Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
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.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: "What's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
At least tell us what you made up lol
I've set up matrix and element to replace discord. I even bridged discord so my users can even still talk to people they have on there.
But damn, does it feel good to self host shit again like in the days of TS3 and Mumble.
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.
This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.
I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).
I don't think I'm the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I'm kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won't hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.
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.
I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It's a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.
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.
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it's way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I'm chatting with my friends, I don't NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I'm not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It's not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn't matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it's lack of voice chat is a bummer
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don't want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels... private. I know they have access to all the data, but it's not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It's my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That's like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it's not indexed and searchable?
I don't get the sentiment.
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn't be here on Lemmy because you would've never heard about it and couldn't search about it, or reddit etc.
It's not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn't get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can't help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only... now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can't see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can't help you, sorry.
This is not how it's been used for the vast majority.
Companies and big communities use it as a forum, sharing knowledge more or less important.
For example, i dabble in modding games, nowadays i need to join a game discord server and ask there hoping that someone is kind enough to repeat for the nth time something asked already, probably several time a week.
Most often than not, you don't get an answer due to several factors, one of which is that if you ask when the people that can help are not online, nobody answer really.
On a forum you could have searched your question and find some answer anyway.
THAT is a very big problem. Knowledge is walled in and the search provided is the equivalent of digging in the sand with a spoon.
use XMPP or Matrix.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it's all XML) which isn't ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn't work. It seems fine and I think it's open-source, but I don't know a lot about it.
I've heard about Matrix but haven't tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
This couldn't be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn't mean it's dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I'm an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn't even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
Not all discussions should be public.
Are XMPP or Matrix really any more seachable? I'm all in on FOSS, clearly, but do they fix that complaint? I feel like the real solution is separating chat and longer term info, and putting the longer term info on a wiki or other public and indexable format.
Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
This is the problem with discord.
What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos? Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn't even be here arguing with me because you would've never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Not sure what is so hard to grasp about that.
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.
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - "Enshittification". They're now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Yep, we've seen that before
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.
I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It's the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.
It's the beginning of the entire platform turning to shit. Because it's never enough money. More ads, more tracking, more locked in features.
This is the cycle of monetization. It gives you a small revenue stream, but only until users get fed up and leave. Because it's never enough money coming in. More more more.
I suggest you Google "slippery slope fallacy".
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.
Sure are a lot of tech companies seemingly speedrunning their self-destruction right now. Is there something in the water in the SF?
On a more serious note, Discord has always been mediocre. Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware. Being able to monitor just the specific channels you're interested in is infinitely better than being forced to use servers wholesale given it's near impossible to keep an eye on one at a time beyond notifications -- which are clumsy at best. But for how useful that is, not having access to things like spoiler tags, most voip (and all video related) stuff really limits its practical use.
Oh well.
Higher interest rates have meant that investors now have better things to invest in. If you aren't profitable now, you need to get profitable soon because VC money is going to get a lot harder to find.
Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware
If this were free software, someone would probably have already picked it up and continued development of it.
You can select which channels you’re interested in in Discord now (though maybe it’s not enabled by default for all servers yet?). I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
I like Matrix, my friends and I had a lot of fun with Element. Didn't stick because of course everyone else was still on Discord but Matrix works as well as... Well, Lemmy
Since they introduced super reactions, which nobody needs, I've become a bit worried, because I live on discord.
Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.
I misread this as "give Reddit a try" and thought you were insane.
Revolt seems pretty promising. Info is kinda scarce, are they a purely volunteer driven product?
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
Oh God anything but ads
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.
Yea, I don't have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.
I like discord. The name change hubbub was..a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server....cool? How does that impact me?
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.
What did people use before discord?
For voice, TeamSpeak
For text chat, IRC
For forums, phpBB or any other forum software
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn't fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can't find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Discord just switches it's business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn't killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it's trying to kill Patreon.
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
I never used Discord but used google hangouts before switching to Telegram and Matrix (the former for family and the latter for everything else).
Discord provides free hosting.
Everyone talking about alternatives like Revolt or Mumble does not realize how big of a deal that actually is.
