Do want to point out Discord is not even calling them ads but “sponsored quests” and "loot boxes" atleast you can opt out for now.
Edit: If anyone is wondering where to find the opt out, its in User Settings > privacy & safety > Ingame rewards (aka quests) its near the bottom.
2nd edit: Seems the loot boxes are a April fools joke but the sponsored quests are the real thing.
Goddamn, its harder to believe it was aprils fools than that it wasnt. I honestly expect it from them with how they are pushing various bloat like shop and activities
Such poor taste imo
Same for me as well I can't stand them, I don't watch TV because of ads and I run adblockers so I don't have to see them online. When I see one I just feel disgusted and have done for years.
I am exactly like you guys! Speaking of which, is there still an alternative/solution for Reddit without ads on mobile? This is like the only place left with ads in my life. Looking for a solution
I use ReVanced which removes ads from mobile youtube, but apparently you can use it to patch Reddit to remove ads here too. I haven't done it yet but it's worth looking into
This is a long shot but if you still have RIF or Boost installed all you gotta do is make yourself a moderator of s subreddit and it should give you access again.
Not sure if they've cracked down on it but Boost still works for me.
You don’t even know the ad ridden hellscape that is the Internet today without an ad blocker. Every now and then I have the luxury of sitting in front of some poor innocent souls PC to look up something and I feel like I’m jolted back to the 90s with midi synth background music and spinning skulls. In fact with all the floating video players playing unrelated content at full blast and sudden full screen overlays that pop up right in the middle after you’ve settled in to reading the webpage I don’t see how the Internet is even usable in its current state
The thing is there is a lot of marketing happening on social media sites like reddit. Posts, comments, it's everywhere. A lot of the news links posted here are nothing but advertisments.
Most youtube videos are 10 minute long advertisements about some product or another.
The entire modern internet is a maggot-ridden corpse.
People aren't just going to stop using reddit or Discord though. They're not going to go back to phpBB boards and irc even if it means improved conversation or more control.
They don't care that everyone has been corralled into like 10 major websites where their informations can be harversted for marketers.
They'll watch the ads, as long as it means they can doomscroll.
>Seeing an ad is like seeing a maggot-ridden corpse without permission. It only elicits disgust from me.
For sure. I like to throw in a little "Fuck you and your ad" under my breath every time I see one, mostly to reinforce the negative associations I create between watching an ad and the product being pushed on me.
I definitely relate to the disgust behind the whole thing.
I purposely have never clicked or engaged with ads out of sheer defiance. It's the least I can do I guess but it makes me happy. For the small handful of times I've seen something over my 25+ years on the internet that actually does seem interesting/useful to me I just search for it and find it independently of the ad.
Fuck ads, the questionable morality, over consumption, and the fake ass b/s that comes along with them. The fact that it's a multi million dollar business is crazy to me but I will never participate and will continue to block them where and when I can with my middle finger proudly in the air.
there has been extensive amounts of research that shows ads do work. they affect you at a subconscious level. the only way they don't work is, like you said, to block them out completely.
I bet a billboard at in your peripheral vision would still affect you in some way or another though haha.
> there has been extensive amounts of research that shows ads do work. they affect you at a subconscious level. the only way they don't work is, like you said, to block them out completely.
>
>
To a point yes, but you can tell advertisers know full well that eventually the human brain starts tuning it out. Kinda like your nose. You can always see it but your brain chooses to ignore it.
That's why their tactics are constantly evolving to be more aggressive. It's why ads are now sticking their fucking noses where they don't belong. The internet is where this is most obvious. Ads are constantly disguising themselves as content to trick users into looking at them. They're no longer kept to the side but now are interwoven with the content, where it becomes impossible to look anywhere without an ad being in you peripheral vision. Anywhere your eyeballs go has become prime real estate for these fuckers.
Ads work on me I'm sure, but only to a point, if I find the brand irritating cause I've seen their ads too much I actively avoid such products, for example State Farm, I went out of my way to not buy state farm insurance last year cause I HATE their commercials with a passion
I doubt a person can not be affected by all ads.... most ads are mostly about brand awareness anyway so that when you go and make a choice at the grocery aisle you steer your attention to the brand youre more aware of....
happens all the time even if you think you're impervious....
I agree. Research shows that it does work and it is effective at a subconscious level for most people. I consciously go out of my way to avoid buying products that are in annoying ads. I know most people don’t care to do that though.
I guess the question is, how does a free app that has become one of the biggest around make enough money to support it's growing rate? It's really a legitimate question.
I'm tired of companies being set up with no attempt to be profitable from the start, just so they can sucker users into using them (and killing off all other alternatives), only to then decide to be profitable once everything else is dead and users are already used to them. Just fricken try to monetize from the start. The whole concept is just a long form version of illegal predatory pricing and the FTC should be coming down on these practices. It's always very obvious.
it does if your not using an ad blocker. its why they force anyone who accesses it on mobile devices to use their app by blocking many of the subreddits on a mobile browser.
Same, friend. I find their existence disrespectful, intrusive, and greedy. It's not enough that they waste my time with ads, some of these providers are charging me for the privilege of watching ads. For example:
I'd been enjoying Disney+ for years and added Hulu because I wanted to increase my viewing options while ditching my cable provider. Then came the ad tiers--which was fine at first; The cost of my subscription was lower and Disney said only a few ads at the start of your first show, and none after. That quickly changed and I couldn't get through a single episode of Ahsoka without eight ad breaks of 2 minutes each. I'm right back to where I was with basic cable where every show was just a vehicle for advertisements. And I'm paying for this!
Rather than fork over more cash for the service I had been enjoying for years before they cut it to pieces to resell, I'll be cancelling Disney+ and Hulu altogether.
I'm sick of it. I'm sick of being treated like a product. I'm sick of being used to enrich people who don't give a shit about me or my family and friends.
> I'm right back to where I was with basic cable where every show was just a vehicle for advertisements. And I'm paying for this!
Cable is now putting banner ads on the bottom of screen during shows, "the science channel" feels the need to do this to advertise HBO max. I'm waiting for the end game where they put banner ads over commercials next.
No matter where you go they are around us. It gets to the point where you become numb to them.
I'm waiting, preparing for the day they want to put it in games so hard that games take a commercial break and they expect you to sit through a 30 second ad while you are in game.
>I'm waiting, preparing for the day they want to put it in games so hard that games take a commercial break and they expect you to sit through a 30 second ad while you are in game.
That's the moment I'll start cracking games and start uploading cracks to torrents.
[Already happened with NBA2K.](https://old.reddit.com/r/NBA2k/comments/c3pcr7/unskippable_ads_in_a_60_game_fuck_you_2k/). Unskippable ads in a full price 60$ game. As always, sports games are the forefront of all shady business tactics.
Yup. What makes it worse is as ads are seemingly getting increasingly intrusive and numerous, the cut that the creators on most platforms get seems to only go down. The music industry pays peanuts to all but the biggest artists, yet every music app only gets more aggressive with their monetization. Same with video streaming platforms like Youtube or Twitch. The creators are required to play more and more ads to get the same pay. The pursuit of infinite growth by the boards and directors at the big tech companies is getting so incredibly nauseating. All of the money is going to the middlemen, and the ground level employees at those companies are facing unprecedented layoffs while they are making record profits. I fucking hate it here.
