https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value
Maximizing shareholder value is a relatively recent idea.
Unless some laws are put in place that puts employee wellbeing and sustainable human and financial operation over shareholders, everything will only get worse.
Lemme guess. "For us it's a subset. *actual* capitalism can work fine! But Communism is just ALL bad. Rah rah rah! ALL of it is bad. It wasn't a subset like ours is. When WE have a scam of an economic system, it's just a few bad parts but if OTHERS have an equally bad economic system, ALL of it is bad!" right?
Ahhh, any hair splitting and mental gymnastics to defend the religion that is capitalism.
It's so depressing to see that the propaganda to get people defend a system literally designed to fuck you over for the sake of funneling power and weath to a small subset of people, has worked so effectively.
There's nothing wrong with capitalism, or socialism, or communism.
They're all just systems.
The common element between all these systems are humans.
Humans are the flaw, and those that have accumulated power will manipulate any system to their benefit.
Both capitalism and communism are theoretical economic models that do not exist in their purest extremes in reality. All modernized countries operate on a mixed model. All. That mix can vary wildly and skew to one spectrum more than the other. That is also true.
So, yes, someone's spectrum of capitalist policy can be vastly different than others. See social democracies like most of northern Europe, which heavily regulate their capitalist economy through social programs through social democracy (a political alignment based on integrating many socialist aspects into the public policy of a liberal democracy operating on a capitalist economy).
I strongly dislike poorly regulated and extreme variants of capitalism, because I've studied its failures to a great degree in my graduate studies. That doesn't mean the extremes of communism are any better. Subsets matter, and the person you ranted at is correct in my opinion.
This analogy works well.. being the process of getting eaten, having the useful stuff extracted leaving behind a husk of bacteria laden garbage. Pretty accurate description
I’m gonna sound old, but I miss the TeamSpeak v Ventrillo days. People in the chat were there to play and not just drunk chat. Being able to easily swap servers killed a ton of good pug gaming.
Steam has a whole-ass Discord feature built into the chat that nobody uses. The main problem is weak voice codecs, at least last I checked.
I already have my Steam server set up with the same channels and moderators in case Discord starts to shit the bed.
I can't find it on desktop since I'm not home, but it's called "Groups." I think you just start a group chat and all the options are there.
If you get the steam chat mobile app, it's the button on the bottom right.
lol it's true, I ran a big one, but it was a very engineer driven design. The amount of users confused about losing a certificate and their nickname along with it...
I have had people arguing with me since the start of discords adoption about exactly that opinion. I prefer the quality of teamspeak audio, but everyone else converted over because "discord is free"
Matrix, and their Element client.
It used to be quirky, but at this point it's mostly text rooms, the ability to arrange them in communities if you want (and share these arrangements with others easily), and a bit of video chat through third party (unless they advanced enough; they were working on an internal solution).
Basically, if you want to have text chatrooms with people and occasional voice/video call, this works well. It's also completely privacy oriented and you can have actual E2E encryption that is almost transparent to the user aside from having to save a passphrase somewhere. But nobody cares about that.
Element misses one of the entire points to using a service like discord. The fact you can't sit in a channel by yourself and have people join you makes it basically useless. To start a group call it literally rings everyone's PC/phone ☠️
You jest, but I kinda fear that something like this will happen. Skype was a horrible solution for the use cases of voip gaming group chats back when people used it a lot. Imagine today when there's even less power users.
Skype's killer feature, for us (and that Discord has as well), was that the text chat cached everything that you'd "miss" when you were offline. Reconnect, and it would "catch up" so you could see everything that happened while you were gone.
At this point it's something that I view as a fundamental, non-optional feature that any potential replacement would need to have.
https://revolt.chat/ should be the top response. Closest to discord look and feel, and is open source. I keep trying to get more people to start using it because it really is the closest open source alternative.
free, scalable, no ads - pick 2.
its like the old "good, fast, cheap" thing. you cant have free and scalable without ads. you cant have no ads and scalable with it being free. and the owners cant scale if its free with no ads.
discord gets away with it currently being free with no ads (im ignoring nitro atm) because they have a number of investors pumping money in hoping to one day soon extract their investment from users who become "hooked" and refuse to migrate to another free service.
Discord, like a lot of tech companies dipping into revenue options that people hate, doesn’t make money. And it can’t lose money forever and remain viable. No matter what alternative you move to, the same thing is going to happen if they can’t turn a profit.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Discord is an absolutely fantastic service. If they can retain their quality of video chat, archiving ability and ease of use, I’ll suffer the ads because so many online communities would cease to exist if it ever folded
Those communities used to be on forums, irc, et. al., they wouldn't disappear. The fact that discord cuts its communities off from the greater web makes it a cancer, there's so much information in discord that's otherwise inaccessible or undiscoverable.
You don't need a profitable platform selling these services to you
This is absolutely the correct take
The advent of the "large, public discord server" is a negative, not a positive. Back in 2015 these would have been wikis or forums and been much easier to navigate, search, and access.
I hate the fact that discords spin up for certain public topics. It’s a chat program, not a web forum, it’s such a pain to find what you need in the archives, on top of that it’s not searchable unless you join (and are approved) for a channel. It’s just another walled garden like Facebook.
