mention all the paid account banners and borders they’re selling for an egregious amount of money
Everyone is optimistically altruistic until the corporate greed comes a-knockin’
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
And regardless, you’re going to end up being the product if they can discern anything marketable about you from your use of the “free” product.
But just be ready to jump to the next free product.
(Obviously it’s possible for there to be FOSS but that comes with some challenges as well.)
Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
The 3rd option is FOSS with donations… But everyone expects everything on the internet to be free (as in beer) these days
Nothing is truly free/gratis…
It all comes down to capabilities, and expectations. Under current circumstances, they fail to meet the expectations, but vastly exceeded their capabilities, by trying to chase the hype, rather than provide what the users needed. It costs them next to nothing to create a new profile border, but fixing issues from 2019 takes engineer hours
a word to rebut this claim: Wikipedia.
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
It will become enshittified unless that new service is open source and “free as in beer”. With no profit motive, it can grow gradually and be supported by it’s users. Like Lemmy/ kbin / Mastodon.
Lemmy’s development is to a large part subsidized by some kind of OSS fund.
That’s fine. Probably not venture capitalists that need paid back.
The Post office should host community webservices. This is our internet.
I don’t get why micro transaction are never micro transactions. If a cosmetic item/feature in a game or sth. like discord would be 50ct up to a Euro, I would here and there buy sth. But they always want 5-15€ and that isn’t money I’m willing to spend. Take Signal for example 5 € for a badge for 30 days is just stupid. I recently donated 20 euros still 30 days. The thing is I don’t care for the badge but I think it could be beneficial to promote the ability to donate via the badge but the system they use, is really stupid.
I think the reason they’re not micro has to do with whales. I bet the whales outbuy normies at a rate that means companies make more selling 1/10th the volume, for 20x the price. The whales go hard. Did you hear that some games will task an artist with creating game-skins for a single person, because they know they can get that person to buy even at a really high price
it’s also about sustainable income. 50c one time purchases are garbage for the bottom line, subscriptions look amazing to investors because it’s effectively guaranteed income that you can assume a current subscriber will remain subscribed until the service shuts down.
Think you’re right.
Founders get told:
Raise your prices. Push them up 2-3x or something, and lose 10% of your customers. Those you lose are generally your worst ones. Huge net win.
a big part of the issue with micro-transactions are the payment processors.
visa and MasterCard basically own it, at some part of the process.
Genuine question, but what’s unusable without Nitro? I don’t use Discord very often, and the only thing that I’ve seen Nitro pushed for is reactions from other communities, and that’s pointless anyway.
video calls and screensharing is very, very rough (locked to 480/low frame rates) without nitro, for one. the file sharing limits are also extremely restrictive.
its actually locked to 720p/30fps w/o nitro
with some of the worst realtime compression i have ever seen
i agree, but you cant just lie to make a point
Fair enough. I tried video calling with it at the beginning of the first lockdown, and it was fine for what I needed, but most of the video calling programs were a bit rubbish then.
I very rarely share files with people outside of an already set up organisation, so I haven’t had a reason to try their file sharing.
Vencord is pretty decent as an alternative to nitro if you haven’t heard of it. It pretty much is a modded client that unlocks most of the nitro locked features
I use Vesktop for other mods. Not touching the paywalled stuff because I don’t want to put my account at risk more, than I need to
deleted by creator
I’m actually not sure about modded clients for android/iOS, maybe someone in this thread knows of one.
… and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.
Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn’t start earlier.
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
I never stopped using irc (I know I’m old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can’t find any communities that aren’t turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I’ve found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I’d like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don’t even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
“RTFM” but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they’re implementing ads, it’s not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It’s not likely to be blockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
If it’s downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It’s impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn’t even been able to keep users from doing it; they’ve had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It’s your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
Will filtering elements not work?
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
Yup, also my experience. Maybe Jabber. Jabber was great.
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere…
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It’s a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
Several messaging services that started on PCs already had mobile apps when Whatsapp got big so there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.
For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.
But all those you listed weren’t available internationally I believe. Atleast in the US, ask anyone who came to work how they keep in touch with people back home, and they’ll likely say whatsapp.
Skype certainly was. It would make an interesting case study - what drove adoption when there were established competitors with more resources?
Phone numbers, phone apps and the international market. Skype was in a lot of places only popular for business, Whatsapp was everyone’s very first doorway into a modern messenger app.
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history
The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord.