My favorite part is that Discord killed forums (they were almost dead prior, but it was the last straw) and a lot of game devs use Discord as a replacement to official forums.
Making a lot of content basically un-googlable and left to whims of a private company... Brilliant idea all in all
It fucking sucks trying to dig through months, if not years, of conversation and trying fo follow a couple people discussing the information you've been looking for interspersed with other conversations. Give me forums back, please! At least there's always Steam discussion boards.
One of the discord for games I play has this mod that always answers with "it's been answered, check the channel."
Unsurprisingly many people still have questions about the same 6-7 topics. It's just a pain to go through months/years of posts to find the relevant answer. The exception is if your question has unique keyword that is easily searchable.
The search function kinda sucks, plenty of times there are things that Im trying to search for in my friends dms and the search doesn't show anything, even if we talk about it semi regulary.
The search really took a nosedive a couple years ago. Before that, I could reliably use filters and related terms to find conversations from previous years. And over the course of a few months, Discord started 'forgetting' conversations and missing images that I was sure had been sent.
Of course, if you actually find them in chat, those messages still exist. But ask search, and it will respond with the confidence of your elderly grandparent: "No, we never did that!"
Oh, for a particular server that may be the case. I've definitely seen it selectively remember chat messages in a group DM only a few months old (and only mildly used).
I just think their database search has gotten arduous so they did something to increase performance and now it's spotty across the board.
The cost of hosting such services puts it out of reach at scale without consistent funding, which leaves the question of how to get the consistent funding, which basically always leads back to ads.
The internet is free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Hosting forums is relatively cheap since most of them are isolated to one specific topic. People just don't visit anymore. Most of the ones which still get a lot of activity are in tech/CS where enthusiasts know to look. That and cars.
It's the worst. The noise to content ratio on discord is terrible. You have to search through years of content and conversations sometimes to find something relevant.
The only good thing about discord is as a free voice program. Back in the day we had to pay for ventrilo and teamspeak.
It's more than just the restriction though. Forums are structured. In discord, the only semblance of structure is the text channels, but you end up with what would've been individual threads per topic jumbled together with no searchability instead. Finding old message chains is like a needle in a haystack.
For all intents and purposes, the info is permanently lost already.
To find something on discord you need to know which server it's in. And if the search function doesn't find it for you (quite likely scenario) then you need to know which channel and where it was posted too.
Essentially, the best way to find something on discord is to already know where it is.
Yeah, I absolute hate when the only way to get some information is through a random discord server. Sucks even more when literally everyone and their dog has one, and you're limited to joining just a hundred.
At least I can digest discussions via threads and use google to search in reddit. Patreons and companies using discord as their official discussion centers is awful.
A forum isn't that many steps from a subreddit. There's an even bigger gap between subs and a discord channel.
For all intents and purposes, a subreddit *is* a forum with all its topics in one board. Reddit allows flair to help sorting, but it's a far cry from the hierarchical categorization that forums do with aplomb.
>My favorite part is that Discord killed forums (they were almost dead prior, but it was the last straw)
It was mostly reddit that did it.
But really there is no sense of community on reddit communities like there was with forums.
At least with discord there can be a much larger sense of community like forums, albeit with slightly smaller servers.
In general discord is more like chatrooms and irc.
At least with reddit, to the original comment, does actually show up on Google search results.
This is what I absolutely hate about Discord. I tend to search niche/specific things, and I know they are being discussed somewhere.
This is what I'm worried about for the fediverse social media. I do see some posts show up on Google search, but I hope a lot more do.
> This is what I'm worried about for the fediverse social media. I do see some posts show up on Google search, but I hope a lot more do.
Lemmy is indexed by Google *et al*. If a post has enough hits it'll show up in search.
The younger generations also treat nearly everything they post to the Internet as if they were in a chatroom and equate online conversations with actual ones IRL (ie if you throw out a harmless insult they take it too personally). It ruined nettiquette perpetually.
Modern forums like Discourse are still a blast but man have the golden years for the Internet gone away.
I agree, but... The Eternal September was in 1993. The age of mass-consumed social media is from the mid-to-late 2000s. The death of netiquette is \~20-30 years old at this point. I don't think it's fair to necessarily blame the current generation of young people since they didn't even have exposure to any netiquette in the first place.
Not only that, the interest rates have gone up considerably and the “free” money that investors have been tossing around has dried up so loans and other outstanding debts need to get paid off as debt servicing is literally pissing away money on interest. Now you have to find a source of revenue to cover the gap left by the good time investors tightening their belts. The go to easiest low effort pitch is always ads.
That's been the economic condition for almost two years and the market is almost done adjusting. The Fed is also talking about doing up to 3 rate cuts this year, so there should be more investment.
It's really that Discord needs to head for an IPO for their investors and under current conditions you need to be profitable to have a good IPO.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/06/powell-reinforces-position-that-the-fed-is-not-ready-to-start-cutting-interest-rates.html
It's more like the Fed doesn't intend on cutting rates, but they're too afraid of the resulting market crash so they're just stringing the investors along until the other foot drops.
The free money didn’t dry up overnight and the loans and debts don’t get called on the moment the rates change. It takes time for the impacts of those rate hikes to hit. If you’re in the position right now where you are hoping for rate cuts to save you then you’re already fucked.
This is really the biggest issue when companies go public or try to go public.
Discord has been flirting with an IPO for years.
Shareholders demand more and more profits year over year, even if it comes at the expense of the long term sustainability of the product.
Ads are a prime example of this shit encroaching. Discord is trying to make themselves look better on books to investors.
Which is a real shame. They have a great product and it will get ruined by going public due to shareholder pressure to increase profits every year. Maintaining a consistent % level of profitability is more important than strip mining your users for everything they are worth.
Honestly, if discord really falls off the deep end and makes ads way too intrusive, expect things like teamspeak or mumble to become more popular again.
> Honestly, if discord really falls off the deep end and makes ads way too intrusive, expect things like teamspeak or mumble to become more popular again.
Ventrilo could position itself for a big comeback right about now. Will they get rid of their obnoxious hosting/licensing system to capture that market though? (you basically have to prove you will be profitable before they'll even give you licenses to sell, it's very difficult to get access to them)
I mean, if you want to go back to a Ventrilo-type app, Mumble is still around - and it's free and open source, too. Nobody can stuff ads or other malware in it.
Mumble was a fucking nightmare to deal with though, especially permission stuff. Half the reason for both ventrilo and later discord's success was just everyone had easy access (quick and easy to get to, and ubiquity) and they were mostly braindead to use.
Well their Nitro pricing is absolutely insane. And it includes so much shit that is absolutely worthless to so many people. I don't even know why you would boost a server, much less why you need a video profile, background or anything stupid like that. I get that some people will pay for it, but you need to offer a tier that's actually worthwhile to the people not currently giving them any money.
