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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'

#61

Post by noirbot »

Ekaros wrote: post #41
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public.

Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.

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

#62

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions.

Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable.

It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

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

#63

Post by lezojeda »

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…

[dead]

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

#64

Post by noirbot »

jjulius wrote: post #57
jasonlotito wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Sure, and if they can offer a better product than Patreon then it's good for Discord and for the people running the communities. Most folks I know who use Patreon loathe it - they've barely improved the product in the last few years, so Discord feels like they're in a good position to offer a better service for some users.

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

#65

Post by lezojeda »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #62
Filligree wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions. Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable. It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

[dead]

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

#66

Post by noirbot »

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.

You can definitely tune to to be a lot tighter - there's UX settings that make it far more minimal, or let you collapse things down.

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

#67

Post by coldpie »

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")

> if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon

Man, really? That sounds great. Patreon sucks really, really hard. It's one of those websites & apps where you're amazed someone managed to screw up that badly. Like, you have to put serious effort into making software as bad as Patreon is. Quibbles about their business model aside, Discord actually knows how to make functional software and a usable UI. I would happily start giving money to Discord if they make a full-featured Patreon competitor.

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

#68

Post by ajwilson »

KronisLV wrote: post #49
Filligree wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this.

It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...

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

#69

Post by wincy »

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?

So I used to be in a top 100 World of Warcraft guild back in the day, so I remember the days of Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Discord is much easier to administrate than all that.

I used Discord to create a “server” for my Eve Echoes corporation which went from ten people to 200 people then down to 40 or so people. I didn’t have to pay to scale the server up and down from whatever hosting solution I was using to accommodate this huge increase then slow decrease of member.

Heck, I didn’t actually create the server, someone else did then handed me owner access. Super convenient. Like, I was astonished that’s how it works.

Everything was integrated so I could ping 50 people and a good number would jump into voice chat and help me defend against the Russians or the Chinese invasions. It was a bustling community created ex nihilo.

I played for a few months, had a good time, but once the pandemic started to wane I wanted to go “back to the real world”. Being a leader of space miners is hard work! So I handed over ownership to someone in the “Corp” who, in true EVE fashion is a real life accountant and loves their space ships and spreadsheets.

It was incredibly easy to set up and then give the discord server away (twice!) over the course of a few months. Easier than giving someone my house keys. The process would have been an absolute nightmare for anything using DNS, or even worse pinned to an actual IP address. Good luck getting 50-00 semi active people to switch to a new server.

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

#70

Post by jorvi »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #56
Filligree wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Discord recently added a forum channel function for that.

Its locked to the community server toggle though (god knows why with how much that is complained about), and it doesn’t solve the walled garden problem.

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