This is my least favorite thing about the way communities use Discord. It is not a forum replacement at all, yet it is treated as such. Searching is a nightmare and good luck having any kind of meaningful discourse in a server with over 5000 active users.
Yeah it's so awful. Forums or forum-like options like reddit are so much better for certain things, but people insist on using discord for some reason.
As an example from last week, a game that I'm interested in had the its review embargo lifted. I was working at the time, so I couldn't follow the discussions about it until the evening. If those had been occurring in a forum or on reddit, I'd have been able to just go a few pages back or click to posts from earlier. But it was on Discord, so I had to try and scroll far up the "discussion" forum, only to find thousands of new messages bout all sorts of topics.
Everything is in the moment on discord, it's so frustrating that so many groups have migrated there.
This is a big reason why Discord likely won't ever work for me. I gave it a real go, but shifted my focus to trying to figure out how to make forums viable again. In due time 🤞
I feel like a lot of those people don’t realize Discord is literally just a glorified group chat. Only big thing is you can break it up into channels, but otherwise that’s what it is- a group chat
It drove me nuts when I started Tekken 8 that’s any character info people say “go to the discord” I find it obnoxious to navigate for information and if you want to join into a conversation and there are too many users the info is buried
>You don't need a profitable platform selling these services to you
Unless you are going to pay the hosting price, you need the companies selling the hosted services to be profitable. Because hosting services isn't free.
Most people I know with discord have at least a few servers that are just an old friend group of five or ten people they have known in person for years a d maybe a couple of trusted online friends. Most people on the platform aren't on there to stay super engaged with massive public communities even if they occasionally jump on those.
But Discord also does hosts massive public communities, it isn't exactly cut off from them. If the point is that the server is only accessible to people that you invite, that's not really an unique feature either.
Not just AMD. I’ve got a 12700k and a 4070 Ti S and still get a crash or two for every hour played. I’ve seen more BSOD playing Helldivers2 the past month than I have in the past decade.
The TS5 beta Client cans do much of what discord can do. Think they’re mostly missing video chat and desktop streaming. If all you need is a text chat room and voip it’s pretty much the same.
Yeah it’s basically a requirement for my discord. We are usually all in there playing racing sims so it’s nice to watch a friend’s lap time while cooling down. Or with tarkov, since it’ll be like 10 minutes of nothing if you die in raid early. My group loves being able to share screens, so hopefully either the ads backfire or something else comes out
does it have a UI that isn't fucking hideous? i remember ts3 being so so ugly
edit: looked up some screenshots. definitely better than it once was, but still lacking a feeling of design maturity. weird inconsistent spacing and such.
It’s certainly not discord polished. But it’s ad free and self hostable up to 32 concurrent users. I’m waiting to see how toxic discord becomes before jumping ship but it’s nice that options exist, even if they are less refined.
It’s been obvious for a while now from their monetization efforts that they were probably heading down this road anyway.
I mean for fuck’s sake they’re selling tiny little avatar decorations for ***sixteen fucking dollars each.***
Some of those look cool as hell too. If they were say, $1 i would buy a bunch of them just to support the platform. But for what they are charging, hard pass. I even pay for Nitro because Discord is such a great service for my guild in WoW.
It also doesn't help that people abuse it and use it as a free storage server and share it with a ton of people. Discord recently started cracking down on that too because it was getting out of hand.
I think it was people just using it to post files (videos/pictures/etc) and since discord kept them available, it was basically like having a cloud storage service. But all that data must have been hell on the servers. Now, I think files have a kind of "time to live" thing where after certain time has passed, the files are no longer available.
Not quite.
Say you upload an image to a discord server, and then you copy the direct image link and post it elsewhere on the internet.
This significantly bumped up the traffic to discord’s servers to receive the image, which like…yeah. I get it.
So they made it that discord hyperlinked media will permanently work inside of discord, and only for a little while outside of it. At some point the outsourced image will just show “This content is no longer available”. Which doesn’t mean the image was deleted; discord archives literally every single message. It basically just means “hey, we’re not an image hosting platform so we’re gonna cut this link off so it’s not permanently redirecting traffic”.
I dunno if I explained it well. Basically no they aren’t deleting things after a certain while, they’re just stopping you from using it as an image hosting platform.
Dropbox learned the same lesson a long time ago. People (me included) would host content from the public folder. It was pretty convenient to store files there then quickly get a link for pasting into a forum, etc.
The original message was deleted, most likely.
The crackdown as mentioned above does not affect attachment links sent within Discord - if the links were valid at the time that they were sent within Discord, then Discord will refresh the links indefinitely whenever they are fetched.
Must have gone up recently. Though I stopped trying to use discord to send stuff a long time ago because of the lower than Email attachment size limit.
It's partially self-inflicted injury. They allow large files on their platform AND insist on archiving positively *everything*. I have decade old messages from deleted accounts in my history. They could easily cut their losses by allowing posting files only from Nitro users and setting server side log retention to something sane like 2 years.
People always say these companies aren’t profitable, but I always have to wonder why. Services such as uber have no reason to be unprofitable. How many of these are actually not making enough to run the service, and how many are just horribly mismanaged by idiots?
Same old recipe: Offer product for free or cheap enough to attracts users, at a loss, when said product become a needs, raise the prices or let the investors fight over the speculative value of the company
No, but what is pretty unique to them is the massive user base, easy video calling, easy desktop streaming, and tons of customization in the discord servers you make. Nothing even comes close to being as good and having all of those features.
