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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'

#71

Post by kitsunesoba »

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…

Discord’s exceedingly low friction and general smoothness is a huge factor. Competitors, commercial or otherwise, should take note if they want to pull in users.

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

#72

Post by coldpie »

dandellion wrote: post #14
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…

Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.

I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.

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

#73

Post by Laremere »

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.

I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it.

Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise.

I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product.

Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.

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

#74

Post by avian »

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.

You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up.

If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.

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

#75

Post by kitsunesoba »

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…

One thing that I’ve not seen any traditional forum software do particularly well is search. For some reason, forum search sucks to the point that if the forum is visible when logged out you’re better off doing a “ site:forums.foobar.baz” search with Google.

Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).

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

#76

Post by isaacremuant »

veave wrote: post #5
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…

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.

IRC was way better (and you had your choice of client) for programming communities.

Discord excels in combining the call/video/screenshare/slack-ish/game experience all in one.

It's a really solid service with good mobile and desktop versions.

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

#77

Post by didntcheck »

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…

The most interesting class of communication platform to me is 2/4chan style text/imageboards. Depending on the speed of the board they can feel like near-real-time chat (with copious memes and verbal banter), or a forum (complete with megathreads for beginners on a topic), or something exactly in-between

For information retrieval it's quite terrible. Generally even worse than Discord due to the archives being on random overloaded sites. OTOH it leads to a culture of survival of the fittest ideas ("meme" culture, I suppose), where instead of upvoting a post or image you like, you just repost it. Like a big shared human cache, or like human memory I suppose

The general lack of persistent identity has a profound influence on the culture of course. People tend to focus on the negatives that it brings, but it can also be refreshing to have pure and frank discussions with no ego or profile snooping or cliques. And just generally the feeling of low-stakes casual chatting, rather than remembering at the back of your head that everything will be on the record against your username

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

#78

Post by IE6 »

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.

Completely anecdotal, but IMHO their app just works and it works well. For instance I used to play an MMO using discord and we had ~72 people in voice chat at any given time and it was flawless (some of our members were 80+ years old, the game I played is 25 years old). Meanwhile at work (I work in IT) it's not uncommon to spend 5 minutes just getting a meeting started, figuring out why the mic isn't working, trying to get someone to mute who isn't, etc.

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

#79

Post by hombre_fatal »

avian wrote: post #74
raxxorraxor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up. If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which…

It might not make a difference when looking at a noisy straw man #general channel with strangers, but it certainly matters when you look at everything else like PM convos, PMs you received while offline, notifications while offline, and slower or more critical channels like #staff or a group of irl friends or announcement channels or almost every other channel type I can think of outside of noisy #offtopic channels.

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

#80

Post by vel0city »

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.

If you switch to the compact appearance and potentially change the font scaling down a tick the text density massively increases.
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