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"Discord “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” she said. " ..For now. Eventually they have to figure out how to get paid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be a better way to pay the bills?
I'd rather the product not exist in the first place if their business model is unsustainable and requires them to eventually enshitify after they've lured people into using it.
Critical mass is important so creating something that captures market share and then turns to shit actively harms the market.
The home base server should be free or otherwise ethical software the community can own, ideally decentralized (in practice, not theoretically decentralized)… & then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy-sapping platforms.
I hate ads, I hope they will limit them to a small amount for free users, but remember the issue Discord has been able to solve: we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. Also it’s much more than a voice-only communication channel, it’s becoming a community, some sort of Facebook group with steroids!
I'm on old fogey who still hosts a teamspeak server and I have to say, teamspeak is one of the simplest and easiest things I've ever hosted. In the 6 or so years I've been running it on my VPS I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had to do anything with it, and all of those were simply required updates.
It's seriously rock solid software, never once let me down.
Sounds like an overreaction on my part, given the news is about something as small as ads.
At the same time it’s an intentional worsening of the UX to increase profits. It’s possible because the provider has control over user data/community. And it’s likely not the last time this is happening.
Perhaps we need more laws like in EU, so that the users could seamlessly switch between apps and communicate across platforms.
I'm gonna look into hosting Matrix servers or something.
I expect that soon their policy of banning client modifications (for a web app) will be applied to ban users with adblockers.