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

The "enshittification" continues

Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.

Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.

I honestly don't mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I'm not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.

Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.

If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.

And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It's astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.

This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.

Oh god, here you go the next "enshitification" victim... Matrix isn't really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.

So it's just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.

If you don't like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It's pretty simple.

Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.

Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn't one of them. It's not like they're forcing every server to setup paid channels.

Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.

This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.

I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing

First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.

While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.

If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.

Also, I’d much rather this than ads ngl

I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.

As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don't mind these things. It's when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.

Lol pay for exclusive memes, I'm out guys

Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/

I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I'm really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long "birthday celebration" (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.

Now that I've started playing around with my own lemmy instance I guess it's fitting for possibly my last beehaw post to reflect my first.

I see discord’s business model is still burning cash trying to be the next slack steam zoom reddit patreon

Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.

Did that fucknugget ruining Twitter cause EVERYONE to have the same hair brained idea?

As long as daily usage is not affected, I don't think this should be a problem.

Maybe this could be used as a way to pay mods/admins for their work as well.

Meh, I couldn't care less. Never used anything but the basic features, and if anyone wants to throw money at them, that's their choice.

As long as I'm not rate limited when using the regular chat in the free tier, I'm good.

I won't pay for anything that discord offers. I understand that companies are there to make money but they do not have anything of actual value to sell me. I don't care about emojis or Nitro or whatever. I just want a chat client that allows me to communicate with people I play certain games with. In-game chat can do this as well and I will simply go back to that if the monetization of discord gets to be too big of a problem. It's less convenient and sometimes sucks when folks are on different platforms but it's free.

Oh yeah sure, this would be cool and all if they didn't screw 99% of their users out of their usernames first.

Hmm. This makes too much sense to me for me to be mad. Discord can easily compete with patreon the way I see it. Obviously, they could fuck it up and ruin the whole platform but if their team has more than a few brain cells it should work out fine right?

Capitalism claiming it's next victim.

"microtransactions" "exclusivities". Average silicon valley update gruel. The best that comes out of this is probably competition, while i like discord basic featureset is solid, the UI is genuinly one of the worst things i have experienced.

Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell

Well, this seems like powerful motivation for me to eventually find a free open source positive alternative to Discord, while ignoring Discord in the meantime. I would love to bypass their enshittification phase entirely.

Will the memes be immune to screenshotting and OBS? lmao

Yaaaaaaaaaay

While I think 10% is a bit steep I don't think this is as bad as getting rid of the discriminators at the end of usernames.