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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'

#51

Post by yomlica8 »

hardware2win wrote: post #27
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?

Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link ins…

Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums.

The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.

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

#52

Post by hardware2win »

yomlica8 wrote: post #51
hardware2win wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link ins…

Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.

Maybe support for rich media types

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

#53

Post by bovermyer »

ravenstine wrote: post #44
bovermyer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many of the forum software packages you mentioned are still actively maintained and used. That's hardly a "demise."

Just because there's a wildly popular internet community in one app/medium doesn't mean that other communities simply ceased to exist. They're just the same thing they've always been - niche.

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

#54

Post by bovermyer »

hardware2win wrote: post #25
bovermyer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable

I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'.

Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.

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

#55

Post by j_crick »

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…

Damn, I miss what.cd so much.

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

#56

Post by jabroni_salad »

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…

It pretty much replaced my WoW guild's forum overnight when we started using it for voice. The guy who was paying for the Mumble rental asked us to try it and we really liked it immediately. Pings that raiders will actually see, amazing. One click to join instead of having to dial thru a wizard with an IP and port (I know mumble had support for that but nobody knew how to use it, and WoW ingame chat does not let you copy text out easily while discord made sure their codes were easy to type). Sending gifs and videos to the team while waiting for an AFK was a nice new development too.

That said, it doesn't make sense for me for huge communities. I definitely think it's the best for small/medium groups but once chat starts moving a too fast to follow, what is the point? Trying to follow older discussions is also super hard compared to a forum.

It's also not a good knowledge repository. One thing that we used our forum for reliably was storing our personal tactics, common assignments, what addons we require etc in a central place. Trying to do it in a chat channel was like pulling teeth and we couldn't assign multiple people to edit the content.

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

#57

Post by jjulius »

jasonlotito wrote: post #7
Deukhoofd wrote: post #4

The article feels a bit over the top, if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon (as many Patreons already basically boil down to "get access to my Discord server")

Correct. Discord is building things that users of Discord already use Discord for. They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.

>They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.

Let's call a spade a spade - this is them knowing their customers, yes, but I'd hardly say they're just making things easier. It's Discord saying, "Oh, people pay for this kinda thing through Patreon? We'd actually like that money instead, please".

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

#58

Post by jadamson »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #13
fidotron wrote: post #9

Somewhere in here is the potential for Discord to become a big game/app platform by itself. It may prove to be a bit like the Facebook games explosion. It’s kind of surprising that turn based games within discord aren’t really a thing.

It is, they rolled it out to everyone over the past month. https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch...

Those are are basically party games. They actually tried to become a Steam competitor before but gave up:

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globall...

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

#59

Post by bee_rider »

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 good for real-time interactions. Discord+Wiki seems to hit the forum from both sides.

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

#60

Post by rjbwork »

doix wrote: post #29
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.

My friends and I still use IRC (for text) and mumble(for voice chat), I'm guessing as long as they are still maintained or if the source still compiles, we'll probably keep using them. The discord interface suffers from modern design syndrome, the information density isn't there. I open it and see inline images/gifs, link previews, reactions etc. There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some…

>There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.

They have compact mode that eliminates that stuff. I don't see avatars. I just see colored user names.

There are image embeds but I tend to see that as a positive, especially with some bot capabilities. For instance here is what the chat looks like in the server for one of the roguelikes I play, TOME4. https://i.imgur.com/WHFD7OA.png

You can see no avatars and it's just a bot-generated image that is relevant to the chat.

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