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Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

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Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#31
post #30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are public servers for Jabber working just fine.

and I run an IRC network from my own pocket. But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.

XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#32
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and I run an IRC network from my own pocket. But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.

XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.

my point is about offering services free at point of sale for communities. Not necessarily about what technology I use to do that.

If I stop running the community it will die unless a benefactor steps in as I pay it from my pocket. thats the point.

We are coded to expect services for free but it rests on the altruism of individuals or as an investment for companies.

If its an investment: at some point those companies will want something back and likely more and more over time.

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#33
post #23

Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it. 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.

Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source. And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.

simplex.chat? I heard it improved a lot.

When do you need voice and video with a big community btw? I can see if you have a group of like 8 core devs having their own communication channel, but that is something else then hosting the whole community.

Also, your boring, regular forum is searchable. Discord is a black hole, so if the value of information is more than just personal, Discord-like things should be a no-no, even if one doesn't value privacy issues.

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#34
post #23

Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it. 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.

Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source. And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.

I don't claim to offer a perfect solution, but the first step is admitting the problem. I'll be seeking out alternatives myself.

> with good ownership management

This part is questionable. As the advertising news highlights, a private company operates primarily in the interest of its owners. For a venture-captial backed company, you expect to see the cycle of benevolence in order to grab market share, a model that induces lock-in (social lock-in, in this case), followed by exploitation (advertising and the other predatory FOMO stuff they have with the subscriptions).

The writing was on the wall from the get go, but people fell for it anyway. And now I'm hit by it too because I have to use it to hang with my friends.

It's all so tiresome

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#35
post #17

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!

> we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. 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,…

I've been a discord user since the very beginning - I joined in July 2015. In almost 10 years of using discord, I've never had to do anything, even a required updated. I've paid for Nitro on and off over that time, and am currently paying $3/mo. I think less than a take away coffee per month for a decade of hassle free chat is worth it, and it's less than running even the cheapest of cheap VPS's

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#36

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 hate ads, I hope they will limit them to a small amount for free users

Do you hate them enough to pay to not have them?

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#37
post #23

Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it. 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.

Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source. And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

When it comes to exchanging information (especially if you want things to be searchable later), I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to be a part of your community, you go where they are, not vice versa. Plus, it doesn't seem that many out there are building gamer-centric platforms since the idea of making an enterprise version in parallel to the free one and earning money off of that is... unlikely?

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#38
post #21
post #16

RIP to all those FOSS projects that thought it was good to build their communities solely on proprietary chat. I don’t expect the average folk to understand the ethical, privacy, or ownership issues, but in the software community, I do. Now your members get ads, & those ads are almost certainly expecting to siphon user data (as if Discord isn’t doing enough of that as is & not buying “seem minimally intrusive”). The…

> then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy sapping platforms. These bridges do in fact send a lot of data still to the proprietary, privacy sapping platforms, even of those who are not using them, no?

But our GMO (growth metric officer) outlined we must interact with the proprietary networks. Without algorithms, what will we trying to ‘hack’?

Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

#39
post #16

RIP to all those FOSS projects that thought it was good to build their communities solely on proprietary chat. I don’t expect the average folk to understand the ethical, privacy, or ownership issues, but in the software community, I do. Now your members get ads, & those ads are almost certainly expecting to siphon user data (as if Discord isn’t doing enough of that as is & not buying “seem minimally intrusive”). The…

How many FOSS projects are live streaming video games in the first place? I don't enjoy communities moving to Discord either, but this seems unlikely to affect any software group.
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