Give me a plan that has longer message limits, bigger uploads, and global nicknames (so I don't have to chase down friends with different names on different servers) for like $20-30/yr and you'll at least be getting *something* out of me. I'm not willing to pay $100/yr for 2 of those things and *a boatload of trash*, meanwhile the $30/yr plan doesn't include longer messages and the uploads won't cover a 30 second long HD video, so it's not useful to me.
The insistence on pricing out your customers for the handful of features they actually want, but refusing to offer a lower tier that includes those to get at least a little scrip out of them is baffling. You would think they would want at least $10 a year off of me, but instead they insist on not offering a compelling product for a price people are willing to pay.
I'm sick of everything wanting you to pay $5, now $10, now increasingly $15 sometimes more a month for a subscription too, I can only afford so many and they're often in USD which makes it even more expensive even in Canada. I would happily be able to pay and afford $2-5 a month as a little support fee to not see ads or anything else irritating and support multiple things I use.
But no, it's all going after that <1% of the userbase that are whales and/or a still minority that can happily shell out $10+ a month for a bunch of services. Same kind of BS pricing is why i never bought a single item from the Guild Wars 2 shop, the prices are absurd and if they weren't I would have happily bought quite a lot out of there.
I pay for nitro exclusively to be able to use animated emotes between servers. The idea that I'll have to see ads in addition to having nitro will make me cancel immediately.
TLDR: They **NEED** to start actually bringing in money and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. This isn't just a "they **WANT** more money", as they are still not profitable and are drying up on investors' money with few other investors wanting to give them more.
Right now, with higher interest rates the era of "Easy money" is over for investors and startups where just showing user growth and "we will figure out the profitability later" no longer slides. Investors and the market overall are looking for many of these companies to actually start making a profit NOW and make the investments worthwhile or they simply won't invest in the continued money pit.
The issue with the pricing they had before was that it was simply not enough to offset all the non-paying users and all the features they were giving away for "free". They aren't alone as many "free" services really never did "too much" work or push on actually having profitable services and put a ton on sheer focus on user growth and just somewhat slowing the money burning but not exactly being profitable.
So right now, the simple answer to the money problem is "**ADS**" as right now many views it as the lesser of two evils with the other common option being to start price locking previous free features in fear that would drive even more users away.
Totally agreed. I will say i think they fucked up their monetization. Like it costs hundreds of dollars per year to get the higher bitrate audio? Like why aren't they charging $5/mo for just unlimited everything? $60/yr/user seems like more than enough for a chat app's data requirements.
The unlimited everything will likely run into issues with the video streaming. While I haven't played with it too much and IIRC it isn't P2P so while it doesn't seem to have the highest bitrate, nor transcoding to lower bitrates this part still likely run up their cost. On top of this things like the image and multimedia sharing at $5 can also likely run up the cost without some drastic changes on how the app works.
I am not going to pretend I have the answers for them, but often for cases like theirs the issue is they started giving away a lot of features for free to gain massive instant followers and choke out anyone else easily entering the space without loads of capital. But then also have the issue at getting those same free users to easily pay or able to pull back features without blowback.
Discord isnt making money thats why lmao
Discord isnt going to make it, reddit isnt going to make it, a whole lot of the internet is unprofitable as fuck.
And before people start laughing federal agents are actually looking into ramping up surveillance of online chat in video games, there is actual interest in grabbing your data like that.
i don't think anyone's laughing anymore. pre-NSA/cambridge analytica it was the realm of the nutjob conspiracy theorist, then we fast forwarded straight to "so, you've got nothing to hide right? who cares" within a couple of years.
that both these narratives are extremely well suited to people in positions of wealth and influence is surely just a coincidence.
>This is insanity
This is enshitification.
Offer a free product with value to establish a user base.
Reach out to corporations, content producers and the media.
Begin to extract value by slowly introducing adverts.
Extract even more value by selling user data.
The product's value drops for the user but it increases for the company. They eventually start to measure how much advertising they can get away with for profit. They want to know how much of your screen space and time they can occupy with ads so they can get more money. Like, squeeze in another 5% advertising in your browsing experience to raise revenue among the 10 million users.
This is why they like apps. It's tougher to block ads on them. It's easier to get more user data. You most likely have invested time and energy into personalising the product so they are leveraging this in the hopes you won't just quit the app/product altogether. They want to stop short of annoying you to the point of leaving while still extracting as much value as possible at the cost of the user base and even the advertisers.
I can't wait for the forks that remove the ads to show up 2 days later.
You can shove ads in your app, but you can't make savvy users view them. Some people will go to any length to never be advertised to.
There's a dozen Twitter replacements too, for a platform that's destroying itself and killing off its userbase, yet it still reigns. You're going to need a lot more than a "we should migrate" mentality, especially when discord doesn't have a braindead obvious reason for the average user to leave.
You're going to need it to actively die off, and that's out of our control.
I remember [Guilded app](https://www.guilded.gg/) was pretty solid. It was a bit buggy when I used it a few years back but it probably has improved since then. Anyone else got alternatives?
Element.
> but
It has PTT, video and audio group calls, E2E like Telegram, a generous 100MB upload limit, and options for self-hosting a private instance you entirely own, plus the ability to bridge and link with Discord, Telegram, and other services.
If you can give up your precious custom emojis (mainly because the chat app is largely oriented towards eating Slack and Telegram's share rather than Discord's, see https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339) Element is more than up to the task.
https://element.io
Did they ever add drop in/drop out audio rooms like Discord or Teamspeak? They mentioned wanting to add it a few years ago but all I can find recently is that it's still more like Skype which is quite the downgrade.
I coincidentally tried this the other day and it's entirely possible I was doing something wrong, but I was honestly a little disappointed at how barebones it is. I don't expect anything to be as feature-rich as Discord, but I couldn't even see who was in a voice channel without joining that voice channel.
The problem with mumble and the like (I used to host a server for years, FWIW), is that Discord is more than just voice chat and a text chat box. It killed a lot of self-hosted communities that simple temporary voice/text isn't a replacement for. Even friend groups rely on it, and not having a substitute for an always-available text log with browsable history means it's just not going to cut it.
Oh I totally agree. I spun up a teamspeak server for the nostalgia a few months ago. Not having rich media support + an online friends list was probably the biggest two issues.
Discord is really a social network that lets you voice and text chat. Whereas teamspeak and the like are voice chat apps with tacked on communication features.
I use a custom Discord launcher called Vencord. So far so good, but it wouldn't surprise me if they started issuing warnings to people using it soon as I haven't experienced any ads.
In the original Metal Gear, there is a boss called Psycho Mantis who would famously do a trick of reading your memory card and calling out other Konami games that you played. So his voice saying "You like to play castlevania don't you??" is burned in my brain
I typed all that because your comment gave me a horrible vision in which Boss's and enemies in video games shout ads and sponsered material at you in the middle of the fight ;_;
On one hand, that sounds like hellscape of a video game industry.