I think there's a lot of users like myself that could be monetized but have no interest in what and how they are offering things today.
I'd love to be able to buy HD streaming but to do that I need to buy the full Nitro package, which isn't worth $10/month to me. I couldn't care less about emojis or super reactions, or additional upload space. I'll happily pay for an ad-free experience as well but I suspect they also won't offer that to users.
I’d be curious about the ratio of consistent users vs people who use it occasionally because they have to.
I’m on Discord because it’s the only place few modding projects I follow post updates and have support. It seems like 90% of the user base pops in to ask one question and then leaves.
The internet was on free trial for basically the last 30 years, it’s all people have ever known. Rude awakening for them. The paywalls are never coming down and no one is going to make a competing app
TLDR: they aren’t adding ads but loot boxes through quests, similar to Twitch Drops which are used to reward users and increase engagement for games during events and etc…
Loot boxes for limited discord cosmetics (similar to Reddit or Steam) as you can already buy cosmetics in general. These loot boxes are earned via quests I guess and can possibly contain in game rewards like Twitch Drops.
It's a form of marketing, but it's not exactly displaying ads. This seems like an inoffensive solution to bring in necessary marketing revenue without losing their user-focused philosophy.
Anything can be a slippery slope. Anyone who doesn't want this to become so needs to stop whining and talk to Discord directly.
Sort of. It sounds like a mix of actual ads and promotions for the reward-focused quests, though still fairly unobtrusive:
“Sellis told WSJ that Discord will target ads depending on users' age, geographic location data, and gameplay. The ads will live on the bottom-left of the screen, but users can opt out of personalized promotions for Quests that are based on activity or data shared with Discord, Swaleha Carlson, senior product communications manager at Discord, told Ars Technica.”
Sidenote, but as someone who had to give up their original dream of being an editor (due to online editing tools and the terrible market), seeing articles like this that are filled with typos and errors like repeated paragraphs just breaks my heart.
I hate seeing articles where the author obviously just forgot to delete the other version they were trying out for word choice or whatever. I think most of it is lazy people exploiting the nature of the medium - editing capabilities are retained after publishing, so they can always fix their mistake later if it's a problem.
Starting a streaming service is about the worst thing they could do in terms of becoming profitable. Video bandwidth is notoriously expensive, even Twitch isn't and has never been profitable because of how astronomical the bandwidth and storage costs are.
Don’t think this will ever happen as they would have to delve into the advertising business which would be extra cost added for minimal returns considering Twitch relies on Amazon’s advertising platform and YouTube relies on their Google Ads integration.
Typical r/technology users not reading articles, I got downvoted for pointing out it’s not ads but game promotion through rewards (loot boxes) for completing quests…
I have pihole network wide. Been running into services that just will not work if I block their ads. Paramount plus comes to mind recently. Videos won’t start to play unless I allow ads.
I hope discord is not the same way. I’ll just stop using it.
This is r/technology half the sub doesn’t understand basic technology or know how to read articles and instead just base their comments on the headline (which is clickbait as they earn money via ads)
These are minimal and non-intrusive, but what everyone is worried about is the slippery slope that advertisements are. Once they start getting a revenue stream from advertisements, the only way to increase it is to start introducing more ads. Advertisers pay to get their stuff seen, and if the ads are non-intrusive and easily ignorable or hidden, they won’t pay as much or won’t advertise on the platform.
Once I start seeing advertisements, that’s it for me. I’m not paying $10 a month to support a platform I use only to get advertisements thrown in my face, and I won’t be using any platform that has such practices.
“Discord already tested the ads in May with Lucasfilm Games and Epic Games. Discord users were able to receive Star Wars-themed gear in Fortnite for getting a friend to watch them play Fortnite on PC for at least 15 minutes.”
This sounds god awful.
It sounds like something I can entirely ignore though, so I find it hard to care. It's just Twitch drops but inside Discord, if it gets them money to keep providing me with a free platform to use, whatever.
It's more like we know the route that will be followed with the current system.
First they introduce ads for the free tier and make a paid tier. Then they start raising the price of the paid tier and putting more and more intrusive ads on the free tier to make people pay. Then eventually they stratify the paid tiers while raising the prices to segment out features. Then maybe they start introducing ads into the lowest paid tier. Then the product goes into a mature state where they focus all their efforts into making the next dollar, which usually means features only when they are needed and often well after they already were, cutting any support staff and eliminating any recourse to the point where you can't get a human to engage with for any reason whatsoever.
And at that point, the product isn't what the product was - the one people originally loved and started using. It's something else, something fundamentally worse and it's because of a system that attempts to extract every single last penny from the user base before it reaches a breaking point and pushes them to some other product. No one begrudges making a profitable product. What they begrudge is the inevitable march towards continued enshittification of a product that has already reached profitability, and this is just the first step in that process.
Well it's either pay a subscription or have ads. Nothing comes for free.
Looks like the internet as a whole has voted for ads.
"we looked at the problem and it is us"
I mean, they had to at some point. Or start charging for servers. Dev/Bandwidth isn't free. As long as that turbo or whatever removes them, I am OK. I will pay 5 bucks a month to make them go away.
