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This is a cool project, but it's kind of ruined by Discord's inane TOS. I hope we can get people to move to something open.
by half-kh-hacker 7y ago
This is a cool project, but it's kind of ruined by Discord's inane TOS.
I hope we can get people to move to something open.
- dmix 7y agoI've never understood these tech company's intolerance to 3rd party clients, which are almost always niche or used by the ad-blocker using tech savvy subset of their userbase. Open clients is how most of the internet was built and will continue to be built. They should spend more time focusing on building their own best-in-class clients themselves. If they're not able to accomplish that for the vast majority of their users it's a sign of a bigger problem than some monetization optimization strategy which will only push people away. The valuable power users have multiple clients anyway and bring in more regular users (who just use the standard clients) than they're worth individually.
- saagarjha 7y agoWell, keeping it this way encourages lock-in.
- notamy 7y ago> I've never understood these tech company's intolerance to 3rd party clients, which are almost always niche or used by the ad-blocker using tech savvy subset of their userbase. In the case of Discord specifically, iirc there has been issues in the past with abusive behaviour coming from people automating their own accounts (spambots etc.), which was one of the main reasons it was prohibited.
- dmix 7y agoBanning all 3rd party clients and shutting down apis seems like an overreaction to spam... just give them keys which can be disabled.
- dylz 7y agoThey already do disable keys. The official client collects a ton of hardware information and posts it back to Discord and a third party repeatedly.
- blowski 7y agoIt’s unlikely to have a good outcome for a service that’s already dominant in the market. They fear being commoditised, or even strangled. Imagine one of those clients becomes really, really good - so much so that it becomes the default way to use the service. The client starts adding features only available in that client. Then the client introduces its own competing service, inside the same client. The service just becomes a dumb pipe, with all the real value in the client. This is why we want protocols, rather than services, to decouple the client from the service provider.
- hhh 7y agoDiscord was okay with it for a long time, then it a abused heavily.
- rat9988 7y agoIn the case of discord, in my opinion, they won't be able to monetize anything if they allow rd party clients.
- ghostpepper 7y agoHow do they make money now? Are they profitable?
- bpicolo 7y agoDiscord does build a best-in-class client, users love Discord. Tinkerers just like tinkering.
- superkuh 7y agoThe reason is simple. Discord's users are it's product, not the software services it provides them. Its clients are intentionally spyware. If you made your own client then they could not spy and sell information about you. They send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a "server" (not really a server), etc. The URL was named "/track" before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response). Also their desktop client is literally a remote sdministration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
- dmix 7y agoI’m not even talking about 3rd party clients becoming the main clients. As I said that would be a sign of a much bigger problem than just reduced ability of monetization. The reasons why they default to lock in are obvious, what I’m saying is that it ultimately benefits their business or has a neutral effect as the type of users to use a 3rd party client isn’t and is probably still using multiple clients (mobile/desktop) and still buys the subscription services. Discord will always make the most popular client. It’s just how this stuff works. Just like Twitter 95%+ of people go to discord to download the clients. It’s the niche ones on the side that end up getting banned. It’s not like the advanced features of a freemium model couldn’t be replicated in the client or in Twitters case they can still send ads in the API stream. If the client doesn’t show the ads + is very popular (a key part of the equation) then you can cut them off.
- aflag 7y agoThey could charge to allow people to use private clients equivalently (or maybe even more) to what they make per client selling that track data. Either way things go they'd win that way.
- belltaco 7y agoPart of it is due to having to worry about breaking changes made to the client-server protocol, and adding new features which may not available to all of the userbase soon, if ever. Look at the various enhancements made to IRC server software over the years and how fragmented things are.
- qwsxyh 7y agoA third party client's shitty coding broke the entire network repeatedly in early 2016. Third party clients are mostly used to spam users with userbots. The only sane option is to blanket ban them.
- m-p-3 7y agoThey want to control all the features under the guise of a unified experience.
- Arathorn 7y agoMatrix has at least two excellent commandline clients fwiw; https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix (written in contemporary python) which even supports full E2E encryption, complete with things like emoji-based key verification; and https://github.com/tulir/gomuks https://github.com/tulir/gomuks (written in Go, as the name implies). And you can bridge to Discord with pretty good parity via https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord. So open options do exist :)
- gsich 7y agoBridges suck. You have to have someone who is constantly monitoring it.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoOr just build an automated tool that watches it. That's not too hard- I've done it in Python under Linux before: gitter <-> IRC <-> Discord It wasn't very difficult- you just need to do something like a keep-alive ping (which can be hidden in an invisible Discord channel) if you're having problems with your bridge.
- gsich 7y agoThat's what I meant with "constantly monitoring". If for some reason it fails you need someone to fix it, maybe it's not fixable due to changes from either provider ... All that makes using bridges unreliable as you don't know if your messages was received by the other end.
- chupa 7y agoSomething open probably won't have the money required to run the service. Discord is losing money and they will probably never make a dime. How could Matrix for example ever compete?
- aflag 7y agoThey could charge to give you an API key that you can use with your 3rd party client
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zzo38computer 7y agoMaking a open protocol, they don't need money to run any kind of service, since you can run it by yourself instead.
- gsich 7y agoJust use it anyway.
- zzo38computer 7y agoYes; IRC is much better. There is also Matrix, but I prefer IRC.