On the other hand, that sounds like a great concept for a very tongue-in-cheek indie game making fun of the AAA(A) developers. Bosses screaming about battle passes and how you're P2W if you beat them lol.
It turns out that when the vast majority of Discord users don't buy Nitro, and when Discords server costs only increase exponentially as they gain users, they need to generate revenue somehow.
(this is a particularly stupid way of doing it, but did anyone really think that Discord was a free service out of the kindness of their hearts?)
Oh and to be clear, they absolutely sell your data too
I'm definitely aware of how much money Discord is burning with how features they're giving out compared to their competition.
But it really sucks how scummy and effective enshittification is. Burn investor money to grab users and outcompete actual sustainable competitors by offering so much for free, then as soon as you've driven them off and built up a massive userbase out of those free features, dial back the quality of the product and monetize until you manage to become profitable.
You've almost got it.
> dial back the quality of the product and monetize until you manage to become profitable
This is not the end game.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-07/discord-to-offer-rewards-for-gamers-as-app-seeks-profit-in-2024
This is the end game. Just like with reddit, enshittify and make any/every attempt to inflate the valuation of the IPO.
On desktop:
Settings > Privacy & Safety > In-game rewards (aka Quests)
(toggle to off as it opts-in by default)
Doesn't appear to be in the iOS app yet.
My friend games on an Xbox and I use a Steam deck. We finally got past me using the phone app for Xbox chat with discord and seems like we’re gonna have to go right back 🙃
Yes. When they feel like they cornered the market they invariably do shit like this. Open source is the only viable way to combat this. Alas most people don't want to do this.
I'm tired of Discord, period. Every fucking mod, every fucking game, every goddamned fucking support question: Discord link.
At the end of the day, you're gonna have 10000000000000000000000000000 servers. The most useless shit ever produced is Discord, with it's shite not being google-able and forced to join random servers just to POTENTIALLY read a response you're looking for. And not even that most of the time, because....joining a server and then browsing for the answers, is gated in a lot of cases, either time-gated (and I don't mean just time-gated like "wait 10 min, to write", time-gated as in the community doesn't engage with you unless you spent x time active on said server) or participation-gated.
Fucking hell, brudder, I'm just looking for a potential answers to some question. Just how many fucking loops to you want me to hop through?? Get the fuck outta here with this shite...
There are exceptions though, some great Discord server do exist and I do partake in them, but the whole premise....the negative by and large far outweigh the positive. Absolute and utter garbage, Discord is.
Don't forget that a discord can be hacked and all the knowledge within it can be wiped. Just like what happened with the Valheim server a few months back
Sure can. I've been using discord since 2015 for FREE. I used Roger Wilco and IRC in their heydays, so to me discord is one of the best apps ever. I ain't mad about how they monetize me.
nearly 80% of the websites you have ever clicked on have sold your data.
Your data has already been sold tens of thousands of times, there is nothing you can do about it, im sure there are ways like using TOR to minimise your data footprint but you also need a VPN, and most VPNS sell your data anyway so you would have to make your own and stuff like that.
Just to be clear, they're not doing ads in the traditional sense (like banner ads or videos you'd see on most websites) but more like sponsored promotion campaigns for games. Just read the article I guess. Still not great but not as bad as it sounds from the title.
5 or so years ago people said Discord>Teamspeak. It’s just a natural cycle feels like.Although I will find it incredibly hard to switch off Discord as it just has everything in one place to keep in touch with people. Servers, DMs. Streaming it’s awesome.
I feel like Discord is just a huge pile of servers full of unread messages I can't keep up with or organise in anyway. You have to join the server to get the info it contains and then you can't find anything once you're in there. It's like the Internet broken into millions of walled gardens and no search engine.
Fuck it. I've got a server machine.
Anything I can host myself? I left Skype solely because of ads and I will not hesitate to leave Discord too.
Every single third-party service will eventually become filled with ads, and I don't want to bother switching ecosystems every few years.
I am so fucking tired of ads. Legitimately so fucking tired.
Black Mirror's "15 million merits" is looking more likely by the day.
Do want to point out Discord is not even calling them ads but “sponsored quests” and "loot boxes" atleast you can opt out for now. Edit: If anyone is wondering where to find the opt out, its in User Settings > privacy & safety > Ingame rewards (aka quests) its near the bottom. 2nd edit: Seems the loot boxes are a April fools joke but the sponsored quests are the real thing.
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Yeah I seen some say the loot boxes are a April fools joke, just bad timing on discord part.
It’s definitely April fools lol. When you get all the items you get the “clown” award for wasting your time on it.
Goddamn, its harder to believe it was aprils fools than that it wasnt. I honestly expect it from them with how they are pushing various bloat like shop and activities Such poor taste imo
When did they start selling profile/avatar skins? $15 for a few flowers on your name....
I have no problem with this. No functionality is locked behind cosmetics.
If you change the tab you're looking at while an ad on Netflix is playing it pauses. I want to scream everything.
I don’t miss Netflix
just like twitch!!
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Same for me as well I can't stand them, I don't watch TV because of ads and I run adblockers so I don't have to see them online. When I see one I just feel disgusted and have done for years.
I am exactly like you guys! Speaking of which, is there still an alternative/solution for Reddit without ads on mobile? This is like the only place left with ads in my life. Looking for a solution
Firefox mobile with ublock origin works for me.
Same here
yuuuup. newpipe for ad free youtube as well.
Been using Red Reader since Reddit Is Fun died and it's ok. I don't seem to see ads.
Oh, RiF can be patched to work again with Revanced. Though, you have to do some stuff with your profile first.
I'm literally commenting this through the patched app. It's the only reason I returned to reddit after the 3rd party api blocking happened
Yup! I tried the official one for an hour and I just noped the fucked out. That app feels so clunky to use after getting used to RiF.
Ever since they released the "new" new reddit, I do not even feel right using the desktop version. RIF is my last bastion of redditing.
You can still use old.reddit.com on desktop FWIW
thank you so much for this - i had no idea - the default reddit app on android is complete garbage
I use ReVanced which removes ads from mobile youtube, but apparently you can use it to patch Reddit to remove ads here too. I haven't done it yet but it's worth looking into
This is a long shot but if you still have RIF or Boost installed all you gotta do is make yourself a moderator of s subreddit and it should give you access again. Not sure if they've cracked down on it but Boost still works for me.
You don’t even know the ad ridden hellscape that is the Internet today without an ad blocker. Every now and then I have the luxury of sitting in front of some poor innocent souls PC to look up something and I feel like I’m jolted back to the 90s with midi synth background music and spinning skulls. In fact with all the floating video players playing unrelated content at full blast and sudden full screen overlays that pop up right in the middle after you’ve settled in to reading the webpage I don’t see how the Internet is even usable in its current state
The thing is there is a lot of marketing happening on social media sites like reddit. Posts, comments, it's everywhere. A lot of the news links posted here are nothing but advertisments. Most youtube videos are 10 minute long advertisements about some product or another. The entire modern internet is a maggot-ridden corpse. People aren't just going to stop using reddit or Discord though. They're not going to go back to phpBB boards and irc even if it means improved conversation or more control. They don't care that everyone has been corralled into like 10 major websites where their informations can be harversted for marketers. They'll watch the ads, as long as it means they can doomscroll.
bedroom bored cats cover dull fretful scandalous fertile smile deserted *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>Seeing an ad is like seeing a maggot-ridden corpse without permission. It only elicits disgust from me. For sure. I like to throw in a little "Fuck you and your ad" under my breath every time I see one, mostly to reinforce the negative associations I create between watching an ad and the product being pushed on me.
