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Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

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Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#241

Post by jeltz »

lmm wrote: post #232
mihaifm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.

I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.

Agreed, Skype used to have much of the Swedish market until they fucked up their clients and pushed people to Facebook Messenger. Now it is irrelevant.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#242

Post by saladuh »

ulimn wrote: post #95

Is nobody concerned about privacy? I don't like this: https://www.tosdr.org/en/service/discord

(So this turned into a log rant... sorry)

Nope, sadly not! People are complacent and unwilling to make a change due to the convience of it. Most people are unwilling to leave the online friends behind that refuse to join you on more ethical platforms. People become tied to communities, of which most are on Discord, and are unwilling to leave them out of fear of feeling alone, or because they require whatever feelings of happiness/dopamine they get from those communities.

I used discord primarily for a large friend group, on one guild/server, but of course was in a bunch of other servers for things that were ultimately useless. Leaving Discord made me feel less controlled by the dopamine effect of interacting with 'communities'. My friends barely use discord for anything other than our friend group, but are unwilling to move off of it because 'pretty UI', or 'emojis', or 'bots', etc. Some of them "don't care about privacy" because "no one at discord cares about your messages/data", " I have nothing to hide", the usual fallacies regarding privacy. The last reason is "laze"/"don't care".

My friends are all in the tech/software space, have careers or are aiming for careers in the space. Some of them even share posts from Hacker News on the regular. Some use Linux, one of them even uses it partly out of privacy concerns. Point is, they're not oblivious to this stuff. If anyone begins to start trying out other services with me like Matrix, they're immediately disuaded because someone else in the group doesn't want to and says they're never going to leave Discord.

I've since just been using a Matrix bridge to continue being part of the group. I've decided though that I will have no part in Discord's increasing monopoly in the chat message space, with their walled garden practices. Once Matrix native voice and video chat rolls out, I'm done with the Matrix-Discord bridge. If my friends don't want to make ethical decisions and put themselves back in control of their online lives and data, then I lose my online group chat. So be it. I'll still see them out in the real world. Friends (for better or worse) come and go every decade. Sucks but I'm so done with no one caring and having to jump through hoops for people who don't care.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#243

Post by foxpurple »

southerntofu wrote: post #154
lloydatkinson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content

Blame capitalism for aiming for profit, not actual service to people.

Capitalism has done an exceptional job though for instant messaging. Discord is an incredible bit of software and through just being better, it has won the market.

It’s basically a picture perfect example of the market working.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#244

Post by Slartie »

rb666 wrote: post #210
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Discord for gaming, but I do (reluctantly) have to use it for volunteering work. One day I discovered Discord sets my status as "currently playing Game X" for everyone to see, to my horror! What an absurd privacy violation.

This is a bit ridiculous. It's a gaming platform before anything else. In that scene it's very common to share your gaming status with others. Not to mention that you can obviously disable this.

If you were introduced to Discord in a non-gaming-related context, it is very common to be unfamiliar with the tendency of gamers to share what game they are currently playing. There is no such habit in other, more "serious" contexts - for example MS Teams does not set "currently using Microsoft Powerpoint" or "currently coding in VS Code" as my publicly visible status at work. I can thus fully understand that a lot of people are (negatively) surprised by this - even gamers, because there's a huge number of people preferring singleplayer games out there that don't have the need to do any group coordination for which a tool like Discord (or built-in community features of games or game launchers) would be needed.

Hence if Discord aims at expanding its user base beyond the (multiplayer) gaming community, it should definitely think twice whether to keep this sharing setting enabled by default. At a minimum I would expect them to try to deduce somehow whether you are using Discord as a gamer or in a non-gaming-related setting, and use the suitable default. Or maybe just disable it by default, so gamers who want this feature enabled need to turn it on.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#245

Post by lmm »

DrBazza wrote: post #191

I can't remember where I read it (likely Joel Spolsky, or Paul Graham), but there was an article about businesses that thrive in the shadow of FAANG + MS and others because even though they're in the same business they don't compete in a way that's worth the big guys chasing. In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord use…

I actually care a lot about calendar integration. For about two years I've been saying that our best hope for calendar software that doesn't suck is if Discord gets into it, and it's a natural fit - most of the discords I'm in have some sort of regular scheduled activity, gamers want to schedule when they can game together.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#246

Post by mynameismon »

lmm wrote: post #245
DrBazza wrote: post #191

I can't remember where I read it (likely Joel Spolsky, or Paul Graham), but there was an article about businesses that thrive in the shadow of FAANG + MS and others because even though they're in the same business they don't compete in a way that's worth the big guys chasing. In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord use…

I actually care a lot about calendar integration. For about two years I've been saying that our best hope for calendar software that doesn't suck is if Discord gets into it, and it's a natural fit - most of the discords I'm in have some sort of regular scheduled activity, gamers want to schedule when they can game together.

You might want to check Guilded (https://guilded.gg)

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#247

Post by nicoburns »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #209
southerntofu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specific to discord, but what's broken is that work is organized to maximize personal profit of shareholders (and the remuneration and other privileges of managers), not to benefit users/society. I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters:…

What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit. Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth. It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not…

Some things that could help:

- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.

- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.

- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.

None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#248

Post by lmm »

Gunax wrote: post #182
bbellini wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind going into more details about the popups? Ive been using for years and cant say I've ever had a popup besides the occasional changelog.

Yea so if you install it, it will harass you about 'going live' everytine you launch a fullscreen app. Then it puts some box in the corner (sorry cannot remember what it said) You can disable it per application of course... But I just wanted it gone. Also it makes incessant beeping noises, which again can only be disabled per room.

Um, what? I don't think either of those things have ever happened to me (unless you're talking about join/leave noises on the rooms?). Are you sure you're talking about Discord?

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#249

Post by Ekaros »

DrBazza wrote: post #191

I can't remember where I read it (likely Joel Spolsky, or Paul Graham), but there was an article about businesses that thrive in the shadow of FAANG + MS and others because even though they're in the same business they don't compete in a way that's worth the big guys chasing. In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord use…

I wouldn't be entirely sure. Discord communities are much more isolated than on other social media sites. Outside discoverability, which is pretty poor you don't end up seeing what is going on even on other public servers. So if they continue to deliver good enough product to gamers and then entice other communities to join it could work very well.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#250

Post by AussieWog93 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #203
nicoburns wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those wh…

> but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else. What altern…

>What alternatives are there?

Just spitballing, but an independent auditor that puts a dollar value on the expected long term gains/losses to a company's brand portfolio based on recent management decisions could help reduce certain types of short-term "cashing in" behaviour.

>The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.

Maybe not the largest companies, but he's basically described the default behaviour of private equity firms.

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