17 ms·

Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

188 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

dbt00 3y ago
It's hard to be too upset about this stuff in a competitive landscape that includes Reddit and Twitter.
serf 3y ago
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even taller than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.
- redmerchant2 3y ago
  Related is the content locked behind sub stack and patreon paywalls. I’m all for creators making money but it splits communities between subscribers and non subscribers. The most invested, and likely to make discussion, fans will pay taking their own contributions behind the paywall.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  They didn't have to do anything but make a quality app. Look at the destruction of all the open community and the burnout of moderators trying to keep them from being ridden with spam. Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.
- veave 3y ago
  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.
  - AnonCoward42 3y ago
    Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.
    - veave 3y ago
      When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
      - AnonCoward42 3y ago
        I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).
        Ekaros 3y ago
        I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control. So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
        noirbot 3y ago
        Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public. Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.
      - jghn 3y ago
        Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)
- Filligree 3y ago
  > 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 like IRC, Slack or any of its competitors.
  - chx 3y ago
    I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.
    - vicktour 3y ago
      I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
      - chx 3y ago
        > I wish it would actually work on Linux. This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    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.
    - xattt 3y ago
      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.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Gamefaqs and the surprisingly decent Steam forums are still able to answer any questions I have.
- dandellion 3y ago
  Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.
  - sneak 3y ago
    It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever. It's got to be a huge trove of behavioral and personal data that is immensely valuable to ad companies. People say all sorts of stuff in private DMs they'd never otherwise think to share with big tech.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I'm not entirely sure people even want the content to be discoverable by search engines. Or care for that matter. Discord is great for running community with multiple chat channels and occasional voice chats. Like any chat communication it is accepted that it is ephemeral. Not that often accessed or searched for.
  - kmmlng 3y ago
    Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.
- dekervin 3y ago
  I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users. Being hard-to-index gives credibility to the pretense of being a pseudo-annonymous, "hidden" from public eyes platform. It encourages people to be laid back, to speak more freely and form social bonds, faster than on "open" web forums. Discord is a night club, web forums are public square. And it occupied an extremely useful, and big niche.
- j_crick 3y ago
  Damn, I miss what.cd so much.
- lezojeda 3y ago
  [dead]
- IE6 3y ago
  > 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+ years old, the game I played is 25 years old). Meanwhile at work (I work in IT) it's not uncommon to spend 5 minutes just getting a meeting started, figuring out why the mic isn't working, trying to get someone to mute who isn't, etc.
  - shiftpgdn 3y ago
    Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?
    - IE6 3y ago
      EverQuest
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    FWIW we used to do 72 people EQ1 raids fine with vent. Although i think someone was paying 5-10$/month for it. Often another 20-30 in some other channels as well.
- seydor 3y ago
  reddit was so bad and so politically onesided that people couldnt talk anymore, it did not evolve, so a lot of people migrated IMHO people use discord as a reddit alternative, NOT as a chat platform. Everywhere i go i see asynchronous communication. It's terrible though, a horrible way to organize text and hidden away from search engines too. the bots and other gimmicks are pure noise. text works though and notifications help
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Discord growth hack (that somehow slack has still not figured out) is making a stupid-easy shareable link that anyone can click to join your server. It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).
- dmortin 3y ago
  > 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?
  - shiftpgdn 3y ago
    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 .
    - dmortin 3y ago
      Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.
  - notamy 3y ago
    Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  >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.
- fndex 3y ago
  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.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Are you referring to bots?
