5 ms·

Discord is a company with a 15B valuation and hundreds of employees. And bots, either general purpose or bespoke, are a pretty important part of most partnered

by oefrha 5y ago

Discord is a company with a 15B valuation and hundreds of employees. And bots, either general purpose or bespoke, are a pretty important part of most partnered servers I’ve been in. I just don’t understand why they would leave a huge fragment of the “community” to their own and simply watch it burn. Surely they can afford a developer advocate or two, and take over development of a popular SDK?

Nextgrid 5y ago
> is a company with a 15B valuation and hundreds of employees And zero profit nor viable plan to generate any. That's the problem. There's no money to be made in being a message bus, certainly not enough to justify such a valuation and sustain hundreds of employees (whether it needs those is a different matter, but that's out of scope). Discord's current business model is "growth and engagement" - this is what netted them their current funding and valuation. This requires keeping the audience captive and being able to regulate their behavior, including coercing them into doing things against their interests such as seeing ads, navigating through dark patterns, etc. Having a healthy developer ecosystem goes against this - it means you become a dumb message bus and people will be able to automate their way around any inconvenience you might put to monetize them. Developers are great when you've got a real business providing a real product people pay for, but when your only bet is on the "attention economy", the last thing you want is to have "smartasses" around that can create technical workarounds to your inconvenience-based business model.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Having interacted with Nitro subscribers daily and worked on Discord bots myself, I fail to see any competition (or workarounds) between Nitro/server boosts and bots. And it’s certainly not becoming a dumb message bus unless you’re talking about the forbidden unofficial clients, which is not what’s being discussed here.
- jart 5y ago
  Discord is one of the few websites on the Internet that doesn't embed any cross-origin resources. Their business model is to sell you stickers. If that isn't honest graft I don't know what is. Last thing Discord needs is for the Cambridge Analyticas of the world to start building apps for it. I'm surprised they even have a developer API.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >Discord is one of the few websites on the Internet that doesn't embed any cross-origin resources What do you mean? You can literally link to an image and Discord will replace that link with an inline image. And with opengraph Discord will embed youtube videos and twitter image and videos right into the chat.
    - ajayyy 5y ago
      That is loaded by Discord's server, not the local client. They likely are mainly referring to 3rd party scripts.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    I admire that business model (Grinding Gear Games followed a similar approach with their ARPG Path of Exile initially, you could only buy cosmetics, and seemed to do okay with that, as opposed to games like War Thunder where money could buy you special planes/tanks/ships, although I think GGG's approach may have changed slightly after Tencent bought them). I just hope it's viable when you're taking VC money.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  > And zero profit nor viable plan to generate any. They went from 5 Million revenue in 2016 to 120 Million in 2020. That's very far from zero or a lacking plan. The money is coming, it's just has not grown enough yet.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I'm explicitly talking about profit and not revenue. I too can have near-infinite revenue if I keep "selling" products/services for less than what it costs to make them.
iforgotpassword 5y ago
And then this guy, who made a detailed post about how non-cooperative and almost hostile the discord dev team was towards his efforts half a year ago — providing free work to help others vastly improve the discord experience with hundreds of useful and unique bots — announces he'll go back to maintaining this lib although nothing about how discord acts towards the project has changed. Is this open source masochism or something? I don't get it. I'd have understood if money were involved, but like that? Rather let shit hit the fan and see if you can leverage it.

by oefrha 5y ago

Nextgrid 5y ago

> is a company with a 15B valuation and hundreds of employees And zero profit nor viable plan to generate any. That's the problem. There's no money to be made in being a message bus, certainly not enough to justify such a valuation and sustain hundreds of employees (whether it needs those is a different matter, but that's out of scope). Discord's current business model is "growth and engagement" - this is what netted them their current funding and valuation. This requires keeping the audience captive and being able to regulate their behavior, including coercing them into doing things against their interests such as seeing ads, navigating through dark patterns, etc. Having a healthy developer ecosystem goes against this - it means you become a dumb message bus and people will be able to automate their way around any inconvenience you might put to monetize them. Developers are great when you've got a real business providing a real product people pay for, but when your only bet is on the "attention economy", the last thing you want is to have "smartasses" around that can create technical workarounds to your inconvenience-based business model.

oefrha 5y ago
Having interacted with Nitro subscribers daily and worked on Discord bots myself, I fail to see any competition (or workarounds) between Nitro/server boosts and bots. And it’s certainly not becoming a dumb message bus unless you’re talking about the forbidden unofficial clients, which is not what’s being discussed here.
jart 5y ago
Discord is one of the few websites on the Internet that doesn't embed any cross-origin resources. Their business model is to sell you stickers. If that isn't honest graft I don't know what is. Last thing Discord needs is for the Cambridge Analyticas of the world to start building apps for it. I'm surprised they even have a developer API.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >Discord is one of the few websites on the Internet that doesn't embed any cross-origin resources What do you mean? You can literally link to an image and Discord will replace that link with an inline image. And with opengraph Discord will embed youtube videos and twitter image and videos right into the chat.
  - ajayyy 5y ago
    That is loaded by Discord's server, not the local client. They likely are mainly referring to 3rd party scripts.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  I admire that business model (Grinding Gear Games followed a similar approach with their ARPG Path of Exile initially, you could only buy cosmetics, and seemed to do okay with that, as opposed to games like War Thunder where money could buy you special planes/tanks/ships, although I think GGG's approach may have changed slightly after Tencent bought them). I just hope it's viable when you're taking VC money.
slightwinder 5y ago
> And zero profit nor viable plan to generate any. They went from 5 Million revenue in 2016 to 120 Million in 2020. That's very far from zero or a lacking plan. The money is coming, it's just has not grown enough yet.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I'm explicitly talking about profit and not revenue. I too can have near-infinite revenue if I keep "selling" products/services for less than what it costs to make them.

iforgotpassword 5y ago

And then this guy, who made a detailed post about how non-cooperative and almost hostile the discord dev team was towards his efforts half a year ago — providing free work to help others vastly improve the discord experience with hundreds of useful and unique bots — announces he'll go back to maintaining this lib although nothing about how discord acts towards the project has changed. Is this open source masochism or something? I don't get it. I'd have understood if money were involved, but like that? Rather let shit hit the fan and see if you can leverage it.