So they’re still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
Why should that be illegal?? It’s definitely disgusting, but if the paid customers don’t want to see ads (they don’t), then they will leave. I don’t see how or why to make it illegal to show ads to paid users.
edit: I didn’t really say that right, I just think that this is a complex problem, and saying “oh just make it illegal” is not a realistic solution. Some antitrust regulation is good for innovation, some more might be worse for innovation, and we need to be realistic about that, and not just act like we can regulate it all and then there will be 5 competing discords or whatever.
because at a certain critical threshold, which I think discord has reached, expecting users to simply stop using a platform when it is the only platform remaining for such tasks is shortsighted and ignores the true monopoly that’s been created.
See: Facebook and it’s complete consumption of most social media, VR headsets, and for-sale pages largely replacing Craigslist. If I want to buy or sell cars it’s basically impossible to do without Facebook Marketplace. I hate giving data to them.
You probably still think prices are determined by supply and demand.
No they won’t. The whole point of a platform like Discord is to bind its users to it. At first because the platform itself offers good value, and second because of network effects. Once you’re good and hogtied the bullshit barrage begins.
It’s the default enshittification playbook.
Enshittification isn’t illegal though. And making it illegal sounds pretty draconian and anti liberal to me.
I, for one, will never pay for discord, and if the communities I do use it for decide to move elsewhere, I’ll happily move over.
It’s definitely not “draconian” to make enshittification illegal. But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.
We’ve essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.
But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part.
Yups, that’s what I was getting at. There can be very good reasons to do things that are impopular with end users.
At the same time, without reddit turning to shit, Lemmy wouldn’t have thrived the way it is now. Change is part of life, as is platforms turning to shit. You move over and learn to deal with it. You might be able to nudge it in the right direction, but in the end, corporations gonna corporate.
Yeah that’s true, and I agree trying to regulate enshittification out of existence will probably have some heavy handed implications. However I do think it’s worth rethinking how network effects as extreme as Discord implements them relate to monopoly.
So they’re still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
You could simply not use the service instead.
It’s not as simple as that, which is why e. g. laws to control monopolies exist. Just look at the recent changes in rulings regarding essential services, right to repair etc.
This is really an outdated, “the market will regulate itself” perspective that has been shown time and again to not work - people just get fucked by corporations.
You want the government to regulate discord? That’s a new one. Hadn’t heard that position before.
You don’t? In civilized countries, companies don’t just get to do whatever they want.
I thought Discord was USA-based.
Right, which is why they mentioned civilized countries in comparison. Over here in the US, yes, companies get to do whatever they want.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be regulating Discord specifically. It would be regulating the business practices and advertising methods. If Discord is affected, then it sucks for them. But it wouldn’t be something specific to Discord. It would simply regulate how companies are able to go about including ads on their programs, especially when it comes to interactive ads and player rewards.
Wow you’re serious.
So create a law to prevent something that charges money from showing ads? It would have to be pretty targeted because that’s how the rest of media works. Magazines, newspapers, cable television…. It’s an age old model you’d be fighting.
I’ve got some news for you about Magazines, newspapers, and cable television in the past couple of decades…
They’re made obsolete by internet devices which also have advertising?
I’m not tracking with the logic here. A ban on advertising? I’m an app dev. I’m not allowed to put an ad in an app? What about paid placement, is that ok?
Wanting a nanny state to punish software devs for putting ads in applications is a fine way to not have software devs in your country.
I didn’t say it should be banned, but I think this is not a very good defense for just about anything:
It would have to be pretty targeted because that’s how the rest of media works. Magazines, newspapers, cable television…. It’s an age old model you’d be fighting.
You cited three age-old institutions that had their legacy business models destroyed the very moment consumers could escape them.
I already barely use discord (after all these years I have only joined two servers, and both make my eyes bleed every time I look at them) - and I can get along just fine without those communities if they make it the tiniest bit less pleasant for me as a consumer.
The only reason I use it at all is for a small number of niche communities that aren’t very active elsewhere. My life would be nearly exactly the same as it is today if I never visited those communities again.
Not in a million years will I pay for discord, and if their ads can’t be blocked, they better be damn near invisible or I’m out. Considering I’ve never heard one person say how much they enjoy using Discord, I feel confident there are a great many others in the same boat.
this is not a very good defense for just about anything
It’s also how the internet works. I left it off because it was the subject of the comment. People didn’t flee those because of the advertising. People left because the internet is undeniably better by being larger, more convenient, timely, and is a 2-way comms channel. Advertising still drives everything there.
I use discord as my primary work app. If they add ads, I’ll likely move to something else also. And that’s the point. Platforms should be free to do whatever they want and consumers are free to react.
No, it’s not about whether or not it’s a paid service. It’s about the fact that the ads are interactive, require users to complete in-game “challenges” for rewards, require users to go live and stream their game, etc…
You need to get out more.
Why is that
What a dense comment.