    - fndex 3y ago
      Yes.
- SinParadise 3y ago
  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.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability. IMO, that's probably their best bet with regards to growing their actual business (as opposed to popularity, which they seem to be doing a bang-up job of already)
- bluehatbrit 3y ago
  If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something. I and the communities I interact with seem to treat it as if it were ephemeral, despite it actually storing everything. People seem to want to converse about a topic and then work on the idea that those messages will fade into obscurity over the course of minutes, days, or weeks. The data that would be useful is really the connection with a given group of people. I'd want to be able to find them again and move somewhere else with them, but the conversations themselves I wouldn't miss. This is of course a big contrast to other platforms though. Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar platforms are great because they're searchable and are (or were) geared towards long term conversations and searchability. If all their content disappeared then I really would feel the impact. That's just my usage, but I'm always surprised when people say they'd want to hold onto conversations in discord.
- jliptzin 3y ago
  All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.
- dhkk 3y ago
  Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC
  - TAForObvReasons 3y ago
    Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.
- vkou 3y ago
  Exactly what knowledge is locked up behind discord's walled garden? As a knowledge repository, it's utter garbage, and always has been.
- judge2020 3y ago
  There's a different feel for something like Reddit, where you know your messages will be on google next day and easily searchable, and Discord, where technically your messages are still a permanent record, but the difficulty for someone to do something like find everything you've chatted about is much higher with search engines out of the picture. Communities are communities but typically the discussions within them aren't 100% in a reddit-like thread style where each message is an attempt to add to the discussion. This feel means the vast majority of Discord users are participating in chat and talk, while Reddit HN etc. likely follow the 90-9-1 rule (90% are lurkers, 9% will reply, 1% will post original content).
- aceazzameen 3y ago
  There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be walled gardens at all and everything would be accessible forever. But since they exist, I think we need easy tools that can scrape conversations for archival. I don't necessarily mean tools that can scrape all content. I imagine most sites would be very hostile towards that. But perhaps a personal/local tool where a user can archive their own conversations and communities, whether it be Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Making it personal instead of a large public scraping might be more tolerable. Data takeouts also exist, some easier to use than others. But they miss out on community conversations, which might have important content that you'd want to preserve.
Deukhoofd 3y ago
The article feels a bit over the top, if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon (as many Patreons already basically boil down to "get access to my Discord server")
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Definitely, and it raises an interesting philosophical/semiotic question as to what "exclusive memes" are.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  Correct. Discord is building things that users of Discord already use Discord for. They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    >They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers. Let's call a spade a spade - this is them knowing their customers, yes, but I'd hardly say they're just making things easier. It's Discord saying, "Oh, people pay for this kinda thing through Patreon? We'd actually like that money instead, please".
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      The existing process is super clunky. They are making it better while also making money. Winners all round. Unless you are patreon.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      Sure, and if they can offer a better product than Patreon then it's good for Discord and for the people running the communities. Most folks I know who use Patreon loathe it - they've barely improved the product in the last few years, so Discord feels like they're in a good position to offer a better service for some users.
fidotron 3y ago
Somewhere in here is the potential for Discord to become a big game/app platform by itself. It may prove to be a bit like the Facebook games explosion. It’s kind of surprising that turn based games within discord aren’t really a thing.
- Deukhoofd 3y ago
  It is, they rolled it out to everyone over the past month. https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch-together https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch...
  - jadamson 3y ago
    Those are are basically party games. They actually tried to become a Steam competitor before but gave up: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globally-today https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globall...
    - judge2020 3y ago