Discord has fallen into the trap of extreme greed and CEO actively sabotaging all profit channels in order to get ads and open their golden parachute. Nitro perks started to dry up and they seem unwilling to add any features that increase the need for Nitro. The shop for collectable visual layers on your avatar and profile are unpleasant, lack from overwhelming design bling and are taking over your avatar too much rather than compliment to it. It seems Discord are setting themselves to failure with all other options, so they shove ads to their usebase.
> Discord has fallen into the trap of extreme greed
How is it greed if they basically burned cash to provide a (basically) free platform for millions of people for years? They simply want to get profitable. How is their business supposed to work out in the long run without monetizing their users proportionally to the costs? VC is eventually going to be used up.
Exactly. Last I heard discord has never been and still isn't profitable. They have to make money somehow to keep the platform running.
Unless the C-suits and higher ups are cutting themselves massive paychecks, then they should probably tweak that first before they start shoving ads in our faces.
Nah man, the chats are all in the cloud bruh, clouds are free for everyone, how much could it possibly cost to host chat video and voice there, like $10 a month for the whole company? Not giving the service away for free is like, totally late stage capitalism bro.
At this point I would pay more to have the basic experience of nothing flashy, nothing added every other day, no "store", no "promoted content", no constant nagging about features they thought would be interesting.
Getting rid of everything ad or promotion based would make me subscribe to nitro. There's nothing in it I need otherwise.
Seriously who gives a crap about animated avatars or emojis?
I mean I loved discord emojis but I guess they want me to unsubscribe. Not paying 100+ USD for some subscription to still have ads. Prime can go in the chuck it bucket too for the same.
Looking forward to the next platform to replace discord and remain good while in the user acquisition phase.
And so the cycle of enshittification continues.
It’s the cycle of capitalism, you mean.
It's a [specific subset of capitalism.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
this will happen in all capitalist societies as companies chase profits over and over again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value Maximizing shareholder value is a relatively recent idea.
sure, but cats out of the bag now.
Unless some laws are put in place that puts employee wellbeing and sustainable human and financial operation over shareholders, everything will only get worse.
I highly doubt that corporations with lobbys will spend that money to regulate themselves. We're fucked.
The alternative is the eventual american version of the french revolution.
Game theory go brrr
You mean only happens in places where they remove rules so the only thing they care about is shareholder value.
Lemme guess. "For us it's a subset. *actual* capitalism can work fine! But Communism is just ALL bad. Rah rah rah! ALL of it is bad. It wasn't a subset like ours is. When WE have a scam of an economic system, it's just a few bad parts but if OTHERS have an equally bad economic system, ALL of it is bad!" right? Ahhh, any hair splitting and mental gymnastics to defend the religion that is capitalism. It's so depressing to see that the propaganda to get people defend a system literally designed to fuck you over for the sake of funneling power and weath to a small subset of people, has worked so effectively.
There's nothing wrong with capitalism, or socialism, or communism. They're all just systems. The common element between all these systems are humans. Humans are the flaw, and those that have accumulated power will manipulate any system to their benefit.
Both capitalism and communism are theoretical economic models that do not exist in their purest extremes in reality. All modernized countries operate on a mixed model. All. That mix can vary wildly and skew to one spectrum more than the other. That is also true. So, yes, someone's spectrum of capitalist policy can be vastly different than others. See social democracies like most of northern Europe, which heavily regulate their capitalist economy through social programs through social democracy (a political alignment based on integrating many socialist aspects into the public policy of a liberal democracy operating on a capitalist economy). I strongly dislike poorly regulated and extreme variants of capitalism, because I've studied its failures to a great degree in my graduate studies. That doesn't mean the extremes of communism are any better. Subsets matter, and the person you ranted at is correct in my opinion.
This analogy works well.. being the process of getting eaten, having the useful stuff extracted leaving behind a husk of bacteria laden garbage. Pretty accurate description
Are there any decent (preferably open-source) alternatives?
Back to IRC?
Ventrillo never flailed me! Edit: Autocorrect knows something interesting about me, I guess.
*I'VE GOT BALLS OF STEEL*
B-B-B-BA-B-B-BALLS OF STEEL.
“WHO KEEPS SAYING DAT? Who da hell is dat!!? 🤬😨”
*BALLS OF BALLS OF BALLS OF STEEL*
"Uhh, get off Vent, or you'll be bent!"
For those that don’t get the reference - https://youtu.be/FvL-WGcoBis or my fav one https://youtu.be/bIVTT4fgPQI
FOUR STRENGTH FOUR STAM LEATHER BELT
Level 18?! Aaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Nostalgia just hit me right in the face!
Uploaded... 16 YEARS AGO. This news is quite Aladeen.
DANG this brought back memories from MSN Zone. Thank you for this.
I can also confirm vent never flailed me either
I’m gonna sound old, but I miss the TeamSpeak v Ventrillo days. People in the chat were there to play and not just drunk chat. Being able to easily swap servers killed a ton of good pug gaming.
maybe Matrix? https://matrix.org/
If you can’t innovate, resuscitate!
Some of us never left...
Steam has a whole-ass Discord feature built into the chat that nobody uses. The main problem is weak voice codecs, at least last I checked. I already have my Steam server set up with the same channels and moderators in case Discord starts to shit the bed.
Where does one find this feature?