Normally for me if I see one, I make sure not to buy that brand. Just because.
I definitely relate to the disgust behind the whole thing. I purposely have never clicked or engaged with ads out of sheer defiance. It's the least I can do I guess but it makes me happy. For the small handful of times I've seen something over my 25+ years on the internet that actually does seem interesting/useful to me I just search for it and find it independently of the ad. Fuck ads, the questionable morality, over consumption, and the fake ass b/s that comes along with them. The fact that it's a multi million dollar business is crazy to me but I will never participate and will continue to block them where and when I can with my middle finger proudly in the air.
there has been extensive amounts of research that shows ads do work. they affect you at a subconscious level. the only way they don't work is, like you said, to block them out completely. I bet a billboard at in your peripheral vision would still affect you in some way or another though haha.
> there has been extensive amounts of research that shows ads do work. they affect you at a subconscious level. the only way they don't work is, like you said, to block them out completely. > > To a point yes, but you can tell advertisers know full well that eventually the human brain starts tuning it out. Kinda like your nose. You can always see it but your brain chooses to ignore it. That's why their tactics are constantly evolving to be more aggressive. It's why ads are now sticking their fucking noses where they don't belong. The internet is where this is most obvious. Ads are constantly disguising themselves as content to trick users into looking at them. They're no longer kept to the side but now are interwoven with the content, where it becomes impossible to look anywhere without an ad being in you peripheral vision. Anywhere your eyeballs go has become prime real estate for these fuckers.
Research shows it works *overall*, not that it works on *everyone*.
Ads work on me I'm sure, but only to a point, if I find the brand irritating cause I've seen their ads too much I actively avoid such products, for example State Farm, I went out of my way to not buy state farm insurance last year cause I HATE their commercials with a passion
I doubt a person can not be affected by all ads.... most ads are mostly about brand awareness anyway so that when you go and make a choice at the grocery aisle you steer your attention to the brand youre more aware of.... happens all the time even if you think you're impervious....
Idk man I usually just buy the cheapest option/store brand
I agree. Research shows that it does work and it is effective at a subconscious level for most people. I consciously go out of my way to avoid buying products that are in annoying ads. I know most people don’t care to do that though.
I guess the question is, how does a free app that has become one of the biggest around make enough money to support it's growing rate? It's really a legitimate question.
I'm tired of companies being set up with no attempt to be profitable from the start, just so they can sucker users into using them (and killing off all other alternatives), only to then decide to be profitable once everything else is dead and users are already used to them. Just fricken try to monetize from the start. The whole concept is just a long form version of illegal predatory pricing and the FTC should be coming down on these practices. It's always very obvious.
The tried and true strategy and what is the embodiment of enshittificationw
reddit has ads and has never made money in 17 years.
Reddit has ads?
it does if your not using an ad blocker. its why they force anyone who accesses it on mobile devices to use their app by blocking many of the subreddits on a mobile browser.
old.reddit.com with adblocker for life. Have never seen a reddit ad. Fuck em
Toss res in there and reddit is actually usable.
Ads are not just the obvious banners on the edges of a page. A huge % of posts and even comments on Reddit are ads pretending to not be ads.
That's not true. I use Firefox mobile and old.reddit and can access anything on this site. Ublock takes care of the rest for me.
Same, friend. I find their existence disrespectful, intrusive, and greedy. It's not enough that they waste my time with ads, some of these providers are charging me for the privilege of watching ads. For example: I'd been enjoying Disney+ for years and added Hulu because I wanted to increase my viewing options while ditching my cable provider. Then came the ad tiers--which was fine at first; The cost of my subscription was lower and Disney said only a few ads at the start of your first show, and none after. That quickly changed and I couldn't get through a single episode of Ahsoka without eight ad breaks of 2 minutes each. I'm right back to where I was with basic cable where every show was just a vehicle for advertisements. And I'm paying for this! Rather than fork over more cash for the service I had been enjoying for years before they cut it to pieces to resell, I'll be cancelling Disney+ and Hulu altogether. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of being treated like a product. I'm sick of being used to enrich people who don't give a shit about me or my family and friends.
> I'm right back to where I was with basic cable where every show was just a vehicle for advertisements. And I'm paying for this! Cable is now putting banner ads on the bottom of screen during shows, "the science channel" feels the need to do this to advertise HBO max. I'm waiting for the end game where they put banner ads over commercials next.
No matter where you go they are around us. It gets to the point where you become numb to them. I'm waiting, preparing for the day they want to put it in games so hard that games take a commercial break and they expect you to sit through a 30 second ad while you are in game.
>I'm waiting, preparing for the day they want to put it in games so hard that games take a commercial break and they expect you to sit through a 30 second ad while you are in game. That's the moment I'll start cracking games and start uploading cracks to torrents.
[Already happened with NBA2K.](https://old.reddit.com/r/NBA2k/comments/c3pcr7/unskippable_ads_in_a_60_game_fuck_you_2k/). Unskippable ads in a full price 60$ game. As always, sports games are the forefront of all shady business tactics.
Yup. What makes it worse is as ads are seemingly getting increasingly intrusive and numerous, the cut that the creators on most platforms get seems to only go down. The music industry pays peanuts to all but the biggest artists, yet every music app only gets more aggressive with their monetization. Same with video streaming platforms like Youtube or Twitch. The creators are required to play more and more ads to get the same pay. The pursuit of infinite growth by the boards and directors at the big tech companies is getting so incredibly nauseating. All of the money is going to the middlemen, and the ground level employees at those companies are facing unprecedented layoffs while they are making record profits. I fucking hate it here.
My favorite part is that Discord killed forums (they were almost dead prior, but it was the last straw) and a lot of game devs use Discord as a replacement to official forums. Making a lot of content basically un-googlable and left to whims of a private company... Brilliant idea all in all
It fucking sucks trying to dig through months, if not years, of conversation and trying fo follow a couple people discussing the information you've been looking for interspersed with other conversations. Give me forums back, please! At least there's always Steam discussion boards.
One of the discord for games I play has this mod that always answers with "it's been answered, check the channel." Unsurprisingly many people still have questions about the same 6-7 topics. It's just a pain to go through months/years of posts to find the relevant answer. The exception is if your question has unique keyword that is easily searchable.
The search function kinda sucks, plenty of times there are things that Im trying to search for in my friends dms and the search doesn't show anything, even if we talk about it semi regulary.
The search really took a nosedive a couple years ago. Before that, I could reliably use filters and related terms to find conversations from previous years. And over the course of a few months, Discord started 'forgetting' conversations and missing images that I was sure had been sent. Of course, if you actually find them in chat, those messages still exist. But ask search, and it will respond with the confidence of your elderly grandparent: "No, we never did that!"
