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Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

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Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#251
post #126
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to me the question is: How many too-young-to-work online gamers are there who have parents willing to pay for their subscriptions / games / in-game purchases? We already know that these kids who don't have enough (or any of their own) money have a computer, internet access, and the ability to purchase all of the peripherals and a game needed to play. What's making companies stop and say, "We don't think the peop…

I certainly expect children to stop being born. Looking at how expensive it is to raise even one, I quickly see it become an upper class thing to be able to afford a child.

The irony is that as people grow richer, they tend to have less children.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#252
post #196

As much as I want something like discord to succeed, it throws all cautions to the wind with user data. There is rentention in two databases of every chat message sent. If somebody ever gets access they could crawl all their info and learn most of their private life through it. Steam on the other hand will not retain more than 5ish of the last messages. I'd say it's fine aslong as users could set a duration for their…

There is no way to massively delete your past messages. In addition to that: 1. If you close a private message window and are not friends with the person or share a server with them, there is no way to open it again, so you've lost access to that chat history and can't delete your messages from there. 2. If you get banned from a server, you lose access to that server's history and can't delete your messages from it.…

I'm a bit confused about 1. First, you can't private message someone if you're not friends and/or don't share a server. Second, all DMs are placed under the DM menu and are visible until you delete them.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#253
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odds are that their reporting and content moderation services are outsourced to companies that are given guidelines and follow them strictly, with no room for interpretation or nuance. No one in that support org is going to go cross-reference your account details and look that stuff up because (1) they hopefully don't have access to it and (2) no offence, you're not important enough to get some kind of special treatm…

There shouldn't be a reason you get banned from a chat client except for abuse. I don't see your point making sense except from maybe a sheltered millenials curated softy platform perspective shaped by the centralized services like YouTube and Twitter.

If their TOS says you have to be over 13 to use the service, and someone reports you for saying "I am 9 years old", and that goes in front of an outsourced content moderation team that has been given rules that say "you have to be over 13 years old to use the service" then what do you think will happen?

You will be banned/removed.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#254
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree (to a degree) . Everyone i know kicked and screamed about switching from Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble. I feel like it eventually dominated not because it was easy to dump existing solutions, but because existing solutions were poorly designed by comparison. No mobile, horrid chat, required install, poor voip quality. Discord came along with a better offering and it still was a tough switch. With that said, i agre…

> Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior. Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable. If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.

But even if you gave me a free mumble service, it still wouldn't be comparable to Discord - at least when i was using Discord.

The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#255
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree (to a degree) . Everyone i know kicked and screamed about switching from Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble. I feel like it eventually dominated not because it was easy to dump existing solutions, but because existing solutions were poorly designed by comparison. No mobile, horrid chat, required install, poor voip quality. Discord came along with a better offering and it still was a tough switch. With that said, i agre…

>required install I'd rather install something compared to using the "webapp" version if it used 30 MB of RAM rather than 3000MB.

Good for you, but it's still optional for the right crowd. More specifically, you don't have to. Users can connect to your gaming group with zero friction. Not even signup! (at least, back in the day, i'm unsure what it's like not)

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#256
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were finishing a HipChat migration to Slack in January. HipChat doesn’t even have inline code or any syntax highlighting so I’ll be very glad to make the transition.

HipChat is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is that it allows on-prem, where most alternatives do not.

It's shutting down so it doesn't have anything going for it.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#257
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careers are inherently meaningless?! Would you mind elaborating? The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have. So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you a…

> The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have. Under the view of the grandparent, the metric/proxy of salary has become so utterly meaningless because of modern day business behavior…

I think we are mostly in agreement. The correlation is definitely partial, but again, I'm not familiar with any better numeric value. This is the one we have.

Salaries are in essence what we are willing to pay one another for each other's time and effort. In your example, people are willing to pay a person 50 times as much for drafting a contract than for taking care of a disabled person. I don't see anything inherently wrong with this. There could be various reasons explaining this disparity, ranging from a lack of availability of people who can do that, to that job potentially being more difficult in some ways, and probably also down to it being more important in some ways, e.g. directly affecting the lives of thousands of people. Whatever the reasons are, the people who choose to pay the fee were probably unable to negotiate a lower fee for a similar level of work.

On the other hand, the question of "what we should value" is much more amorphous and I'd be interested to hear of ideas on how to model and practically implement that, if you have any. There only alternative frameworks I'm familiar with are communism, with its well known share of problems and "time banks" which I've seen working decently well at a local level, but don't tend to scale.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#258
post #212
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely to ever happen. History suggests that the way evolutionary biology corrects this is revolution or invasion :-)

That's a very interesting statement. Could you share some more information about what events in history or research in "evolutionary biology" suggest this ? I don't know where to start searching from for this information...

Nothing direct from what I've read but I'm extrapolating from various "decline and fall of X civilization(s)" - all great societies have been through a phase where the society no longer produces enough defenders and the ones alive lack vitality to protect against relatively primitive less technologically sophisticated "barbarians".

Also, what we're seeing happenning in Europe right now on immigration. Japan is a bit weird right now.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#259
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bet that they save every audio sample you generate.

the GDPR data takeout option (maybe only for european users) contains a lot of creepy shit (essentially every click and mouse movement), but no audio data

It's not creepy. Discord tracks mouse movements to tell when you're hovering over something and tracks clicks to tell when you've clicked on something. It's just how the client works.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#260
post #227

Discord is in this weird situation where they've been massively successful at some specific things that people aren't willing to spend money on, and not, as best as I can tell, anywhere else. They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together. But things like Nit…

Do you have a citation on "Nitro seem to have minimal adoption"? Genuinely curious, as all over this thread there's people saying "so many people have Nitro!" and other saying "no one pays for Nitro".. I'd love to see stats to figure out who is actually correct.

They don't release numbers, so everything I have is personal anecdata, but I'm in 12 active Discord communities, and any time the discussion has come up, pretty much no one involved has a nitro subscription.

We're the demographics that, at least to me, seem the most likely to pay for it as well. Better than average incomes, MMO subscribers, groups that host their own servers for games that support it, subscribers to twitch streamers, etc. I can't fathom who is paying for Nitro in large numbers if not these demographics.

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