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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'

#111

Post by dmortin »

serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

> 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.

I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?

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

#112

Post by shiftpgdn »

dmortin wrote: post #111
serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

> 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. I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?

Same reason Reddit locked down their API. AI training models. Reddit's traffic has been on a down trend over last six months as people consult GPT instead of googling "search term" + reddit.com .

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

#113

Post by i_am_jl »

serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

>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 than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.

I use Discord a lot, and while I'm sympathetic to the concerns they're not relevant to the servers I frequent. Discord is so abysmal to search that anything that users want to share beyond chat/memes/pet pictures gets posted in the forum and linked to from the Discord. Any ordered discussion just falls apart in Discord, so every server I'm in either:

* Is small and ephemeral (Breaking rules, trying to not get the main server sanctioned)

* Is a private group where archival is undesirable

* Has a wiki/forum/dropbox/drive where conversation and artifacts are shared, organized and archived.

I don't think you're wrong about Discord being difficult to index, I just think the problem you're describing is, at worst, understood and has simple workarounds, or at best is an actual feature that people want.

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

#114

Post by vicktour »

xattt wrote: post #87
Levitz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.

Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.

That must be something they added recently-ish. I wonder how walled it really is. I also wonder if they remove the arbitrary rules like the 5mb limit on files.

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

#115

Post by shiftpgdn »

IE6 wrote: post #78
serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

> 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. Completely anecdotal, but IMHO their app just works and it works well. For instance I used to play an MMO using discord and we had ~72 people in voice chat at any given time and it was flawless (some of our members were 80+ year…

Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?

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

#116

Post by jjulius »

noirbot wrote: post #108
jjulius wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the improvement for the users is just a byproduct in Discord's eyes. Pardon my pessimism, but I don't see Discord just deciding to stop monetizing more things. This is the encroachment of enshittiffication.

Sure, but that's essentially just "we all agree capitalism sucks, right?" in more words. I'd rather I just get a free voice chat app forever, but given that that's not the way this current economy works, I'm going to take the wins where I can when a company is choosing to monetize in ways that are generally good for everyone involved. Discord, thus far, has generally been monetizing in ways I find pretty generally po…

>Discord, thus far, has generally been monetizing in ways I find pretty generally positive. I'm going to celebrate that until they actually start monetizing in shittier ways.

I'd argue that's why we end up in the position we often end up in, as users. We take it little by little until it's too late.

The "Well yeah that's capitalism and it sucks so /shrug, right?" argument feels kinda weak to me. If Discord's profitable and users are happy, why beat them for even more profit? Why can't we just go, "Welp, this is working, let's maintain where we're at"?

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

#117

Post by fndex »

serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

I think one reason Discord is so popular and many people don't talk about is the same reason why games like Minecraft, Tibia, GTA San Andreas and many other old games are still popular today.

The reason is that they allow users to customize the software through code. When you create a Discord or Minecraft server, they act as a "platform" for your server, you can write code to customize every aspect of it. I think that counts a lot.

I don't know any alternative that is as customizable and good as Discord, and I don't think Discord will be replaced any soon while a platform that supports that level of customization comes up.

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

#118

Post by AlbinoDrought »

worble wrote: post #98
KronisLV wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried. But a lot of it…

If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop. There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio. 0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

It's interesting that there's a workaround. I always assumed it was an upstream Chromium [0] or Electron [1] issue.

0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114376...

1: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515

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

#119

Post by msabalau »

bovermyer wrote: post #20
veave wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives. It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on. Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.

Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so. But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition. - Forums are easy for search engines to index - Old threads on forums are easily discoverable - Forums have good threading in general - Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) - It's easy to have completely different identities on differe…

Discord is great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new.

Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that.

It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd.

A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"

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

#120

Post by paulmd »

Filligree wrote: post #6
serf wrote: post #3

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. 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…

> 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…

Yeah. Does anyone actually remember Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, lol? Discord is an incredibly better UX. Those programs feel like they're from 2000, they're clunky to set up, and the reality is they're still way better than what came before (eg Roger Wilco).

(for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.)

Also, they need a hosted server (which most people see as a disadvantage, HN is not the norm here).

Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.

I think that's what they're fishing for with the transition to unique global usernames tho. Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board.

When your users keep trying to shove your product into another niche it doesn't fit... you listen.

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