      Facebook took off with social games, like FarmVille, but Discord was going after something like Steam. These party games are good for a lot of friend groups, and third-party activities are coming online soon enough.
- davikr 3y ago
  I kinda wish Discord had a social feed where you could post to your friends, as long as there weren't any ads, or temporary Stories, but I feel like this is an uncommon opinion.
a13o 3y ago
This is a really smart move for them. They were downstream of a lot of other creator platforms, and now they can start to move that revenue over to them. Discord has a really well-built server permission model, and a rich API bot ecosystem. I bet there's brand new business opportunities made possible by this change. They're effectively a platform now.
pxue 3y ago
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?
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link instead of ip port
  - TheFreim 3y ago
    > have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      Maybe support for rich media types
    - Laremere 3y ago
      I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.
ryu2k2 3y ago
I think there's a real market for a non-profit discord-like platform on the open web, especially with all the reddit drama going on. Part of me wants to build this. The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way.
- xethos 3y ago
  Matrix is this (IMO), but self-hosted. And I doubt the ability of a non-profit to eat (or have subsidized) hosting as they approach Discord's size
- nisegami 3y ago
  >The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way. I don't know if you knew this, but Slack started as a project for a game dev team to communicate. https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/ https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    and, notably, Discord too started out trying to make a game.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  I admire your goals and wish you success, but IMO the biggest obstacle to be tackled is how to sustainably operate such a platform. If data is hosted centrally, someone needs to pay the server bills. This is fine for a small community but if user growth reaches critical mass, it has to be monetized to the point where server costs can be covered. If data is decentralized, then the potential fragmentation will be a hurdle for user adoption. Discord succeeded because it required zero tutorial to use and no setup beyond making an account, compared to previous iterations of VoIP/IRC software. This was a crucial success factor in attractig non-gamers during the pandemic.
bhickey 3y ago
Between the discord username switch, their new UI and the reddit shitification, I think the writing is on the wall. Communications are too valuable to be left to venture capitalists. I wish that Discord had decided to monetize by taking on Slack, but it was not so. Last week I burned my server to the ground and we all migrated to a self-hosted matrix instance.
- vicktour 3y ago
  I'll have to look into Matrix. I have been looking for something to replace discord. I have so many gripes about discord but I'll give you the most egregious. I cannot share a screenshot because I have a 1440p monitor and the output file is over 5mb. Sometimes my dislike of discord feels like I am an old man yelling at clouds but then I remember the 5mb transfer limit.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - spongebobstoes 3y ago
    The free transfer limit was recently increased to 25MB iirc, so it should work now. They also have a premium subscription that removes the limit (or makes it so large that I've never hit it).
    - vicktour 3y ago
      You are right, It looks like they changed it in April. I was wrong, it wasn't 5mb it was 8mb. I am glad they upped the cap. I might have to try it out tonight, but I have effectively ditched it as a platform after the user name fiasco. I don't know if I can drop the way the file transfer size limit made me feel. I think you can tell a lot about a company by the way they want to monetize. If they were willing to force a subscription in order to share screenshots what else are they willing to do.
      - spongebobstoes 3y ago
INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
I seriously dislike trying to use Discord, and I get annoyed when open source projects direct questions / support to a community discord as opposed to a wiki or faq of forum. Searching discord is painful, and god forbid you ask a question that someone else asked 3 weeks ago that you weren’t sitting in front of the chat for. The only discord that kind of makes sense (that I’ve used, and I haven’t used many) is the doom eMacs discord, where the questions are kind of pinned. Almost in a Forum format. I wish Discourse would take off more. I think it’s a great, modern answer to forums.
- the_common_man 3y ago
  Or nodebb
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  Discourse is a nice experience once you're in, but the lack of federation is problematic. With NNTP, IRC, or even email lists, I can participate in multiple communities from one screen. With Discourse, I need to register on different sites and then visit each of them individually and regularly if I want to actively participate. Consequently, I don't often participate in those communities.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    discourse users, admins, devs etc need to get their act together and improve federation possibilities between different instances as it feels like a missed opportunity
  - Laaas 3y ago