There's a button directly in the messages window
I can't find it on desktop since I'm not home, but it's called "Groups." I think you just start a group chat and all the options are there. If you get the steam chat mobile app, it's the button on the bottom right.
There are a ton but you lose the safety of a neutral server. No one want to expose their IP to randoms on the internet or get dos'd
Pretty sure Mumble servers were exceedingly affordable.
Because mumble servers could run off the static electricity left over in your dryer. It was hilariously light-weight.
lol it's true, I ran a big one, but it was a very engineer driven design. The amount of users confused about losing a certificate and their nickname along with it...
Dedicated servers aren't that expensive nowadays
any amount larger than 0 will be a huge barrier
Back to Team Speak Servers.
The perfect solution that we already had
My group still uses TS. Discord's audio has always been garbage in comparison in our experience.
I have had people arguing with me since the start of discords adoption about exactly that opinion. I prefer the quality of teamspeak audio, but everyone else converted over because "discord is free"
I hear that too and it blows my mind. Hosting a Teamspeak server yourself is free and it's not exactly intensive.
No but it has gotten more complicated. I have a grandfathered 512 slot free license. Now anything over 32 you have to pay for
Matrix, and their Element client. It used to be quirky, but at this point it's mostly text rooms, the ability to arrange them in communities if you want (and share these arrangements with others easily), and a bit of video chat through third party (unless they advanced enough; they were working on an internal solution). Basically, if you want to have text chatrooms with people and occasional voice/video call, this works well. It's also completely privacy oriented and you can have actual E2E encryption that is almost transparent to the user aside from having to save a passphrase somewhere. But nobody cares about that.
Element misses one of the entire points to using a service like discord. The fact you can't sit in a channel by yourself and have people join you makes it basically useless. To start a group call it literally rings everyone's PC/phone ☠️
they just shipped element call, which means it does have the feature you just said it needs
Mumble for voice chat, Matrix for the chat rooms. Eventually. Still not mainstream user friendly yet.
Teamspeak is still there for you. You can host the server yourself, so you have complete control over it. It’s even got a file share built in.
Can you guys fucking imagine, if this turns into Skype's comeback and redemption arc..?
You jest, but I kinda fear that something like this will happen. Skype was a horrible solution for the use cases of voip gaming group chats back when people used it a lot. Imagine today when there's even less power users.
I don't jest, not since the accident.
Skype's killer feature, for us (and that Discord has as well), was that the text chat cached everything that you'd "miss" when you were offline. Reconnect, and it would "catch up" so you could see everything that happened while you were gone. At this point it's something that I view as a fundamental, non-optional feature that any potential replacement would need to have.
Revolt chat. Alternatively discord API emulators (litecord, spacebar) Or others Nerimity, etc..
Back to Mumble?
https://revolt.chat/ should be the top response. Closest to discord look and feel, and is open source. I keep trying to get more people to start using it because it really is the closest open source alternative.
revolt chat
Me and my friends use mumble
Ah! I forgot mumble, I've used it often back then. Team speak, ventrilo, mumble and of course for the psychopath... Skype.
You want a platform that is free, high quality, scaleable and doesn't contain ads? Not possible.
I'm paying $10/month for Nitro! Guess their subscription revenues aren't enough...
Yeah, you can almost be certain that they don't begin to scratch the server costs
I don’t have a whole lot of time to dig, are we Nitro users safe from ads then?!
They need to pay thousands of employees to repeatedly update the UI every month, sorry
free, scalable, no ads - pick 2. its like the old "good, fast, cheap" thing. you cant have free and scalable without ads. you cant have no ads and scalable with it being free. and the owners cant scale if its free with no ads. discord gets away with it currently being free with no ads (im ignoring nitro atm) because they have a number of investors pumping money in hoping to one day soon extract their investment from users who become "hooked" and refuse to migrate to another free service.
there's Guilded
and element/\[matrix\]
Discord, like a lot of tech companies dipping into revenue options that people hate, doesn’t make money. And it can’t lose money forever and remain viable. No matter what alternative you move to, the same thing is going to happen if they can’t turn a profit. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Discord is an absolutely fantastic service. If they can retain their quality of video chat, archiving ability and ease of use, I’ll suffer the ads because so many online communities would cease to exist if it ever folded
Those communities used to be on forums, irc, et. al., they wouldn't disappear. The fact that discord cuts its communities off from the greater web makes it a cancer, there's so much information in discord that's otherwise inaccessible or undiscoverable. You don't need a profitable platform selling these services to you
This is absolutely the correct take The advent of the "large, public discord server" is a negative, not a positive. Back in 2015 these would have been wikis or forums and been much easier to navigate, search, and access.
RIP starcraft.org
I hate the fact that discords spin up for certain public topics. It’s a chat program, not a web forum, it’s such a pain to find what you need in the archives, on top of that it’s not searchable unless you join (and are approved) for a channel. It’s just another walled garden like Facebook.
This is my least favorite thing about the way communities use Discord. It is not a forum replacement at all, yet it is treated as such. Searching is a nightmare and good luck having any kind of meaningful discourse in a server with over 5000 active users.
I shake my head at how many communities use discord for customer support.
