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This feels monumentally overblown to me. I don't pay for nitro but I clearly benefit from all the people who do and if they get some fun, silly little perks that's fine.
Internet caste systems is just social status hierarchy. Or rather, showing off to others you're higher on the ladder. People don't buy sports cars, or extremely expensive clothing because it's functional. But rather to project their above the plebs. Games have skins or icons marking how high up you are. Most importantly, very expensive skins. Honestly, discords isn't bad, you're not constrained by being a free user.…
Clothing with the modifier “extremely” probably makes sense though.
This guy: I'm being oppressed
Man there's plenty of amazing examples of caste systems on the internet, but Discord Nitro ain't it. Discord is a free app without ads. Nitro is a reasonable monetization strategy for a chat app that works incredibly well and fosters probably millions of communities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has that ever worked?
yeah except the capitalists killed it. napster, bitorrent etc... being tried now with mastodon et al...
The article is about monetising social status, and I think the majority of criticisms about capitalism are actually thinly veiled complaints about social status (often complaints about how others get more, rarely mentioning someone’s benefits compared against those that get less).
However social status exists independent of capitalism.
Replace capitalism, and you just end up with similar problems, just rotated, because the underlying motivation is the human drive for social status.
The article implies a wish for a world without social status signals, and rightly denigrates caste systems. Can we even change our nature to avoid status signalling?
Virtue signalling is also status signalling - just declaring a particular caste - and this article clearly declares their virtue.
I agree we should aspire to not be judgemental, and we should aspire to generosity, kindness, forgiveness. Regardless of what ingroup we belong to. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be aware of human failings, and imperfection in our systems is a compromise.