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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'

#241

Post by nkjnlknlk »

pmoriarty wrote: post #228
dgellow wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Discord does have threading and a pseudo-forum view as well.

None of that changes its main societal flaw which is being a walled garden. So much loss of information.

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

#242

Post by jasonlotito »

jjulius wrote: post #57
jasonlotito wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Discord is building things that users of Discord already use Discord for. They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.

>They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers. Let's call a spade a spade - this is them knowing their customers, yes, but I'd hardly say they're just making things easier. It's Discord saying, "Oh, people pay for this kinda thing through Patreon? We'd actually like that money instead, please".

> I'd hardly say they're just making things easier.

For users? 100% it just makes things easier. This just makes it easier for users and hopefully overcomes some of the issues with Patreon's integration with Discord.

But from a user's perspective (which is what my POV was from and the only one that matters in this context), whether you are paying Patreon or Discord, it doesn't really matter.

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

#243

Post by nirvdrum »

Laaas wrote: post #153
nirvdrum wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess I don't really care what the auth mechanism is, so long as I'm not required to use Google or Facebook. The Mastodon experience is pretty good (not great) in my experience, so I was basing my mental model on that. Really, I'd love to just have NNTP or something similar. I don't want the Slack model where I can't have more than one workplace open at a time. That solves the not needing more than one app problem, but still means switching between communities would have unnecessary friction.

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

#244

Post by OkayPhysicist »

sergiotapia wrote: post #134

What happened to their game store? They launched this big Steam competitor, and quietly and unceremoniously shut it down. You guys remember right?

I'd wager it wasn't worth the hassle. Steam isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly that's not actively committed to being terrible. People, on the whole, like Steam. And that's a huge moat. When going toe-to-toe with a monopoly, normally your snowball's-chance-in-hell chance comes from the fact that people aren't happy about the monopoly, because the monopoly got complacent, started squeezing people for everything they can get, and just generally being awful, because hey, where else will you go? But Steam hasn't done that, so on top of overcoming the market momentum in their favor, you also have to go above and beyond to make a better product.

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

#245

Post by waboremo »

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.

I really disagree with the community building part, but I do agree with the defaults on Discord being horrible.

With the community building aspect, forums were not great for it. Due to how fragmented it was, and how subforums were often dramatically different sections, this meant that unless you were genuinely deeply into [topic] and were spending numerous hours per day regularly you would not build a community at all there. This is why on most forums, it's only the trolls who became known, they had that cross-contamination aspect. Forums also had a lot of UX that discouraged caring about the user. Names were tucked away, profile images were tiny, people hid signatures due to how obnoxious they got. They became the equivalent of reading a mailing list you were randomly added into.

This doesn't really excuse Discord. By default it encourages too many indicators. Tutorials for new accounts, rule modules, every channel has an indicator on it, there's buttons left right and center making you afraid to click anything, then the whispers for joining servers, the list goes on. This is one aspect that I hope Discord spends severe amount of resources looking at in 2024. Which I think they absolutely are capable of doing, but I'm not sure if their investors care about the new user experience sadly.

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

#246

Post by SirMaster »

pmoriarty wrote: post #228
dgellow wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Discord does have that, via Forum channels.

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

#247

Post by judge2020 »

jadamson wrote: post #58
Deukhoofd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, they rolled it out to everyone over the past month. https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch...

Those are are basically party games. They actually tried to become a Steam competitor before but gave up: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globall...

Facebook took off with social games, like FarmVille, but Discord was going after something like Steam. These party games are good for a lot of friend groups, and third-party activities are coming online soon enough.

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

#248

Post by skeaker »

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.

If you read the article that the term you're using actually originates from, it states that a necessary part of enshittification is that it makes the application less useful for users. This change does the opposite and doesn't qualify at all.

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

#249

Post by LightMachine »

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?

Well, then perhaps you need to reflect where your research failed, because it clearly did. Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. So, if all these clueless kids are there, perhaps it is time for you to realize the interface perhaps is actually easy and you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX.

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

#250

Post by hewlett »

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.

zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow
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