Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

hot take - it’s a good thing discord can monetise without turning to adverts or “curated” feeds.

How will this be any different from how current servers are run? Rather than getting a special role after donating that unlocks hidden channels, they're making it more obvious by saying which channels are subscriber-only.

It seems more of a competition against Patreon than anything else. Nobody is going to use this to hide discussion and share subscriber-only secrets, it's definitely for content creators that want to sell early access and such.

So this is adding subscriptions to servers, and allowing server owners to sell exclusive content. I don't see this as a negative if the server owners get some of the profits. To me, it seems they are trying to take market shares from services such as Patreon with the move. It might indicate the beginning of trying to close their ecosystem and forcing users to go through their channels for anything related to subscriptions/income. This would be a negative in my opinion, further closing off and fragmenting social communities on the internet. Let's hope this doesn't happen, but at least there are alternatives available if things get out of hand.