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Here's the real issue as I see it, based on the CEO's statements. His reasoning that '“almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the rig
by personjerry 3y ago
Here's the real issue as I see it, based on the CEO's statements.
His reasoning that '“almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person' clearly alludes to some friending metric they want to improve. It's an easy "fix" and they're probably right, this change is highly likely to "move the needle" on this metric and other related metrics such as # of friends, first month retention, etc. as a result of better early user friending experience.
But modern tech product development and its obsession with "moving the needle" avoids this question: What about the long term effects? I would ask, does making Discord more like traditional social media eat away at its "core culture", that essence that makes people loyal and likely to stay with it over months and years of time?
While you can have a holdout group to "measure against",because of the network effect it doesn't always work out the way you intend it to - if your friends stop using Discord as much, you're likely to use it less as well.
To me, it sounds like they have a) immense outside pressure and b) decreasing conviction in their original vision, which feels like the beginning of the end.
- Thorrez 3y agoSure there might be long term effects of making Discord more like traditional social media. But there could also be long term effects of people saying "huh my friend didn't get my friend request, well forget this buggy site".
- personjerry 3y agoSure, that's exactly the retention metric I mentioned (or we can call it activation), but another way to look at it could be that the people who said "forget this site" may not have stuck around or converted, so in fact you could be retaining the users with high LTV and gatekeeping against low/negative LTV users
- quickthrower2 3y agoOn a site aimed at people who pay a lot of money to solve puzzles and learn skills with persistence.
- Aeolun 3y agoInstalling mastodon is rocket science. I can see why people call it difficult. Typing the correct name into a field is not. I have a hard time understanding who’d fail at that.
- quickthrower2 3y agoYes exactly. It is almost a feature. If you can't type their handle properly, are they really a friend?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rocqua 3y agoThis was my thought as well, is discord VC funded? This smells of 'hyper-scale or die'.
- cinntaile 3y agoThey are. They have raised about a billion dollar so far.
- golemotron 3y ago> His reasoning that '“almost half” of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person' clearly alludes to some friending metric they want to improve It's not a bug, it's a feature. Considering how often users prefer anonymity, global search for users is a bad idea.
- hackernewds 3y agousers can still be anonymous while search able?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]