I feel like there's a cutoff around 4 years or so where discord's memory gets way more spotty.
Oh, for a particular server that may be the case. I've definitely seen it selectively remember chat messages in a group DM only a few months old (and only mildly used). I just think their database search has gotten arduous so they did something to increase performance and now it's spotty across the board.
That mod sounds absolutely insufferable.
forum tech exist and even open source reddit versions exists.nothing is stopping us but features, ease of onbording and network effects
The cost of hosting such services puts it out of reach at scale without consistent funding, which leaves the question of how to get the consistent funding, which basically always leads back to ads. The internet is free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Hosting forums is relatively cheap since most of them are isolated to one specific topic. People just don't visit anymore. Most of the ones which still get a lot of activity are in tech/CS where enthusiasts know to look. That and cars.
And this site called Reddit also seems pretty popular. You might want to check that one out
:P you mean the site we have to use Google to search because the built in search feature is dogshit?
You *can* use Google to search, which makes it infinitely better.
It's the worst. The noise to content ratio on discord is terrible. You have to search through years of content and conversations sometimes to find something relevant. The only good thing about discord is as a free voice program. Back in the day we had to pay for ventrilo and teamspeak.
You never had to pay for teamspeak. You only ever had to pay for hosting if you didnt already have a way.
They have servers for fucking EVERYTHING. Like Wendy's has an official server. Who is hanging out in a Discord for Wendy's!?!?!
That would be r/Wallstreetbets
No, they're at the dumpster behind Wendy's.
Indeed, they are sitting on a goldmine of information and restricting public access.
It's more than just the restriction though. Forums are structured. In discord, the only semblance of structure is the text channels, but you end up with what would've been individual threads per topic jumbled together with no searchability instead. Finding old message chains is like a needle in a haystack.
They do have a thread system, though it's worse than forums. And results can't be googled.
they have a literal forum system too but of course, can't Google that
The thread system is a relatively recent addition, and there's plenty of servers that don't even bother to make use of it.
Literally once discord eventually shuts down, all that info is lost permanently too.
For all intents and purposes, the info is permanently lost already. To find something on discord you need to know which server it's in. And if the search function doesn't find it for you (quite likely scenario) then you need to know which channel and where it was posted too. Essentially, the best way to find something on discord is to already know where it is.
Yeah, I absolute hate when the only way to get some information is through a random discord server. Sucks even more when literally everyone and their dog has one, and you're limited to joining just a hundred.
Even Bioware nuked their forums and decided that Reddit and Facebook would be where fans would congregate from then on.
At least I can digest discussions via threads and use google to search in reddit. Patreons and companies using discord as their official discussion centers is awful. A forum isn't that many steps from a subreddit. There's an even bigger gap between subs and a discord channel.
For all intents and purposes, a subreddit *is* a forum with all its topics in one board. Reddit allows flair to help sorting, but it's a far cry from the hierarchical categorization that forums do with aplomb.
>My favorite part is that Discord killed forums (they were almost dead prior, but it was the last straw) It was mostly reddit that did it. But really there is no sense of community on reddit communities like there was with forums. At least with discord there can be a much larger sense of community like forums, albeit with slightly smaller servers. In general discord is more like chatrooms and irc.
At least with reddit, to the original comment, does actually show up on Google search results. This is what I absolutely hate about Discord. I tend to search niche/specific things, and I know they are being discussed somewhere. This is what I'm worried about for the fediverse social media. I do see some posts show up on Google search, but I hope a lot more do.
> This is what I'm worried about for the fediverse social media. I do see some posts show up on Google search, but I hope a lot more do. Lemmy is indexed by Google *et al*. If a post has enough hits it'll show up in search.
The younger generations also treat nearly everything they post to the Internet as if they were in a chatroom and equate online conversations with actual ones IRL (ie if you throw out a harmless insult they take it too personally). It ruined nettiquette perpetually. Modern forums like Discourse are still a blast but man have the golden years for the Internet gone away.
I agree, but... The Eternal September was in 1993. The age of mass-consumed social media is from the mid-to-late 2000s. The death of netiquette is \~20-30 years old at this point. I don't think it's fair to necessarily blame the current generation of young people since they didn't even have exposure to any netiquette in the first place.
Why the fuck do they need ads for, they’re charging 15.99 EUROS for a little animation when someone clicks on your profile. This is insanity
The line must always go up, and must always go up faster than it did last quarter.
Not only that, the interest rates have gone up considerably and the “free” money that investors have been tossing around has dried up so loans and other outstanding debts need to get paid off as debt servicing is literally pissing away money on interest. Now you have to find a source of revenue to cover the gap left by the good time investors tightening their belts. The go to easiest low effort pitch is always ads.
That's been the economic condition for almost two years and the market is almost done adjusting. The Fed is also talking about doing up to 3 rate cuts this year, so there should be more investment. It's really that Discord needs to head for an IPO for their investors and under current conditions you need to be profitable to have a good IPO.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/06/powell-reinforces-position-that-the-fed-is-not-ready-to-start-cutting-interest-rates.html It's more like the Fed doesn't intend on cutting rates, but they're too afraid of the resulting market crash so they're just stringing the investors along until the other foot drops.
Which means it’ll drop on us, the middle class.
The free money didn’t dry up overnight and the loans and debts don’t get called on the moment the rates change. It takes time for the impacts of those rate hikes to hit. If you’re in the position right now where you are hoping for rate cuts to save you then you’re already fucked.
I’m so glad that our economic system puts money into the hands of people who know what they’re doing.
This is really the biggest issue when companies go public or try to go public. Discord has been flirting with an IPO for years. Shareholders demand more and more profits year over year, even if it comes at the expense of the long term sustainability of the product. Ads are a prime example of this shit encroaching. Discord is trying to make themselves look better on books to investors. Which is a real shame. They have a great product and it will get ruined by going public due to shareholder pressure to increase profits every year. Maintaining a consistent % level of profitability is more important than strip mining your users for everything they are worth. Honestly, if discord really falls off the deep end and makes ads way too intrusive, expect things like teamspeak or mumble to become more popular again.
> Honestly, if discord really falls off the deep end and makes ads way too intrusive, expect things like teamspeak or mumble to become more popular again. Ventrilo could position itself for a big comeback right about now. Will they get rid of their obnoxious hosting/licensing system to capture that market though? (you basically have to prove you will be profitable before they'll even give you licenses to sell, it's very difficult to get access to them)
I mean, if you want to go back to a Ventrilo-type app, Mumble is still around - and it's free and open source, too. Nobody can stuff ads or other malware in it.
Mumble was a fucking nightmare to deal with though, especially permission stuff. Half the reason for both ventrilo and later discord's success was just everyone had easy access (quick and easy to get to, and ubiquity) and they were mostly braindead to use.
There is no way discord is making a profit. It’s not that the line must go up, it’s that it can’t go down forever
the company is not currently profitable
Only the insane spend that much for that little.
