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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'

#121

Post by JamesLeonis »

pxue wrote: post #21

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

> Maybe I'm dating myself

I'm almost 40, so I think I can explain this. Discord is turn-key community infrastructure for users and moderators. Bespoke solutions have more incidental complexities compared to Discord with regard to hanging out with others and playing games. This initial gravity is what is pulling in the rest of the Internet communities.

VoIP is not easy to set up and use in the best circumstances, and Discord makes it painless. I cannot stress this enough! Usually it took That Guy who spent days pouring over how-tos and several aborted attempts at setting it up. Discord is similar to what GameSpy brought to game server hosting compared to hosting a game yourself. If that sounds like foreshadowing, I agree!

Discord also is replacing the whole communication/coordination stack. Forums are a casualty for the same reason Reddit took over; setting up a public internet service is hard. But Discord steps beyond that. It is taking over the chat communications gamers use to coordinate, including text messages and AIM/IRQ/IRC/etc. This meshes very well with guilds and amateur competitive gaming, as well as the hangout vibe of sitting in a chat room. Throw in built-in video streaming and you have Twitch.tv functionality all in the same app.

Combine the above with a single unified moderation, and you have a critical nexus of features for community management without all the fuss of hosting the infrastructure yourself. Individuals have a single login that can access hundreds of communities, while moderators have similar management controls as forums over their own.

Are there downsides? Oh my yes, but those will manifest later as Discord matures into its own blow-up stage of venture capital social networks.

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

#122

Post by zeku »

pxue wrote: post #21

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

My entire online social life(which got really big due to friends moving and covid) is 100% on discord.

Many of my friends also don't have social media and we all exist within a discord server and share our lives and game together very often.

Discord has this buy in like a social media platform for a lot of people.

It's what I've described above--plus communities moving to discord and away from reddit.

If you do an online game now you will end up on discord if you're even halfway serious about the game.

One of the big things discord has allowed for my friend group is it's the first platform like this that has brought in the "normies". People who would never visit a forum and didn't even know teamspeak or ventrilo ever existed.

It's a smooth experience at almost all times on desktop and mobile.

If you go to college nowadays most of the majors have discords--and study groups have discords.

My friends don't even text me anymore, they DM me on discord and have for years at this point.

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

#123

Post by paulmd »

didntcheck wrote: post #102
this_user wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps

yeah people arbitrarily throw content federation and identity federation into the same bin.

you can get a lot of the squeeze of a centralized reddit-style service (in terms of low-friction user signup) without needing actual content federation. One ID can still let you post on multiple boards without needing to sign up in 27 places, and that doesn't need content federation.

It also significantly reduces the moderation problem because now you are letting {Google,Facebook,Apple} solve (or at least gate/significantly reduce) the spammers problem for you. That said, custom IDPs are inherently at odds with this value in spam filtering. If a spammer just needs to set up a custom domain, you don't get any signal as to user quality.

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

#124

Post by this_user »

vvillena wrote: post #110
this_user wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

Convenience doesn't require centralization nor a walled-garden approach. It's just not a priority to the people developing the alternatives. Let's use Lemmy as an example. The current UI makes it clear at all times where the communities and the users are located. It's nice to provide such information, but in the end it should not matter, and thus it should not be wasting premium UI space. Same thing goes with the com…

> Convenience doesn't require centralization

Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the federated system. Those entities are most likely operating with different standards and different levels of professionalism. In the end, you are offloading tasks to the end users like figuring out the structure of it all, where to sign up, which instances to join, how to get access to the content you are looking for, what to do when things inevitably break. In a centralised system, most of these questions don't exist, and everything else is being taken care of by the operator who has a vested interest in things running as smoothly as possible.

What you are describing are mostly UI problems, but even if those had been solved, it would still a worse experience. The average user doesn't even know what "federated" means, the don't want to be thinking about local and remote instances, they just want things to work.

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

#125

Post by dcow »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #62
Filligree wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions. Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable. It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

To be fair, the text density can be changed to be more compact.

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

#126

Post by vhcr »

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…

Discord's UX is on another level compared to the other apps, here's two examples:

* If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G.

* When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.

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

#127

Post by dcow »

didntcheck wrote: post #102
this_user wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps

I also pine for a world where I can put in my own IDP url and login anywhere. But you have to admit that the UX of such a flow is hard to solve for the general user which is why we have crummy “log in with X” buttons.

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

#128

Post by SinParadise »

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…

Zoom is said to be easy to use for voip, but I found discord to be vastly superior in terms of ease of use and config.

Basically all the ceremonies and friction of the networking aspect and video/audio aspects are gone.

Now I think the community model of Discord isn't really in congruence with the knowledge base model a la Reddit(its hard to drop-in and out of community just to get one answer), but it is still vastly superior to its competition.

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

#129

Post by detourdog »

didntcheck wrote: post #102
this_user wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps

I think Apple is about to open up Passkey management to device owner. This will essentially turn every Apple device kerberos type key manager. This will open up federation with a new level of authentication.

The only hitch is that one has to trust Apple as the key manager. Everyone that can get past that hurdle will be able to manage very sophisticated trust relationships.

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

#130

Post by dgellow »

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…

I cannot stand discord. Everything in the screen is trying to grab your attention all the time, unless you explicitly disable all sorts of notifications. It’s also really hard to follow discussions if you’re off for some time or want to understand what people are talking about when you join a channel.

The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.

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