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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'

#201

Post by ssnistfajen »

ryu2k2 wrote: post #26

I think there's a real market for a non-profit discord-like platform on the open web, especially with all the reddit drama going on. Part of me wants to build this. The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way.

I admire your goals and wish you success, but IMO the biggest obstacle to be tackled is how to sustainably operate such a platform. If data is hosted centrally, someone needs to pay the server bills. This is fine for a small community but if user growth reaches critical mass, it has to be monetized to the point where server costs can be covered. If data is decentralized, then the potential fragmentation will be a hurdle for user adoption. Discord succeeded because it required zero tutorial to use and no setup beyond making an account, compared to previous iterations of VoIP/IRC software. This was a crucial success factor in attractig non-gamers during the pandemic.

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

#202

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> you don't even need to create an account immediately

Huh? It's extremely aggressive about accounts. This thing literally requires a phone number. Can't even create pseudonymous accounts.

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

#203

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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…

My friend group made the same jump. People forget just how abysmal VOIP was back then: your options were Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge" and RAM usage that was simply insane for the time period, or Mumble, where the sound quality was fantastic and used next to no memory, but had an interface and new user on boarding process that left no-doubt of its FOSS status, and purely ephemeral text chat.

Then along comes Discord. Easy to use, a master class in UI design, and sound quality that was at least in the ballpark of Mumble's. And persistent text chat! If you're going to be talking in Discord, it's only natural that some amount of conversation is going to spill over into the text channels. And if there's a lot of chat in those text channels, then it's going to suck conversation out of your other text mediums. That's how we ended up with Discord dominating the online community space.

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

#204

Post by vvillena »

this_user wrote: post #124
vvillena wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

> Convenience doesn't require centralization Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the federated system. Those entities are most likely operating with different standards and different levels of professionalism. In the end, you are offloading tasks to the end users like figuring out the structure of it all, where to sign up, which instances to j…

> The average user [...] just want things to work.

Indeed. This is why convenience means moving all things 'federation' to the background.

Remember eDonkey, eMule, and the ED2K network? It started as a federated network, and it added a second decentralized network later on. And it was successful, because users didn't have to care about the inner workings of the product. There were a bunch of external sites acting as link aggregators, but there was a builtin search feature too that worked well (until hash collisions catched up with the stagnant protocol).

To me, this is still a shining example of how to do federation right. There were multiple clients, standard communication protocols, and it was easy to take advantage of the full federated network, because it didn't take any effort to do so.

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

#205

Post by adamwong246 »

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 did. It was called "The Internet". It was great, for a while. But you had write your own webpages and host the pages yourself, which was hard and expensive. Only nerds could figure it out and the only people who got free servers were academics. At some point, some rich guys in california realized that you could trade a consumers info for a "free" service. Regular people went online and found all these neat free apps and all they had to do was watch some ads. It wasn't the best, but it worked ok, for a while. And suddenly _everything_ was a "free" app. Then walls came up and we found ourselves stranded. Nobody could afford to leave the walled garden and nobody could afford to make a better option.

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

#206

Post by eitally »

vhcr wrote: post #126
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…

Discord's UX is on another level compared to the other apps, here's two examples: * If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G. * When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.

On the flip side, literally the only app I've ever had BT earbud issues with is Discord (on Android). With two different earbuds that both support multi-point, neither one would reliably work with Discord.

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

#207

Post by babypuncher »

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…

And most importantly, Discord provides free hosting.

This is a huge deal, especially for people who aren't tech savvy. Setting up a Discord server and providing 24/7 availability to all your friends is as easy as sharing a photo on Instagram. No need to find a computer that you can leave on 24/7 or messing with your router.

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

#208

Post by eitally »

Lockyy wrote: post #50
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…

When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up. I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison. Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usa…

You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.

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

#209

Post by mysterydip »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #193
imtringued wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 primaril…

I'm fine using it for what it's designed for (your #2). My problem is when I see "need support? just join our discord!" when they really need a forum or some other system.

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

#210

Post by mjevans »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #193
imtringued wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 primaril…

0. They know the value of CHOICE and demand an open protocol that anyone can create a client or server for so that communities can maintain OWNERSHIP over their data and ensure there isn't a single point of failure / man in the middle.
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