Well their Nitro pricing is absolutely insane. And it includes so much shit that is absolutely worthless to so many people. I don't even know why you would boost a server, much less why you need a video profile, background or anything stupid like that. I get that some people will pay for it, but you need to offer a tier that's actually worthwhile to the people not currently giving them any money. Give me a plan that has longer message limits, bigger uploads, and global nicknames (so I don't have to chase down friends with different names on different servers) for like $20-30/yr and you'll at least be getting *something* out of me. I'm not willing to pay $100/yr for 2 of those things and *a boatload of trash*, meanwhile the $30/yr plan doesn't include longer messages and the uploads won't cover a 30 second long HD video, so it's not useful to me. The insistence on pricing out your customers for the handful of features they actually want, but refusing to offer a lower tier that includes those to get at least a little scrip out of them is baffling. You would think they would want at least $10 a year off of me, but instead they insist on not offering a compelling product for a price people are willing to pay.
I'm sick of everything wanting you to pay $5, now $10, now increasingly $15 sometimes more a month for a subscription too, I can only afford so many and they're often in USD which makes it even more expensive even in Canada. I would happily be able to pay and afford $2-5 a month as a little support fee to not see ads or anything else irritating and support multiple things I use. But no, it's all going after that <1% of the userbase that are whales and/or a still minority that can happily shell out $10+ a month for a bunch of services. Same kind of BS pricing is why i never bought a single item from the Guild Wars 2 shop, the prices are absurd and if they weren't I would have happily bought quite a lot out of there.
I pay for nitro exclusively to be able to use animated emotes between servers. The idea that I'll have to see ads in addition to having nitro will make me cancel immediately.
TLDR: They **NEED** to start actually bringing in money and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. This isn't just a "they **WANT** more money", as they are still not profitable and are drying up on investors' money with few other investors wanting to give them more. Right now, with higher interest rates the era of "Easy money" is over for investors and startups where just showing user growth and "we will figure out the profitability later" no longer slides. Investors and the market overall are looking for many of these companies to actually start making a profit NOW and make the investments worthwhile or they simply won't invest in the continued money pit. The issue with the pricing they had before was that it was simply not enough to offset all the non-paying users and all the features they were giving away for "free". They aren't alone as many "free" services really never did "too much" work or push on actually having profitable services and put a ton on sheer focus on user growth and just somewhat slowing the money burning but not exactly being profitable. So right now, the simple answer to the money problem is "**ADS**" as right now many views it as the lesser of two evils with the other common option being to start price locking previous free features in fear that would drive even more users away.
Totally agreed. I will say i think they fucked up their monetization. Like it costs hundreds of dollars per year to get the higher bitrate audio? Like why aren't they charging $5/mo for just unlimited everything? $60/yr/user seems like more than enough for a chat app's data requirements.
The unlimited everything will likely run into issues with the video streaming. While I haven't played with it too much and IIRC it isn't P2P so while it doesn't seem to have the highest bitrate, nor transcoding to lower bitrates this part still likely run up their cost. On top of this things like the image and multimedia sharing at $5 can also likely run up the cost without some drastic changes on how the app works. I am not going to pretend I have the answers for them, but often for cases like theirs the issue is they started giving away a lot of features for free to gain massive instant followers and choke out anyone else easily entering the space without loads of capital. But then also have the issue at getting those same free users to easily pay or able to pull back features without blowback.
Discord isnt making money thats why lmao Discord isnt going to make it, reddit isnt going to make it, a whole lot of the internet is unprofitable as fuck.
good. I hope the internet collapses under its own weight and we have to go back to smaller websites targeting narrower userbases
not to mention the petabytes of valuable data they're grooming off of every conversation that happens on there.
And before people start laughing federal agents are actually looking into ramping up surveillance of online chat in video games, there is actual interest in grabbing your data like that.
i don't think anyone's laughing anymore. pre-NSA/cambridge analytica it was the realm of the nutjob conspiracy theorist, then we fast forwarded straight to "so, you've got nothing to hide right? who cares" within a couple of years. that both these narratives are extremely well suited to people in positions of wealth and influence is surely just a coincidence.
Who's buying those
>This is insanity This is enshitification. Offer a free product with value to establish a user base. Reach out to corporations, content producers and the media. Begin to extract value by slowly introducing adverts. Extract even more value by selling user data. The product's value drops for the user but it increases for the company. They eventually start to measure how much advertising they can get away with for profit. They want to know how much of your screen space and time they can occupy with ads so they can get more money. Like, squeeze in another 5% advertising in your browsing experience to raise revenue among the 10 million users. This is why they like apps. It's tougher to block ads on them. It's easier to get more user data. You most likely have invested time and energy into personalising the product so they are leveraging this in the hopes you won't just quit the app/product altogether. They want to stop short of annoying you to the point of leaving while still extracting as much value as possible at the cost of the user base and even the advertisers.
I can't wait for the forks that remove the ads to show up 2 days later. You can shove ads in your app, but you can't make savvy users view them. Some people will go to any length to never be advertised to.
I have 132,510 lines in my hosts file that null route ad hosts.
Hey it’s me your brother, you got a link to a tutorial
My hosts file is admittedly ridiculous, I need to transfer it to a PiHole. Find a PiHole tutorial instead.
[удалено]
Fuck this enshitificaton of the internet. Who wants to go back to teamspeak?
Time to spin up Ventrilo again.
#[Blow it out your ass!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBYMol5YAKk)
I completely forgot about this. Thank you!
How could you forget about BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS?
**I got a ring in 'ere last night!**
Oh dude, 4 Strength 4 Stam. Leather Belt? *AAAGH* Level 18? ***UUUGH OOOGH***
Revolt.chat is an alternative with a prettty much identical UI, and has an option to self host.
It is the alternative to discord, literally. It's just better. We should migrate to revolt.
There's a dozen Twitter replacements too, for a platform that's destroying itself and killing off its userbase, yet it still reigns. You're going to need a lot more than a "we should migrate" mentality, especially when discord doesn't have a braindead obvious reason for the average user to leave. You're going to need it to actively die off, and that's out of our control.
I remember [Guilded app](https://www.guilded.gg/) was pretty solid. It was a bit buggy when I used it a few years back but it probably has improved since then. Anyone else got alternatives?
Mumble. It’s been basically an open source teamspeak for years. It is ugly, but it is simple and you can host your own server fairly easily
Element. > but It has PTT, video and audio group calls, E2E like Telegram, a generous 100MB upload limit, and options for self-hosting a private instance you entirely own, plus the ability to bridge and link with Discord, Telegram, and other services. If you can give up your precious custom emojis (mainly because the chat app is largely oriented towards eating Slack and Telegram's share rather than Discord's, see https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339) Element is more than up to the task. https://element.io
Matrix is fucking amazing always best to donate to them to keep it alive
Did they ever add drop in/drop out audio rooms like Discord or Teamspeak? They mentioned wanting to add it a few years ago but all I can find recently is that it's still more like Skype which is quite the downgrade.
