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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'

#221

Post by mthoms »

wmeredith wrote: post #217
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've been building and designing software interfaces for two decades, and I think Discord's app has a shitty UX. Saying it is easy to use is a statement I find laughable at first, but it makes me wonder: compared to what? CLI apps?

As someone with ADHD, their interface gives me actual real-life anxiety.

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

#222

Post by whoopdedo »

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…

Forums aren't popular more the same reason email isn't. Spam. Forum operators fought a valiant yet losing battle against spambots. While tools like fail2ban eventually came around to make it easier, a generation of users grew up learning that forums suck and Discord was the right app at the right time to lure them away.

"Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention.

There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny.

Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.

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

#223

Post by Hermitian909 »

eitally wrote: post #208
Lockyy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher.

Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot.

Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.

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

#224

Post by TAForObvReasons »

dhkk wrote: post #219
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…

Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC

Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.

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

#225

Post by RadiozRadioz »

xattt wrote: post #199
jaywalk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't blame you for the confusion. Their usage of the term "server" is extremely misleading. Should have called them "guilds" or something like they do in their API.

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

#226

Post by bell-cot »

mjevans wrote: post #210
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

sed 's/0. They know/0.01% They know/'

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

#227

Post by importantigrvty »

yeah it sucks that the best voip and messaging platform is trying to find ways to continue to operate. /s

The product is the same and you don't have to use any of these new features if you don't want to. Like, what are we actually complaining about here.

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

#228

Post by pmoriarty »

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.

Discord desperately needs threading.

I prefer the Slack model where you can reply inside a thread and you replies stay within the thread instead of being scattered all over the place like IRC.

I hate to admit it, but this is one thing that Slack does better than IRC, except that in that model you do miss seeing everything that's talked about in the channel (because many of the conversations are hidden in the threads), but it's a better model for organization.

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

#229

Post by OkayPhysicist »

SinParadise wrote: post #128
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…

Zoom is said to be easy to use for voip, but I found discord to be vastly superior in terms of ease of use and config. Basically all the ceremonies and friction of the networking aspect and video/audio aspects are gone. Now I think the community model of Discord isn't really in congruence with the knowledge base model a la Reddit(its hard to drop-in and out of community just to get one answer), but it is still vastly…

Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability.

IMO, that's probably their best bet with regards to growing their actual business (as opposed to popularity, which they seem to be doing a bang-up job of already)

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

#230

Post by rapnie »

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.

Discourse has added ActivityPub-based support for the Fediverse, using the help of The Pavilion cooperative. First release offers basic support for one-way federating of Categories which federate as Group actors that can be followed by other federated services (e.g. with Mastodon app). Federation comes as a plugin you can install via Discourse admin.

I created a separate HN submission, since not many people are aware of this development. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435680

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