    For authentication, you don't want federation, you want OpenID [0]. The "access each of them individually" problem is separate from federation and could be solved by having custom clients, such that one client connects to multiple discourses, e.g., if Discourse decided to use the Matrix protocol, you could use any Matrix client to connect to any Discourse instance. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID
uni_baconcat 3y ago
Discord is a group chatting app for me. I barely use it as a community.
newsclues 3y ago
Discord is becoming intolerable, I guess we should all go back to forums and IRC.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  This, unironically (if you meant it as such).
sergiotapia 3y ago
What happened to their game store? They launched this big Steam competitor, and quietly and unceremoniously shut it down. You guys remember right?
- Jasper_ 3y ago
  Epic Games Store happened.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  I'd wager it wasn't worth the hassle. Steam isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly that's not actively committed to being terrible. People, on the whole, like Steam. And that's a huge moat. When going toe-to-toe with a monopoly, normally your snowball's-chance-in-hell chance comes from the fact that people aren't happy about the monopoly, because the monopoly got complacent, started squeezing people for everything they can get, and just generally being awful, because hey, where else will you go? But Steam hasn't done that, so on top of overcoming the market momentum in their favor, you also have to go above and beyond to make a better product.
sledgehammers 3y ago
I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.
- JustBreath 3y ago
  We already did: email. But seriously, in order for this to happen the platform needs to be a protocol. Basically Bitcoin but for sharing stuff, but all the attempts so far have been too nerdy/esoteric to gain mainstream adoption.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  There's the Fediverse sphere of platforms that largely fit your ideals but fragmentation is a glaring problem that prevents it from much wider adoption. Any centralized platform where data is hosted is going to cost an obscene amount of money to operate once it gains traction. So they need to find a way to monetize it in order to keep the lights on. Throw in some venture capital and you've got yourself yet another startup that thinks they can scale infinitely. My biggest fear is Discord gating old convos behind a paywall like Slack. Discord doesn't do that because it is still technically a different product from Slack, but should monetization drives intensify I'm afraid that'd be one of the easy channels they are going to take a look at.
- nologic01 3y ago
  We are a bullshit species. Our collective well being is secondary to each era's power games. With the amount of brain power and resources that exist today and the relative triviality of orchestrating social media platforms it would take, like two or three months of banging some heads together and solving this little nuisance once and for all. To the great relief and benefit of current and future generations. So that we can focus on some real problems. But no, we have to stick to the rigged game.
- adamwong246 3y ago
  We did. It was called "The Internet". It was great, for a while. But you had write your own webpages and host the pages yourself, which was hard and expensive. Only nerds could figure it out and the only people who got free servers were academics. At some point, some rich guys in california realized that you could trade a consumers info for a "free" service. Regular people went online and found all these neat free apps and all they had to do was watch some ads. It wasn't the best, but it worked ok, for a while. And suddenly _everything_ was a "free" app. Then walls came up and we found ourselves stranded. Nobody could afford to leave the walled garden and nobody could afford to make a better option.
vegabook 3y ago
Interesting that both "winners" in their relative spaces, Discord and WhatsApp, both ramped up using BEAM languages.
importantigrvty 3y ago
yeah it sucks that the best voip and messaging platform is trying to find ways to continue to operate. /s The product is the same and you don't have to use any of these new features if you don't want to. Like, what are we actually complaining about here.
Havoc 3y ago
Seems the era of free money is over for all the growth at any cost companies
ChildOfChaos 3y ago
Discord has been a buggy mess lately since they keep pushing all these updates to add further monetisation and breaking core features. The Mac version is handling calls horribly, often doesn't show connection strength on calls (greyed out), often completely kills Microphone and bluetooth headphones (starts working as soon as you close discord) or slows the entire machine down to a crawl unless you quit out of it. I had an issue for months with every update, I would need to go into the library and delete the discord folder and reinstall, hasn't happened for awhile now.
ziml77 3y ago
Not sure why the writer of this article is concerned about paywalling. That's already a thing. If you support someone on Patreon, it can come with the benefit of being able to join a subscriber-only Discord server. And you can have roles assigned based on the selected tier of support, which allows the creators to set up channels so only people above a certain tier can access them.

