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Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

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Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#41

Post by Ekaros »

AnonCoward42 wrote: post #24
veave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).

I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control.

So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#42

Post by pleb_nz »

bjord wrote: post #33
pxue wrote: post #21

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free. The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.

It ain't nice looking IMO, it reminds me if a kids toy, one for 2 year olds with bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space etc etc.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#43

Post by INGSOCIALITE »

I seriously dislike trying to use Discord, and I get annoyed when open source projects direct questions / support to a community discord as opposed to a wiki or faq of forum.

Searching discord is painful, and god forbid you ask a question that someone else asked 3 weeks ago that you weren’t sitting in front of the chat for.

The only discord that kind of makes sense (that I’ve used, and I haven’t used many) is the doom eMacs discord, where the questions are kind of pinned. Almost in a Forum format.

I wish Discourse would take off more. I think it’s a great, modern answer to forums.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#44

Post by ravenstine »

bovermyer wrote: post #20
veave wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives. It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on. Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.

Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition. - Forums are easy for search engines to index - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable - Forums have good threading in general - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) - It's easy to have completely different identities on differe…

Discord is better than forums for casual chatting and sharing memes. As far as acting as a repo of frequently asked questions to be left open for information to be amended and appended, forums are far superior to Discord. It's surprising that there are people who think Discord is better in every way when, to me, it's clearly not true. I wonder how many of those Discord-type users actually grew up with the chat rooms and forums/BBSes of Web 1.0. For those who didn't, maybe Discord superficially seems like a huge advancement over forums.

The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#45

Post by bjord »

hardware2win wrote: post #36
bjord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free. The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.

Why you folks act in this thread as if sharing and making everything googlable should be "by default"? I dont want you to be able to read messages of my mmorpg team, privacy is desired.

I think it's important to highlight the difference between private group chats (e.g. the discord I have with my high school friends) and community hubs. For example, some discord servers serve as the entire knowledge base for some open source projects. I'm only advocating for preservation of the latter.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#46

Post by bjord »

pleb_nz wrote: post #42
bjord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free. The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.

It ain't nice looking IMO, it reminds me if a kids toy, one for 2 year olds with bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space etc etc.

Can I ask which generation you're a member of? I truly think different demographics prefer different styling. FWIW, I personally prefer to use old reddit and like the layout of HN, but can also appreciate Discord's styling.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#47

Post by jghn »

veave wrote: post #19
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.

When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#48

Post by dekervin »

serf wrote: post #3

I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. People compared the loss of what.cd to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. While I do think that was an exaggeration at the time, I worry about the loss of effort and 'thought-power' when the discord walls get even taller th…

I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users.

Being hard-to-index gives credibility to the pretense of being a pseudo-annonymous, "hidden" from public eyes platform. It encourages people to be laid back, to speak more freely and form social bonds, faster than on "open" web forums.

Discord is a night club, web forums are public square. And it occupied an extremely useful, and big niche.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#49

Post by KronisLV »

Filligree wrote: post #6
serf wrote: post #3

I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. People compared the loss of what.cd to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. While I do think that was an exaggeration at the time, I worry about the loss of effort and 'thought-power' when the discord walls get even taller th…

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work , and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately. Love it or hate it, let's not pretend it's lik…

> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately.

It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried.

But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.

Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

#50

Post by Lockyy »

bovermyer wrote: post #20
veave wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives. It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on. Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.

Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition. - Forums are easy for search engines to index - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable - Forums have good threading in general - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) - It's easy to have completely different identities on differe…

When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up.

I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.

Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.

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