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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'

#191

Post by jabroni_salad »

dgellow wrote: post #147
Sharlin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, IRC was great for communities, and Discord is just a modernized, centralized IRC, for better or worse. And one of the "worse" parts is the incredibly cluttered, in-your-face, ADHD interface.

It’s anti-ADHD. I have an ADHD diagnostic, using discord is a constant fight. You’re trying to follow fragmented discussions, while receiving notifications everywhere that more things are happening at the same time.

I am also diagnosed and I have an alright time. Here are my reccs:

1. Set your own notification preferences to @mentions only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever.

2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform.

3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.

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

#192

Post by ssnistfajen »

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 Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.

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

#193

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

imtringued wrote: post #173
jabroni_salad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is actually it. Discord was the first app that could hold a candle to Mumble and it did everything in the browser without having to install a client or run a server. I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition. When it was coming out it had basically no competitors. It was obvious as early as 2016 how popular discord will become. It is only now after the pandemic that the compe…

> I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition.

I think they fall into one of three buckets:

1. They have an extremely strong hatred for Electron and let that hatred overcome any actual thought about the product.

2. They're trying to use Discord for something it's not designed to be. Discord is not a replacement for Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media. It is primarily a text/voice chat service. It's a replacement for IRC, Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo, etc.

3. They don't see the need for Discord when IRC still exists because they completely miss all the short-comings that IRC has that a modern audience expects. For example, missing a conversation because you happened to not be online is inexcusable these days, but more importantly, people expect the ability to post images directly to chat.

I mean really, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it took so long for something like Discord to exist. We should have had something like it 10 years prior.

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

#194

Post by spongebobstoes »

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.

The free transfer limit was recently increased to 25MB iirc, so it should work now.

They also have a premium subscription that removes the limit (or makes it so large that I've never hit it).

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

#195

Post by ssnistfajen »

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.

>bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space

That has been the dominant web design paradigm for close to a decade now. Discord is just following industry trends.

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

#196

Post by conor- »

imtringued wrote: post #173
jabroni_salad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is actually it. Discord was the first app that could hold a candle to Mumble and it did everything in the browser without having to install a client or run a server. I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition. When it was coming out it had basically no competitors. It was obvious as early as 2016 how popular discord will become. It is only now after the pandemic that the compe…

> Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord

Maybe pedantic, but Matrix is a protocol that predates Discord by 6 months. Maybe certain Matrix clients are a copycat of Discord, but the protocol itself doesn't necessitate that.

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

#197

Post by jliptzin »

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…

All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.

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

#198

Post by jimmydorry »

dcow wrote: post #188
thaumasiotes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IRL has the same issues non-unique usernames do. It's almost irrelevant in a small community because of the number of members. It becomes a problem in large communities because you can't find someone based on their name. The issues are.. trivial at most. If you can't find someone based on their name in a large community, that can't cause any problems, because... how did you learn their name? If you know who they ar…

I'm confused. What game are we playing? I just need to add my friend Ryan so we can play a game together and there are 10,000 other `ryan`s when I type "ryan" into the username search field.

There is no username search field in that context. The "username search field" requires the person's username + their unique friend code (otherwise known as a discriminator). If you know to look for a "ryan" you would know their friend code. You either share a server with them, or met them outside the Discord exosystem.

It's that last point there, that Discord seems to want to tackle... We will have to wait to see how, but I hope they don't ruin the server paradigm and aim to become a subreddit type ecosystem.

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

#199

Post by xattt »

jaywalk wrote: post #169
xattt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.

Can you share a link to information on this? I can't find anything.

I’m wrong. My friend group has a Discord server, which I assumed my buddy was self-hosting (like Mastadon).

I hadn’t used Discord in the past and was really surprised to keep seeing promos for Boosts and stuff.

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

#200

Post by nologic01 »

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 are a bullshit species. Our collective well being is secondary to each era's power games.

With the amount of brain power and resources that exist today and the relative triviality of orchestrating social media platforms it would take, like two or three months of banging some heads together and solving this little nuisance once and for all.

To the great relief and benefit of current and future generations. So that we can focus on some real problems.

But no, we have to stick to the rigged game.

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