188 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

It's hard to be too upset about this stuff in a competitive landscape that includes Reddit and Twitter.

serf 3y ago

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

redmerchant2 3y ago
Related is the content locked behind sub stack and patreon paywalls. I’m all for creators making money but it splits communities between subscribers and non subscribers. The most invested, and likely to make discussion, fans will pay taking their own contributions behind the paywall.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
They didn't have to do anything but make a quality app. Look at the destruction of all the open community and the burnout of moderators trying to keep them from being ridden with spam. Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.
veave 3y ago
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.
- AnonCoward42 3y ago
  Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.
  - veave 3y ago
    When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
    - AnonCoward42 3y ago
      I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control. So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.
        noirbot 3y ago
        Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public. Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.
    - jghn 3y ago
      Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)
Filligree 3y ago
> 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 like IRC, Slack or any of its competitors.
- chx 3y ago
  I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.
  - vicktour 3y ago
    I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
    - chx 3y ago
      > I wish it would actually work on Linux. This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.
- Levitz 3y ago
  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.
  - xattt 3y ago
    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.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Gamefaqs and the surprisingly decent Steam forums are still able to answer any questions I have.
dandellion 3y ago
Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.
- coldpie 3y ago
  I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.
- sneak 3y ago
  It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever. It's got to be a huge trove of behavioral and personal data that is immensely valuable to ad companies. People say all sorts of stuff in private DMs they'd never otherwise think to share with big tech.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.
Ekaros 3y ago
I'm not entirely sure people even want the content to be discoverable by search engines. Or care for that matter. Discord is great for running community with multiple chat channels and occasional voice chats. Like any chat communication it is accepted that it is ephemeral. Not that often accessed or searched for.
- kmmlng 3y ago
  Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.
dekervin 3y ago
I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users. Being hard-to-index gives credibility to the pretense of being a pseudo-annonymous, "hidden" from public eyes platform. It encourages people to be laid back, to speak more freely and form social bonds, faster than on "open" web forums. Discord is a night club, web forums are public square. And it occupied an extremely useful, and big niche.
j_crick 3y ago
Damn, I miss what.cd so much.
lezojeda 3y ago
[dead]
IE6 3y ago
> 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+ years old, the game I played is 25 years old). Meanwhile at work (I work in IT) it's not uncommon to spend 5 minutes just getting a meeting started, figuring out why the mic isn't working, trying to get someone to mute who isn't, etc.
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?
  - IE6 3y ago
    EverQuest
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  FWIW we used to do 72 people EQ1 raids fine with vent. Although i think someone was paying 5-10$/month for it. Often another 20-30 in some other channels as well.
seydor 3y ago
reddit was so bad and so politically onesided that people couldnt talk anymore, it did not evolve, so a lot of people migrated IMHO people use discord as a reddit alternative, NOT as a chat platform. Everywhere i go i see asynchronous communication. It's terrible though, a horrible way to organize text and hidden away from search engines too. the bots and other gimmicks are pure noise. text works though and notifications help
newZWhoDis 3y ago
Discord growth hack (that somehow slack has still not figured out) is making a stupid-easy shareable link that anyone can click to join your server. It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).
dmortin 3y ago
> 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?
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  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 .
  - dmortin 3y ago
    Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.
- notamy 3y ago
  Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.
i_am_jl 3y ago
>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.
fndex 3y ago
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.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Are you referring to bots?
  - fndex 3y ago
    Yes.
SinParadise 3y ago
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.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability. IMO, that's probably their best bet with regards to growing their actual business (as opposed to popularity, which they seem to be doing a bang-up job of already)
bluehatbrit 3y ago
If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something. I and the communities I interact with seem to treat it as if it were ephemeral, despite it actually storing everything. People seem to want to converse about a topic and then work on the idea that those messages will fade into obscurity over the course of minutes, days, or weeks. The data that would be useful is really the connection with a given group of people. I'd want to be able to find them again and move somewhere else with them, but the conversations themselves I wouldn't miss. This is of course a big contrast to other platforms though. Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar platforms are great because they're searchable and are (or were) geared towards long term conversations and searchability. If all their content disappeared then I really would feel the impact. That's just my usage, but I'm always surprised when people say they'd want to hold onto conversations in discord.
jliptzin 3y ago
All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.
dhkk 3y ago
Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC
- TAForObvReasons 3y ago
  Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.
vkou 3y ago
Exactly what knowledge is locked up behind discord's walled garden? As a knowledge repository, it's utter garbage, and always has been.
judge2020 3y ago
There's a different feel for something like Reddit, where you know your messages will be on google next day and easily searchable, and Discord, where technically your messages are still a permanent record, but the difficulty for someone to do something like find everything you've chatted about is much higher with search engines out of the picture. Communities are communities but typically the discussions within them aren't 100% in a reddit-like thread style where each message is an attempt to add to the discussion. This feel means the vast majority of Discord users are participating in chat and talk, while Reddit HN etc. likely follow the 90-9-1 rule (90% are lurkers, 9% will reply, 1% will post original content).
aceazzameen 3y ago
There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be walled gardens at all and everything would be accessible forever. But since they exist, I think we need easy tools that can scrape conversations for archival. I don't necessarily mean tools that can scrape all content. I imagine most sites would be very hostile towards that. But perhaps a personal/local tool where a user can archive their own conversations and communities, whether it be Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Making it personal instead of a large public scraping might be more tolerable. Data takeouts also exist, some easier to use than others. But they miss out on community conversations, which might have important content that you'd want to preserve.

