Not sure why the writer of this article is concerned about paywalling. That's already a thing. If you support someone on Patreon, it can come with the benefit of being able to join a subscriber-only Discord server. And you can have roles assigned based on the selected tier of support, which allows the creators to set up channels so only people above a certain tier can access them.
Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
271–280 of 308 posts
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#272Earlier 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 was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.
I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#273Earlier 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…
> Their app isn't buggy The Android app often has issues that make using it infuriating.
The sole reason I have the android app installed is for the QR sign in for my desktop.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#274I 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…
There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either.
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be walled gardens at all and everything would be accessible forever. But since they exist, I think we need easy tools that can scrape conversations for archival. I don't necessarily mean tools that can scrape all content. I imagine most sites would be very hostile towards that. But perhaps a personal/local tool where a user can archive their own conversations and communities, whether it be Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Making it personal instead of a large public scraping might be more tolerable. Data takeouts also exist, some easier to use than others. But they miss out on community conversations, which might have important content that you'd want to preserve.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that while the users shouldn't care, they should also care (as the Lemmy instance you use does not want to federate with the one discussing CP).
In the end it's all about trusting a bunch of unpaid wardens. Just like Reddit.
Reddit in addition to unpaid wardens also has a god-emperor pushing for enshittification of the platform.
Not quite the same thing.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
You are right, It looks like they changed it in April. I was wrong, it wasn't 5mb it was 8mb. I am glad they upped the cap. I might have to try it out tonight, but I have effectively ditched it as a platform after the user name fiasco. I don't know if I can drop the way the file transfer size limit made me feel. I think you can tell a lot about a company by the way they want to monetize. If they were willing to force…
> If they were willing to force a subscription in order to share screenshots what else are they willing to do.
I think this is a slippery slope argument. I also don't think there's something inherently wrong with charging money for a premium feature (large files) on a free service. You could crop your screenshot, for example.
I'm not sure what the username problem is either -- I think having unique names will help them to combat fraud and deception, which is a major benefit at a minor cost.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#277I 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.
There is an iOS app I found today called DiscourseHub that allows you to connect multiple discourse sites into a unified homepage, and switch between them. I've used it for about an hour and it seems pretty solid, fwiw
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#278Earlier 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, 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"
I actually had a friend who preferred Skype for that very reason. Due to the lack of noise filtering, she could more easily tell whether she disconnected due to her poor rural connection. It was a funny use-case that’s for sure. We were still rocking Skype up till 2018.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cor…
Even so, I see community members searching for gossip on what some ex-member said on Discord years ago.
So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.
Re: Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cor…
Even so, I see community members searching for gossip on what some ex-member said on Discord years ago. So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.
Yeah, it's slower, not impossible.
Throwing back to the past, central logging is new, and twenty years ago it would've been hearsay where many people couldn't verify those claimed past conversations. I would have no issues with a two-month default expiry policy for these things.