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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'

#101

Post by vicktour »

bhickey wrote: post #31

Between the discord username switch, their new UI and the reddit shitification, I think the writing is on the wall. Communications are too valuable to be left to venture capitalists. I wish that Discord had decided to monetize by taking on Slack, but it was not so. Last week I burned my server to the ground and we all migrated to a self-hosted matrix instance.

I'll have to look into Matrix. I have been looking for something to replace discord. I have so many gripes about discord but I'll give you the most egregious. I cannot share a screenshot because I have a 1440p monitor and the output file is over 5mb. Sometimes my dislike of discord feels like I am an old man yelling at clouds but then I remember the 5mb transfer limit.

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

#102

Post by didntcheck »

this_user wrote: post #81
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…

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps

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

#103

Post by armitron »

this_user wrote: post #81
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…

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

Winning doesn't have to be a popularity contest. The majority can stick with Discord/gifs/microtransactions. As long as I can still have interesting discussions with super-smart folks on IRC, I'm happy (maybe even more happy than I used to be, there's enormous value in a high signal-to-noise ratio).

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

#105

Post by the_af »

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…

Discourse was expressly designed to re-do forums from scratch, rethinking every assumption. It's also a relatively recent creation. How is that "remaining in the past"?

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

#106

Post by lolinder »

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, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.

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

#107

Post by pndy »

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…

All my GW2 guilds at some point created discord servers and all life moved there and in time in-game chat channels become ghost towns.

When we moved from TS to discord the first noticeable change was audio quality and the fact that we "owned" the space - it no longer was a single audio channel on some community-run server. The links and media previews were also a nice novelty; nothing new anymore around social media at that point but it felt like this should be a standard feature. And years later this indeed become a standard feature around the Internet.

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

#108

Post by noirbot »

jjulius wrote: post #91
noirbot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue that the improvement for the users is just a byproduct in Discord's eyes. Pardon my pessimism, but I don't see Discord just deciding to stop monetizing more things. This is the encroachment of enshittiffication.

Sure, but that's essentially just "we all agree capitalism sucks, right?" in more words. I'd rather I just get a free voice chat app forever, but given that that's not the way this current economy works, I'm going to take the wins where I can when a company is choosing to monetize in ways that are generally good for everyone involved.

Discord, thus far, has generally been monetizing in ways I find pretty generally positive. I'm going to celebrate that until they actually start monetizing in shittier ways.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

vicktour wrote: post #101
bhickey wrote: post #31

Between the discord username switch, their new UI and the reddit shitification, I think the writing is on the wall. Communications are too valuable to be left to venture capitalists. I wish that Discord had decided to monetize by taking on Slack, but it was not so. Last week I burned my server to the ground and we all migrated to a self-hosted matrix instance.

I'll have to look into Matrix. I have been looking for something to replace discord. I have so many gripes about discord but I'll give you the most egregious. I cannot share a screenshot because I have a 1440p monitor and the output file is over 5mb. Sometimes my dislike of discord feels like I am an old man yelling at clouds but then I remember the 5mb transfer limit.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by vvillena »

this_user wrote: post #81
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…

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

Convenience doesn't require centralization nor a walled-garden approach. It's just not a priority to the people developing the alternatives.

Let's use Lemmy as an example. The current UI makes it clear at all times where the communities and the users are located. It's nice to provide such information, but in the end it should not matter, and thus it should not be wasting premium UI space. Same thing goes with the community list: the "subscribed" section works as expected, but "local" should never be the default view, because in the end, users shouldn't have to care where communities are hosted. Finally, the search feature should be much more explicit in describing the corpus of data being searched: "all known communities", "communities federated into this instance", "local communities". All new users think it's #1, but #1 doesn't exist, it's #2, and this leads these users to think they have to be on one of the big instances if they want to participate in a larger community.

It's almost like federation was an afterthought.

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