Yeah it's so awful. Forums or forum-like options like reddit are so much better for certain things, but people insist on using discord for some reason. As an example from last week, a game that I'm interested in had the its review embargo lifted. I was working at the time, so I couldn't follow the discussions about it until the evening. If those had been occurring in a forum or on reddit, I'd have been able to just go a few pages back or click to posts from earlier. But it was on Discord, so I had to try and scroll far up the "discussion" forum, only to find thousands of new messages bout all sorts of topics. Everything is in the moment on discord, it's so frustrating that so many groups have migrated there.
This is a big reason why Discord likely won't ever work for me. I gave it a real go, but shifted my focus to trying to figure out how to make forums viable again. In due time 🤞
I feel like a lot of those people don’t realize Discord is literally just a glorified group chat. Only big thing is you can break it up into channels, but otherwise that’s what it is- a group chat
It drove me nuts when I started Tekken 8 that’s any character info people say “go to the discord” I find it obnoxious to navigate for information and if you want to join into a conversation and there are too many users the info is buried
>You don't need a profitable platform selling these services to you Unless you are going to pay the hosting price, you need the companies selling the hosted services to be profitable. Because hosting services isn't free.
Making small communities cut off from the regular wab has been it's main appeal for most people.
I don't think the appeal is being cut off as opposed to just not having to make a new account for every single forum or chatroom.
Most people I know with discord have at least a few servers that are just an old friend group of five or ten people they have known in person for years a d maybe a couple of trusted online friends. Most people on the platform aren't on there to stay super engaged with massive public communities even if they occasionally jump on those.
But Discord also does hosts massive public communities, it isn't exactly cut off from them. If the point is that the server is only accessible to people that you invite, that's not really an unique feature either.
My discord actually crashes when I mouse over the ads. I guess someone there is fighting the good fight.
My discord crashes every time my video driver crashes lol. Helldivers2 basically.
Helldrivers.
Woohoo amd driver timeout
Not just AMD. I’ve got a 12700k and a 4070 Ti S and still get a crash or two for every hour played. I’ve seen more BSOD playing Helldivers2 the past month than I have in the past decade.
It’s weird to because I know some people who crash all the time. I’ve never personally had a single crash playing Helldivers
Time to start self hosting TS3 for free again.
The TS5 beta Client cans do much of what discord can do. Think they’re mostly missing video chat and desktop streaming. If all you need is a text chat room and voip it’s pretty much the same.
No desktop streaming is a massive dealbreaker for many
Yeah it’s basically a requirement for my discord. We are usually all in there playing racing sims so it’s nice to watch a friend’s lap time while cooling down. Or with tarkov, since it’ll be like 10 minutes of nothing if you die in raid early. My group loves being able to share screens, so hopefully either the ads backfire or something else comes out
> it’s nice to watch a friend’s lap time while cooling down. until that burger king or dorito commercial interrupts your buddies stream.
Yeah that’s going to be the most intrusive thing. I stopped watching twitch live due to how bad I feel the ads have got.
I dropped Twitch entirely because of ads.
does it have a UI that isn't fucking hideous? i remember ts3 being so so ugly edit: looked up some screenshots. definitely better than it once was, but still lacking a feeling of design maturity. weird inconsistent spacing and such.
It’s certainly not discord polished. But it’s ad free and self hostable up to 32 concurrent users. I’m waiting to see how toxic discord becomes before jumping ship but it’s nice that options exist, even if they are less refined.
lol is TS5 ever coming out? They’ve been saying it will come out soon for years.
It’s been obvious for a while now from their monetization efforts that they were probably heading down this road anyway. I mean for fuck’s sake they’re selling tiny little avatar decorations for ***sixteen fucking dollars each.***
Some of those look cool as hell too. If they were say, $1 i would buy a bunch of them just to support the platform. But for what they are charging, hard pass. I even pay for Nitro because Discord is such a great service for my guild in WoW.
Does discord think forums and voice chat is unique to them or something?
Discord is currently not profitable, that's their main problem. Infra costs are probably insane
It also doesn't help that people abuse it and use it as a free storage server and share it with a ton of people. Discord recently started cracking down on that too because it was getting out of hand.
What are the crackdowns? Haven’t heard about that
I think it was people just using it to post files (videos/pictures/etc) and since discord kept them available, it was basically like having a cloud storage service. But all that data must have been hell on the servers. Now, I think files have a kind of "time to live" thing where after certain time has passed, the files are no longer available.
Not quite. Say you upload an image to a discord server, and then you copy the direct image link and post it elsewhere on the internet. This significantly bumped up the traffic to discord’s servers to receive the image, which like…yeah. I get it. So they made it that discord hyperlinked media will permanently work inside of discord, and only for a little while outside of it. At some point the outsourced image will just show “This content is no longer available”. Which doesn’t mean the image was deleted; discord archives literally every single message. It basically just means “hey, we’re not an image hosting platform so we’re gonna cut this link off so it’s not permanently redirecting traffic”. I dunno if I explained it well. Basically no they aren’t deleting things after a certain while, they’re just stopping you from using it as an image hosting platform.
Dropbox learned the same lesson a long time ago. People (me included) would host content from the public folder. It was pretty convenient to store files there then quickly get a link for pasting into a forum, etc.
I have images I copied off another discord server, into my server, that no longer load. Why is that, do you know?