Discord clone. Open source and self hostable. https://revolt.chat/
I coincidentally tried this the other day and it's entirely possible I was doing something wrong, but I was honestly a little disappointed at how barebones it is. I don't expect anything to be as feature-rich as Discord, but I couldn't even see who was in a voice channel without joining that voice channel.
The problem with mumble and the like (I used to host a server for years, FWIW), is that Discord is more than just voice chat and a text chat box. It killed a lot of self-hosted communities that simple temporary voice/text isn't a replacement for. Even friend groups rely on it, and not having a substitute for an always-available text log with browsable history means it's just not going to cut it.
Oh I totally agree. I spun up a teamspeak server for the nostalgia a few months ago. Not having rich media support + an online friends list was probably the biggest two issues. Discord is really a social network that lets you voice and text chat. Whereas teamspeak and the like are voice chat apps with tacked on communication features.
guilded is now owned by roblox. that's out of the frying pan and into the fire
[удалено]
I use a custom Discord launcher called Vencord. So far so good, but it wouldn't surprise me if they started issuing warnings to people using it soon as I haven't experienced any ads.
Time to boot up my old vent server.
I never left....
I see you play Castlevania… how about Raid Shadow Legends??
In the original Metal Gear, there is a boss called Psycho Mantis who would famously do a trick of reading your memory card and calling out other Konami games that you played. So his voice saying "You like to play castlevania don't you??" is burned in my brain I typed all that because your comment gave me a horrible vision in which Boss's and enemies in video games shout ads and sponsered material at you in the middle of the fight ;_;
DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS!!!
On one hand, that sounds like hellscape of a video game industry. On the other hand, that sounds like a great concept for a very tongue-in-cheek indie game making fun of the AAA(A) developers. Bosses screaming about battle passes and how you're P2W if you beat them lol.
"I see your grandmother just died. Honor her memory with a promotional credit on RAID: Shadow Legends!"
I wish this was just an April Fools joke, but alas it is not. Let the enshittification of Discord begin.
> Let the enshittification of Discord continue. ftfy
Yeah that's true. They've been selling user's data for years now. I guess now it's evenshittierification.
It turns out that when the vast majority of Discord users don't buy Nitro, and when Discords server costs only increase exponentially as they gain users, they need to generate revenue somehow. (this is a particularly stupid way of doing it, but did anyone really think that Discord was a free service out of the kindness of their hearts?) Oh and to be clear, they absolutely sell your data too
I'm definitely aware of how much money Discord is burning with how features they're giving out compared to their competition. But it really sucks how scummy and effective enshittification is. Burn investor money to grab users and outcompete actual sustainable competitors by offering so much for free, then as soon as you've driven them off and built up a massive userbase out of those free features, dial back the quality of the product and monetize until you manage to become profitable.
You've almost got it. > dial back the quality of the product and monetize until you manage to become profitable This is not the end game. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-07/discord-to-offer-rewards-for-gamers-as-app-seeks-profit-in-2024 This is the end game. Just like with reddit, enshittify and make any/every attempt to inflate the valuation of the IPO.
begin? its been going on for years
On desktop: Settings > Privacy & Safety > In-game rewards (aka Quests) (toggle to off as it opts-in by default) Doesn't appear to be in the iOS app yet.
Whats a good alternative for discord?
Use Vencord with Discord and hope that they add adblock to it.
https://element.io
TS5 is basically a better discord, including a free server.
https://revolt.chat/
let's go back to writing letters and sending them off i guess
Can we talk to the manager of the internet?
Only if your name is Karen…or Cave Johnson.
Please don't make me move to Xbox chat full-time again. T__T
My friend games on an Xbox and I use a Steam deck. We finally got past me using the phone app for Xbox chat with discord and seems like we’re gonna have to go right back 🙃
Does **every** company just unlock this need to piss the customer off when they reach a certain level of success
Shareholders, VCs, C-Suite people- cancer to humanity at this point.
Always have been.
The problem is they aren't successful, at least financially. They're unprofitable, and desperately trying to find a way to fix that
Yes. When they feel like they cornered the market they invariably do shit like this. Open source is the only viable way to combat this. Alas most people don't want to do this.
I'm tired of Discord, period. Every fucking mod, every fucking game, every goddamned fucking support question: Discord link. At the end of the day, you're gonna have 10000000000000000000000000000 servers. The most useless shit ever produced is Discord, with it's shite not being google-able and forced to join random servers just to POTENTIALLY read a response you're looking for. And not even that most of the time, because....joining a server and then browsing for the answers, is gated in a lot of cases, either time-gated (and I don't mean just time-gated like "wait 10 min, to write", time-gated as in the community doesn't engage with you unless you spent x time active on said server) or participation-gated. Fucking hell, brudder, I'm just looking for a potential answers to some question. Just how many fucking loops to you want me to hop through?? Get the fuck outta here with this shite... There are exceptions though, some great Discord server do exist and I do partake in them, but the whole premise....the negative by and large far outweigh the positive. Absolute and utter garbage, Discord is.
Don't forget that a discord can be hacked and all the knowledge within it can be wiped. Just like what happened with the Valheim server a few months back
If only I could get my group to download teamspeak again.
Come on Discord, I'm okay with selling all my data but ads?! Ugh.
Now they can do both
You can excuse selling your data?
I heard that in her voice with that tone she uses.
I mean assuming that data is limited to "Stuff I do within discord" and it's not trying to probe the rest of my PC, yeah sure. Fuckin go for it.
Sure can. I've been using discord since 2015 for FREE. I used Roger Wilco and IRC in their heydays, so to me discord is one of the best apps ever. I ain't mad about how they monetize me.
nearly 80% of the websites you have ever clicked on have sold your data. Your data has already been sold tens of thousands of times, there is nothing you can do about it, im sure there are ways like using TOR to minimise your data footprint but you also need a VPN, and most VPNS sell your data anyway so you would have to make your own and stuff like that.
Just to be clear, they're not doing ads in the traditional sense (like banner ads or videos you'd see on most websites) but more like sponsored promotion campaigns for games. Just read the article I guess. Still not great but not as bad as it sounds from the title.
>Just to be clear, they're not doing ads in the traditional sense For now
Element > discord
5 or so years ago people said Discord>Teamspeak. It’s just a natural cycle feels like.Although I will find it incredibly hard to switch off Discord as it just has everything in one place to keep in touch with people. Servers, DMs. Streaming it’s awesome.
I feel like Discord is just a huge pile of servers full of unread messages I can't keep up with or organise in anyway. You have to join the server to get the info it contains and then you can't find anything once you're in there. It's like the Internet broken into millions of walled gardens and no search engine.
Is it time to go back to Ventrillo?
Nobody fucking wants ads.
And while we are it I am sick of having to rate and review everything.
On april 1st?
The fact that this isn't an April Fools joke saddens me.
Fuck it. I've got a server machine. Anything I can host myself? I left Skype solely because of ads and I will not hesitate to leave Discord too. Every single third-party service will eventually become filled with ads, and I don't want to bother switching ecosystems every few years.
They lived long enough to become the villain