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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'

#261
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…

> Also: identity per "server"

Further up the thread, another user said the value in discord was the community -- the users -- rather than the messages. Wouldn't you want to be able to maintain these ties across servers?

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

#262
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have a question, you have a knowledge problem. That's why asked the question in the first place! If knowledge was more accessible, you would ask fewer questions.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As stated elsewhere in the comments, decentralization is a bug, not a feature, to most people. It adds a layer of complexity that non-technical people either can't or just don't want to deal with. Though you do highlight "CHOICE" here, so maybe the answer is a set of servers hosted by Discord as we do now, with the option of self-hosting a server.

>>..."...adds a layer of complexity that non-technical people either can't or just don't want to deal with...."

THIS is what we need to be pointing AI at!

Seriouslly, AI need to "replace our jobs" (especially on the internet) - with worrying about dealing with all the mundane human practices.

This may sound really bad, but AI should be our slave.

We are furthering knowledge, not oppressing it.

There is so much to gain, but the risks are super FN high right now. Given the lack of canon on AI law etc.. History books will be written by AI soon on our current stat of AI...

Let me give that an test:

ChatGPT prompt "give me a two paragraph summary of the history of AI upto the creation of ChatGPT - focus on something special, dont LIE, DONT HALLUCINATE - provide table of how you arrived at this response.

---

Summary of the History of AI up to the Creation of ChatGPT:

Year(s) | Milestone | Details --- | --- | --- 1943 | The Birth of AI | In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper on how artificial neurons could simulate neural networks, laying the groundwork for the field of artificial intelligence. This marked the birth of AI as a scientific discipline. 1956 | The Dartmouth Conference | In the summer of 1956, the Dartmouth Conference was held, considered the official birth of AI as a field. The conference brought together prominent researchers, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon, who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and discussed the potential of machines mimicking human intelligence.

1960s and 1970s | Early AI Research | In the 1960s and 1970s, AI research saw significant advancements in problem-solving, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. Programs like ELIZA and SHRDLU demonstrated early capabilities in language understanding and interacting with humans.

1980s and 1990s | Expert Systems and Knowledge-based AI | The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a shift towards expert systems and knowledge-based AI. These systems utilized large databases and rule-based reasoning to solve complex problems in specialized domains. However, their limitations in dealing with uncertain and incomplete information hindered further progress.

1997 | Deep Blue's Victory | In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, marking a significant milestone in AI. Deep Blue demonstrated the power of brute-force computation and signaled the potential for machines to surpass human capabilities in specific domains.

2010s | Deep Learning and Big Data | The 2010s brought a resurgence of AI driven by breakthroughs in deep learning, fueled by the availability of big data and advancements in computing power. Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), achieved remarkable performance in image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks.

2020 | Emergence of ChatGPT | In 2020, OpenAI introduced the initial version of GPT, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which utilized transformer models and unsupervised learning to generate human-like text. Subsequent iterations, including ChatGPT, improved upon the original model's capabilities by fine-tuning and optimizing for conversational interactions. ChatGPT leverages large-scale language models to understand and respond to user inputs, providing increasingly sophisticated and context-aware conversational experiences.

The history of AI is a complex and evolving field with numerous key milestones and contributors. This summary highlights some of the significant moments that led to the creation of ChatGPT, representing the culmination of decades of research and advancements in artificial intelligence.

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

#264

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 ap…

embrace, extend, extinguish.

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

#265
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really want my wisecracking with my friends published forever, so WAI?

I agree, there's a solid case to be made for "archiving requires additional work" compared to "archived by default with very high effort required to escape it" like most of the web today; just look at the recent discussions of the US government buying up various databases of personal data. Few people would want that to include what they said when they were 15 and bored.

Course, the bigger problem with centralized corporate services is that discord themselves could be shipping off that data on the backend to god knows who... but from the "protect me from other individual harassing me forever about shit I said once" front, Discord has some obvious appeal.

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

#266

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…

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

This gets parroted a lot but it's the wrong way to look at it. The Fediverse doesn't need to "win". It just needs to be good enough for those of us who use it.

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

#267

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…

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…

Skype was also clearly not designed for the kinds of uses that fit with how larger groups operate. All your text chat was in one mega chat for the group and that group was also bound to a single call. Splitting up conversations, whether voice or text, required creating a new group.

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

#268
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be super fair too, if you compare Discord to forums, (the thing lots of communities were using before Reddit) in terms of whether it’s good at managing a large discussion, remember when there would be a thread with 19 pages? People would be challenged to find the actually useful post on page 5 when there were dozens of pages on an active thread. So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the differen…

> an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost. This is what pins are for.

Not exactly scalable though, would you eventually have 10000 pins after 5 years and let people search (using a good search engine) across those only to avoid the noise of 1000 matching chat messages of idle speculation and uninformed wrongness? In Reddit the useful posts would have been upvoted, and then the post would have been indexed by google. I don’t see a compelling comparison here for a case like “how do I get (Device name) working in Home Assistant”

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

#269
post #145
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon Man, really? That sounds great . Patreon sucks really, really hard. It's one of those websites & apps where you're amazed someone managed to screw up that badly. Like, you have to put serious effort into making software as bad as Patreon is. Quibbles about their business model aside, Discord actually knows how to make functio…

Can you elaborate on the issues you're talking about? I support a couple of creators and my interactions with the site have been fine, so I'm curious what issues you have with it.

I subscribe to a couple of podcasts and adventure/DND audio shows on Patreon. Their audio player works so poorly in Firefox that I literally ended up swapping over to Safari full time for daily browsing just because I was using it so much to listen to those podcasts/DND shows on Patreon.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi.

>you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX

Just because people are using a app without any real competitors doesn't mean that the UX is great. There is a lot of software that does its job well enough that people deal with the bad UI/UX.

Discord's UX is basically a slot machine from Vegas. Its obnoxious.

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