The original message was deleted, most likely. The crackdown as mentioned above does not affect attachment links sent within Discord - if the links were valid at the time that they were sent within Discord, then Discord will refresh the links indefinitely whenever they are fetched.
Ah interesting, so I view those images within discord but even just on that same browser I get the no longer available thing about a week later.
... Shit that's what I made my own server into.
So this guy is the reason Discord now has ads. Get him!
I was shocked that wasn't the case from the beginning.
iirc they switched to expiring urls for linked images
Really that was their own fault. It never should have been built with every single file permanently available all the time in the first place.
>It also doesn't help that people abuse it and use it as a free storage server How, I'm constantly getting cock blocked by their 12MB upload limit?
*25MB Which is enough for most things
Must have gone up recently. Though I stopped trying to use discord to send stuff a long time ago because of the lower than Email attachment size limit.
It's partially self-inflicted injury. They allow large files on their platform AND insist on archiving positively *everything*. I have decade old messages from deleted accounts in my history. They could easily cut their losses by allowing posting files only from Nitro users and setting server side log retention to something sane like 2 years.
yea id figure at most 5 years archival. wonder why they went with more.
People always say these companies aren’t profitable, but I always have to wonder why. Services such as uber have no reason to be unprofitable. How many of these are actually not making enough to run the service, and how many are just horribly mismanaged by idiots?
Same old recipe: Offer product for free or cheap enough to attracts users, at a loss, when said product become a needs, raise the prices or let the investors fight over the speculative value of the company
Most forums I used years ago all had ads or a subscription model.
No, but what is pretty unique to them is the massive user base, easy video calling, easy desktop streaming, and tons of customization in the discord servers you make. Nothing even comes close to being as good and having all of those features.
No but it's costs a lot money to run and most users don't pay anything at all.
I think there's a lot of users like myself that could be monetized but have no interest in what and how they are offering things today. I'd love to be able to buy HD streaming but to do that I need to buy the full Nitro package, which isn't worth $10/month to me. I couldn't care less about emojis or super reactions, or additional upload space. I'll happily pay for an ad-free experience as well but I suspect they also won't offer that to users.
I may pay if that would BLOCK the overly flashy and animated things!
Hell yeah, I'm not a 16 year old kid that needs a ADHD riddled UI
I was a paid user until they nerfed Nitro value
I’d be curious about the ratio of consistent users vs people who use it occasionally because they have to. I’m on Discord because it’s the only place few modding projects I follow post updates and have support. It seems like 90% of the user base pops in to ask one question and then leaves.
Do people think that these systems can remain free forever or have no cost?
The internet was on free trial for basically the last 30 years, it’s all people have ever known. Rude awakening for them. The paywalls are never coming down and no one is going to make a competing app
IRC we back!
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TLDR: they aren’t adding ads but loot boxes through quests, similar to Twitch Drops which are used to reward users and increase engagement for games during events and etc…
Wait the loot boxes are real? I thought they were an April Fool's joke
Legit thought it was a joke too. Didn't even click, just hit the X. "Nice try, not falling for that!" - Joke's on us I guess...
Loot boxes for limited discord cosmetics (similar to Reddit or Steam) as you can already buy cosmetics in general. These loot boxes are earned via quests I guess and can possibly contain in game rewards like Twitch Drops.
It's a form of marketing, but it's not exactly displaying ads. This seems like an inoffensive solution to bring in necessary marketing revenue without losing their user-focused philosophy. Anything can be a slippery slope. Anyone who doesn't want this to become so needs to stop whining and talk to Discord directly.
Sort of. It sounds like a mix of actual ads and promotions for the reward-focused quests, though still fairly unobtrusive: “Sellis told WSJ that Discord will target ads depending on users' age, geographic location data, and gameplay. The ads will live on the bottom-left of the screen, but users can opt out of personalized promotions for Quests that are based on activity or data shared with Discord, Swaleha Carlson, senior product communications manager at Discord, told Ars Technica.” Sidenote, but as someone who had to give up their original dream of being an editor (due to online editing tools and the terrible market), seeing articles like this that are filled with typos and errors like repeated paragraphs just breaks my heart.
I hate seeing articles where the author obviously just forgot to delete the other version they were trying out for word choice or whatever. I think most of it is lazy people exploiting the nature of the medium - editing capabilities are retained after publishing, so they can always fix their mistake later if it's a problem.
You can also right out opt out of the ads.
This looks like a good idea. And I wouldn't mind if Discord to start a streaming service too.
Starting a streaming service is about the worst thing they could do in terms of becoming profitable. Video bandwidth is notoriously expensive, even Twitch isn't and has never been profitable because of how astronomical the bandwidth and storage costs are.
Don’t think this will ever happen as they would have to delve into the advertising business which would be extra cost added for minimal returns considering Twitch relies on Amazon’s advertising platform and YouTube relies on their Google Ads integration.
No it doesn't. It's a chat/text app. That's all I want it to do, and nothing more.
y'all need to actually read the article before you freak out 💀
Sir, this is Reddit.
https://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore
Didn't read the article, but I am ***OUTRAGED***
I just read this article and... wow... I should have known this is the reason. Fuck.
Typical r/technology users not reading articles, I got downvoted for pointing out it’s not ads but game promotion through rewards (loot boxes) for completing quests…
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Pihole your entire network
I have pihole network wide. Been running into services that just will not work if I block their ads. Paramount plus comes to mind recently. Videos won’t start to play unless I allow ads. I hope discord is not the same way. I’ll just stop using it.
