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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'

#151

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Discord was first to provide:

> Also: identity per "server"

But Discord doesn't provide identity per server. You get one identity, and if you want a different one you need to sign up for a new account using a new email address.

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

#152

Post by Jcowell »

bjord wrote: post #45
hardware2win wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

does it ? I sounds like it’s less for knowledge basing and more so for if you have a question this is where we’re at you can come ask.

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

#153

Post by Laaas »

nirvdrum wrote: post #84
INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #43

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 doo…

Discourse is a nice experience once you're in, but the lack of federation is problematic. With NNTP, IRC, or even email lists, I can participate in multiple communities from one screen. With Discourse, I need to register on different sites and then visit each of them individually and regularly if I want to actively participate. Consequently, I don't often participate in those communities.

For authentication, you don't want federation, you want OpenID [0].

The "access each of them individually" problem is separate from federation and could be solved by having custom clients, such that one client connects to multiple discourses, e.g., if Discourse decided to use the Matrix protocol, you could use any Matrix client to connect to any Discourse instance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

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

#155

Post by JustBreath »

sledgehammers wrote: post #140

I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.

We already did: email.

But seriously, in order for this to happen the platform needs to be a protocol.

Basically Bitcoin but for sharing stuff, but all the attempts so far have been too nerdy/esoteric to gain mainstream adoption.

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

#156

Post by bluehatbrit »

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…

If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something.

I and the communities I interact with seem to treat it as if it were ephemeral, despite it actually storing everything. People seem to want to converse about a topic and then work on the idea that those messages will fade into obscurity over the course of minutes, days, or weeks.

The data that would be useful is really the connection with a given group of people. I'd want to be able to find them again and move somewhere else with them, but the conversations themselves I wouldn't miss.

This is of course a big contrast to other platforms though. Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar platforms are great because they're searchable and are (or were) geared towards long term conversations and searchability. If all their content disappeared then I really would feel the impact.

That's just my usage, but I'm always surprised when people say they'd want to hold onto conversations in discord.

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

#157

Post by dsir »

dgellow wrote: post #130
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…

I cannot stand discord. Everything in the screen is trying to grab your attention all the time, unless you explicitly disable all sorts of notifications. It’s also really hard to follow discussions if you’re off for some time or want to understand what people are talking about when you join a channel. The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.

In my opinion Discord got some things right in the community space. Their voice chat system is very good and the way they have channels allows for discussion to be spread across different topics under the same umbrella (community). On Reddit for example, each community only has a singular discussion board. One of the biggest issues with Discord however is how the content is lost into the abyss. The discoverability of content on the platform is basically non existent.

This realization that the online community space has grown more diverse than just a single medium was the inspiration for us building Sociables.

We've been working on a community platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.

https://sociables.com/browse/all

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

#158

Post by paddw »

jjulius wrote: post #116
noirbot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

>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. I'd argue that's why we end up in the position we often end up in, as users. We take it little by little until it's too late. The "Well yeah that's capitalism and it sucks so /shrug, right?" argument feels kinda weak to me. If Discord's profitab…

There's no way Discord is profitable.

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

#159

Post by gedy »

paulmd wrote: post #120
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…

Yeah. Does anyone actually remember Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, lol? Discord is an incredibly better UX. Those programs feel like they're from 2000, they're clunky to set up, and the reality is they're still way better than what came before (eg Roger Wilco). (for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.) Also, they need a hosted server (which most p…

> Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.

I would assume that there’s pressure for “growth“, and pushing discord as a Reddit or forum replacement. It’s probably just that.

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

#160

Post by bovermyer »

msabalau wrote: post #119
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 great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new. Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that. It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd. A more useful question may be "why are foru…

My point is that saying Discord is universally better than forums ignores context and is not a useful comparison.
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