Deukhoofd 3y ago

The article feels a bit over the top, if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon (as many Patreons already basically boil down to "get access to my Discord server")

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Definitely, and it raises an interesting philosophical/semiotic question as to what "exclusive memes" are.
jasonlotito 3y ago
Correct. Discord is building things that users of Discord already use Discord for. They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers. Let's call a spade a spade - this is them knowing their customers, yes, but I'd hardly say they're just making things easier. It's Discord saying, "Oh, people pay for this kinda thing through Patreon? We'd actually like that money instead, please".
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    The existing process is super clunky. They are making it better while also making money. Winners all round. Unless you are patreon.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    Sure, and if they can offer a better product than Patreon then it's good for Discord and for the people running the communities. Most folks I know who use Patreon loathe it - they've barely improved the product in the last few years, so Discord feels like they're in a good position to offer a better service for some users.

fidotron 3y ago

Somewhere in here is the potential for Discord to become a big game/app platform by itself. It may prove to be a bit like the Facebook games explosion. It’s kind of surprising that turn based games within discord aren’t really a thing.

Deukhoofd 3y ago
It is, they rolled it out to everyone over the past month. https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch-together https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch...
- jadamson 3y ago
  Those are are basically party games. They actually tried to become a Steam competitor before but gave up: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globally-today https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globall...
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Facebook took off with social games, like FarmVille, but Discord was going after something like Steam. These party games are good for a lot of friend groups, and third-party activities are coming online soon enough.
davikr 3y ago
I kinda wish Discord had a social feed where you could post to your friends, as long as there weren't any ads, or temporary Stories, but I feel like this is an uncommon opinion.

a13o 3y ago

This is a really smart move for them. They were downstream of a lot of other creator platforms, and now they can start to move that revenue over to them. Discord has a really well-built server permission model, and a rich API bot ecosystem. I bet there's brand new business opportunities made possible by this change. They're effectively a platform now.

pxue 3y ago

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?

hardware2win 3y ago
Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link instead of ip port
- TheFreim 3y ago
  > have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Maybe support for rich media types
  - Laremere 3y ago
    I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.

ryu2k2 3y ago

I think there's a real market for a non-profit discord-like platform on the open web, especially with all the reddit drama going on. Part of me wants to build this. The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way.