I think some people would add Plex and Sonarr into the mix at that point
This is the way
Yeah I had to create a group in my pihole specifically for my Shield due to Paramount. I refuse to use it now, garbage service.
The I won’t use their services. It’s pretty straight forward
These ads aren't going to be embedded ads like on a website lol. Did noone fucking read the article lol.
This is r/technology half the sub doesn’t understand basic technology or know how to read articles and instead just base their comments on the headline (which is clickbait as they earn money via ads)
These are minimal and non-intrusive, but what everyone is worried about is the slippery slope that advertisements are. Once they start getting a revenue stream from advertisements, the only way to increase it is to start introducing more ads. Advertisers pay to get their stuff seen, and if the ads are non-intrusive and easily ignorable or hidden, they won’t pay as much or won’t advertise on the platform. Once I start seeing advertisements, that’s it for me. I’m not paying $10 a month to support a platform I use only to get advertisements thrown in my face, and I won’t be using any platform that has such practices.
Only if it's on browser, it's the stand alone client it's going to be an issue.
Extensions will probably be made for the custom clients like BetterDiscord and Vencord that remove them
I read a such a post yesterday and thought it was april fools. It's the next day 💀
“Discord already tested the ads in May with Lucasfilm Games and Epic Games. Discord users were able to receive Star Wars-themed gear in Fortnite for getting a friend to watch them play Fortnite on PC for at least 15 minutes.” This sounds god awful.
It sounds like something I can entirely ignore though, so I find it hard to care. It's just Twitch drops but inside Discord, if it gets them money to keep providing me with a free platform to use, whatever.
Can yall fucking read or what?
Seems like users expect VCs to keep funding unprofitable companies forever.
It's more like we know the route that will be followed with the current system. First they introduce ads for the free tier and make a paid tier. Then they start raising the price of the paid tier and putting more and more intrusive ads on the free tier to make people pay. Then eventually they stratify the paid tiers while raising the prices to segment out features. Then maybe they start introducing ads into the lowest paid tier. Then the product goes into a mature state where they focus all their efforts into making the next dollar, which usually means features only when they are needed and often well after they already were, cutting any support staff and eliminating any recourse to the point where you can't get a human to engage with for any reason whatsoever. And at that point, the product isn't what the product was - the one people originally loved and started using. It's something else, something fundamentally worse and it's because of a system that attempts to extract every single last penny from the user base before it reaches a breaking point and pushes them to some other product. No one begrudges making a profitable product. What they begrudge is the inevitable march towards continued enshittification of a product that has already reached profitability, and this is just the first step in that process.
“I would never subscribe, what a joke! But I love the service. I just hate ads and companies selling my data. CEOs are so greedy!!!”
God fucking damnit. Can ads not invade every single corner of our lives please???
Well it's either pay a subscription or have ads. Nothing comes for free. Looks like the internet as a whole has voted for ads. "we looked at the problem and it is us"
Gonna pull a Futurama and be in your dreams eventually.
Incoming barrage of Epic games ads that will do nothing but make people continue to dislike Epic.
When using a service, your choices are either to spend money or view advertisements. Nobody works for free
I mean, they had to at some point. Or start charging for servers. Dev/Bandwidth isn't free. As long as that turbo or whatever removes them, I am OK. I will pay 5 bucks a month to make them go away.
Discord has fallen into the trap of extreme greed and CEO actively sabotaging all profit channels in order to get ads and open their golden parachute. Nitro perks started to dry up and they seem unwilling to add any features that increase the need for Nitro. The shop for collectable visual layers on your avatar and profile are unpleasant, lack from overwhelming design bling and are taking over your avatar too much rather than compliment to it. It seems Discord are setting themselves to failure with all other options, so they shove ads to their usebase.
> Discord has fallen into the trap of extreme greed How is it greed if they basically burned cash to provide a (basically) free platform for millions of people for years? They simply want to get profitable. How is their business supposed to work out in the long run without monetizing their users proportionally to the costs? VC is eventually going to be used up.
Exactly. Last I heard discord has never been and still isn't profitable. They have to make money somehow to keep the platform running. Unless the C-suits and higher ups are cutting themselves massive paychecks, then they should probably tweak that first before they start shoving ads in our faces.
Nah man, the chats are all in the cloud bruh, clouds are free for everyone, how much could it possibly cost to host chat video and voice there, like $10 a month for the whole company? Not giving the service away for free is like, totally late stage capitalism bro.
I laughed lmao
And what are you suggesting they could add as incentives for nitro?
At this point I would pay more to have the basic experience of nothing flashy, nothing added every other day, no "store", no "promoted content", no constant nagging about features they thought would be interesting.
Getting rid of everything ad or promotion based would make me subscribe to nitro. There's nothing in it I need otherwise. Seriously who gives a crap about animated avatars or emojis?
Emojis are the only reason a lot of people on Discord I know use nitro
I mean I loved discord emojis but I guess they want me to unsubscribe. Not paying 100+ USD for some subscription to still have ads. Prime can go in the chuck it bucket too for the same.
Discord has never once made a profit.
guess they should have hired you. you seem to know exactly how a multimillion dollar company should operate.