April fools
Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#42I 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?
If you do, then that marks you as having cash to throw around, making you a more valuable ad target. So the advertisers raise their bid. It's part of the great cycle of digital content channels.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#43The enshittification progresses... you hate to see it
What would be a better way to pay the bills?
The problem is, many users already pay. Server boosts, nitro, etc. It feels like threatening free users wont help their problem much. We see it time and time again with the enshittification of other projects that it wont work as a reliable revenue stream.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#44I 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!
It becoming a Facebook group on steroids is my biggest issue with Discord. So much knowledge, information and documentation is lost in an unindexed proprietary black hole. It‘s a chat that people started to abuse for all kinds of things just because it can be done. Often time normal forums would be more beneficial for everyone involved. Also I host my own TS server since 2019 and never had to deal with any real probl…
If any discord employee sees this, here’s an idea: 10$/month subscription to run a LLM on the chat history daily, grouping and indexing all information, structuring it in articles, etc…
Killer feature, that’d solve a lot of issues with the current experience.
Next one: teach someone born before 1999 how to deactivate channel notifications.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is a given. Is your only point that we should be more skeptical of free stuff or is there something deeper here?
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is a given. Is your only point that we should be more skeptical of free stuff or is there something deeper here?
Nothing deeper, skeptical is a fair term but impractical.
Consider instead what the person stands to gain.
In my case I invest in my network because it makes me independent and that is my objective and I am happy to pay for that.
For other people its because they might want to foster open source (freenode for example) and thus your for-profit business or gamer clan isn't the right fit.
Due diligence is the correct term. Not skepticism.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
I don't mean ownership of the server. I mean managing it, administrating it, creating granular roles, managing bans, etc.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A subsidised product that is unsustainable crowds out a product/project that is perhaps more basic but is sustainable. Critical mass is important so creating something that captures market share and then turns to shit actively harms the market.
This addresses the crux of the issue as I see it. We will never have nice things if this cycle is allowed to repeat endlessly. I hope that people will eventually wisen up to these tactics but realistically I think regulation would be required if we wanted to stop it. I see parallels to classic price dumping but I don't know how applicable those laws are in the digital world.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#49Are there any laws against enshittification / unsustainable business practices? 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…
You’ve really gotta separate is/ought in your world view. Is it good to make laws according to taste; ought we do so to help create the world we like? The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail. It generally better to allow even playing grounds. Our desires for what what ought to happen are often short sighted.
> The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail.
I'm fine with discord failing if the alternative is discord enshittifying itself while keeping user data hostage. Same applies to other platforms or products.
I guess what you're saying is that not just discord would fail but the whole network of advertisers and products that rely on them. I hope this wouldn't be as dramatic, I hope we'd find better ways to reach consumer audiences than creepy ads.
Re: Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
#50RIP 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.
These projects do other non-gaming livestreams for certain events, meetings, etc. Twitch was just a game streaming platform for many years with more incidental gaming / just chatting now than not. Unless there’s a lot of pushback, this will likely just be the tip of the iceberg before allowing more ads in more places in the future.