I never ever understood and still doesn’t understand why people like Discord. It’s not indexed, it’s a constant background noise. It’s absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it’s perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it’s always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it’s fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is “everyone else is using it”. Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It’s hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
I don’t know anyone who’s used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn’t indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
The alternatives at the time were steam voice chat or Skype, and both were awful to use.
The reason why gamers pivoted to discord is it was irc, team speak, and Skype in one platform that just worked
I’m shocked they’re moving to ads when I’ve been paying them $4/month for Discord Nitro for several years now. Surely, that revenue is enough for their upkeep???
It’s never enough. Growth must be un-ending. Also gotta pump them numbers up for an IPO so they can bail with a pocket full of cash.
It’s like how Netflix ended the basic no-ads plan to force people to either pay way more or pay a little less but be bombarded with ads. Serving ads is more profitable than letting people pay a little bit to skip them, apparently.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
I assume that’s sarcasm, but no, they almost certainly aren’t anywhere near probably from nitro subscriptions. I don’t know how many employees they have, but they surely have a lot of developers working on all their features. And that cloud server time isn’t cheap either, especially when you’re handling video.
They could have stopped adding features years ago.
There’s some weird corporate obsession with always constantly “innovating” and “improving”. Adding complexity for the sake of complexity. Completely blind and oblivious to the fact that most consumers actually want something consistent that just does what they ask it to without much fuss, not just additional complexity.
Discord has added probably a hundred features since I started using it- ultimately, the only things I ever touch in the app are the same set of 5 that existed back in 2015 when I switched. Text, voice, basic file and image sharing, group servers, and (after they added it) video+screen sharing. Literally everything else is total fluff.
Yup, it’s sometimes called box-checking. “Look boss, I did a thing.”
Often a thing nobody wanted or asked for.
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
$4 is probably way more than enough to cover the cost of your account, but the problem is what percentage of people are paying. If it’s 1 in 100 or 1,000 and $4 covers 75 average accounts they might be in a bind.
They also are forcing US users into arbitration unless you opt out by May 15th by emailing arbitration-opt-out@discord.com, so you can’t sue them. This is similar to LG with their compressor fiasco in their fridges where they put arbitration agreement crap on the box.
I am so happy there is no other country where this bullshit is legal
What should I put in the opt out email?
“get fucked! Best regards <username>”
Wait what? Can I get a link to read more about this?
I’m afraid that every generation runs into this and learns the hard way. Discord isn’t the first and won’t be the last. The moment someone wants to become profitable, all bets are off.
I guess that with discord (and many other non-foss free projects) the problem is that they start as free and then wanted to start to make money at a later stage.
For-profit software and companies are not necessarily bad, but they are bad when they take their existing software and start radically changing it for the sake of making more money.
If for example discord always had some features just for Nitro users and others for everyone, and those features (and the nitro price) would have always stayed the same it would have been much better
is that they start as free and then
wanted to start to make money at a later stage.*run out of VC capital and find themselves in a cash crunchEvery free service is built on the back of free money given out by the fed over the last 20 years in terms of near-zero percent central bank interest rates. Interest rates are up which means the VC faucets are closed. Users now need to pick up the massive debt tabs and they’re gonna get ass fucked ten ways from Sunday to do it.
Just a reminder that FOSS and for-profit are not mutually exclusive. Your FOSS product can be free (as in free speech, not free beer), but cost money to acquire (although once bought, you could redistribute it as much as you like, for any price you like).
Yep it happened to Skype and slack.
And team speak too…
Teamspeak never died. It’s always had a fairly dedicated core userbase, but it’s inability to video chat/screenshare and the need to self host puts off most everyday users from getting onto it.
it’s arguably WAY better for actual video game voice chat though. faster, higher quality, less resource intensive.
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can’t imagine enough people put money into it that they haven’t just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It’s hard for me to exactly call it greed if they’re just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
We have no clue if they’re profitable since they’re private… but given they’ve laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they’ve been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren’t devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn’t profitable.
I mean they’re almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You’re telling me we aren’t in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn’t have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that’s too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
Exactly. Everyone wants an ad-free platform that’s free to use. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
I don’t think paying will stop enshitification.
Line.
Go.
Up.
It’s not a publicly traded company smh
They’re probably trying to IPO like Reddit.
Maybe they are, but they fought off a Microsoft buyout only a few years ago, seems if they wanted to sell out, they would have done it then. Meanwhile, we don’t have financial figures (since it is a private company) but reportedly they are profitable Regardless, it’s just speculation and the “line must go up” meme generally refers to increasing share price to enrich investors and c suite, which… Doesn’t make as much sense for a private company who’s shares do not trade on an exchange.
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can’t die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won’t care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000’s of people keep coming back again and again.
Neo, Matrix is calling