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack's approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/
Do they even have a consumer version? I've seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is "Business - $5/month/user". I'm not an organization and while that's not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I'm paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My "senior executive discussions" consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there's even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
If you'd rather use another client you can use any of these listed here: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
To use Element on the web you just need to go to:
https://app.element.io/
Absolutely. I use the free consumer-tier version every day. Just download the app, sign up for a Matrix account, and go.
Lol pay for exclusive memes, I'm out guys
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.
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.
I'm still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don't care at all about paid memes.
I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki
For real. Crowdsec, a crowd sourced blocklist / basic IPS system doesnt really have a living forum. You ask question through unindexable discord threads.... so often times I cant just google an issue i am having with the app. I have to open up my damn Discord account while at work to get answers.
Its awful.
Did that fucknugget ruining Twitter cause EVERYONE to have the same hair brained idea?
Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.
companies running unprofitable social media (read: not worth the 100s of millions of investor money for some fuckin basic chat or forums) figured out they cant ever become super profitable like theyd hoped and try to monetize to the max while they can
I don’t mind it. It’s outing all the companies who are run by people who lack critical thinking skills. Thanks for letting me know which corners of the internet to avoid
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 only use it because my friends like to for when we game or watch stuff together. But, never bothered to actually install the app or software.
Unless it gets in the way of that don't see people moving.
Yeah, if it keeps the basic functions free and without restriction I am good with adding some extra glitter like that.
The issue is that once they start heading down that path, they will probably start enshittifying the experience for non-paying users.
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.
Capitalism claiming it's next victim.
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?
vomits
Oh yeah sure, this would be cool and all if they didn't screw 99% of their users out of their usernames first.
The usernames stuff was stupid, but pray tell. How did users get "screwed out of their usernames".
Did you know that when choosing a username you could just do your name and the number sans the hashtag and it's functionality exactly the same as before.
It was a stupid change and unnecessary, but nobody got screwed out of anything.
"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.
It's not just me then... I consider myself tech savvy and I have such a hard time finding the message that notified me. Getting back to an old message is just impossible for me.
Well... Maybe I am getting old.
Dont concider yourself alone, ive theorized this "shittification" for a while now, as its partly a phenomenon partly entangled with next generation. Tech companies will cater to youth, the ones with the most engagement in online platforms. Once that company then achieves monopoly status. Youth thrives in its tribal behavior of either belonging or not. Then these companies basically have free reign try to put as much shit into it to prolong the usage and hours spend because they will know that regardless people will use it or you are out. Snapchat and new reddit UI exemplify exactly that.
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
I heard about "guilded" but i don't have direct experience.
We could always go back to ventrilo servers for voice chats! I miss hopping into vent with my WoW guild for raids back in the day.
Matrix is the ultimate alternative to Discord! It's a FOSS protocol, which has numerous server and client implementations available—much like the ActivityPub protocol.
Will the memes be immune to screenshotting and OBS? lmao
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.
There's Matrix/Element and now Revolt
It's very new, but that's one. Spacebar was one but seems to be stuck in limbo. Then yeah there's Revolt I guess.
@Nero if it's from the same dev as Nertivia, I wouldn't trust them
Revolt is one, and the app is basically a clone of Discord.
Maybe this is a sign people need to stop expecting everything on the Internet to be free?
If you’re selling my data, it’s not free
@PositiveNoise @dirtmayor Have you tried revolt.chat ?
I'll check out revolt.chat. Thanks for the suggestion!
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.
Here's the thing... If your name was gamers_mate#2002 before the change, after the change you could make your name gamers_mate2002 and functionally nothing would change.
As I've said elsewhere, the user name stuff was stupid, but it's not that big of a deal.
Yaaaaaaaaaay
The "enshittification" continues
Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.
Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.
I'm loving Matrix.
Revolt.chat is far nicer than Matrix usability-wise
bad idea when revolt exists and is basically exactly the same software but open source and self hosted
Second this. Revolt looks exactly like Discord except it's open source and privacy focused.
https://revolt.chat