xethos 3y ago
Matrix is this (IMO), but self-hosted. And I doubt the ability of a non-profit to eat (or have subsidized) hosting as they approach Discord's size
nisegami 3y ago
>The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way. I don't know if you knew this, but Slack started as a project for a game dev team to communicate. https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/ https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/
- BoxFour 3y ago
  and, notably, Discord too started out trying to make a game.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
I admire your goals and wish you success, but IMO the biggest obstacle to be tackled is how to sustainably operate such a platform. If data is hosted centrally, someone needs to pay the server bills. This is fine for a small community but if user growth reaches critical mass, it has to be monetized to the point where server costs can be covered. If data is decentralized, then the potential fragmentation will be a hurdle for user adoption. Discord succeeded because it required zero tutorial to use and no setup beyond making an account, compared to previous iterations of VoIP/IRC software. This was a crucial success factor in attractig non-gamers during the pandemic.

bhickey 3y ago

Between the discord username switch, their new UI and the reddit shitification, I think the writing is on the wall. Communications are too valuable to be left to venture capitalists. I wish that Discord had decided to monetize by taking on Slack, but it was not so. Last week I burned my server to the ground and we all migrated to a self-hosted matrix instance.

vicktour 3y ago
I'll have to look into Matrix. I have been looking for something to replace discord. I have so many gripes about discord but I'll give you the most egregious. I cannot share a screenshot because I have a 1440p monitor and the output file is over 5mb. Sometimes my dislike of discord feels like I am an old man yelling at clouds but then I remember the 5mb transfer limit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- spongebobstoes 3y ago
  The free transfer limit was recently increased to 25MB iirc, so it should work now. They also have a premium subscription that removes the limit (or makes it so large that I've never hit it).
  - vicktour 3y ago
    You are right, It looks like they changed it in April. I was wrong, it wasn't 5mb it was 8mb. I am glad they upped the cap. I might have to try it out tonight, but I have effectively ditched it as a platform after the user name fiasco. I don't know if I can drop the way the file transfer size limit made me feel. I think you can tell a lot about a company by the way they want to monetize. If they were willing to force a subscription in order to share screenshots what else are they willing to do.
    - spongebobstoes 3y ago

INGSOCIALITE 3y ago

I seriously dislike trying to use Discord, and I get annoyed when open source projects direct questions / support to a community discord as opposed to a wiki or faq of forum. Searching discord is painful, and god forbid you ask a question that someone else asked 3 weeks ago that you weren’t sitting in front of the chat for. The only discord that kind of makes sense (that I’ve used, and I haven’t used many) is the doom eMacs discord, where the questions are kind of pinned. Almost in a Forum format. I wish Discourse would take off more. I think it’s a great, modern answer to forums.

the_common_man 3y ago
Or nodebb
nirvdrum 3y ago
Discourse is a nice experience once you're in, but the lack of federation is problematic. With NNTP, IRC, or even email lists, I can participate in multiple communities from one screen. With Discourse, I need to register on different sites and then visit each of them individually and regularly if I want to actively participate. Consequently, I don't often participate in those communities.
- nologic01 3y ago
  discourse users, admins, devs etc need to get their act together and improve federation possibilities between different instances as it feels like a missed opportunity
- Laaas 3y ago
  For authentication, you don't want federation, you want OpenID [0]. The "access each of them individually" problem is separate from federation and could be solved by having custom clients, such that one client connects to multiple discourses, e.g., if Discourse decided to use the Matrix protocol, you could use any Matrix client to connect to any Discourse instance. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

uni_baconcat 3y ago

Discord is a group chatting app for me. I barely use it as a community.

newsclues 3y ago

Discord is becoming intolerable, I guess we should all go back to forums and IRC.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
This, unironically (if you meant it as such).

sergiotapia 3y ago

What happened to their game store? They launched this big Steam competitor, and quietly and unceremoniously shut it down. You guys remember right?

Jasper_ 3y ago
Epic Games Store happened.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
I'd wager it wasn't worth the hassle. Steam isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly that's not actively committed to being terrible. People, on the whole, like Steam. And that's a huge moat. When going toe-to-toe with a monopoly, normally your snowball's-chance-in-hell chance comes from the fact that people aren't happy about the monopoly, because the monopoly got complacent, started squeezing people for everything they can get, and just generally being awful, because hey, where else will you go? But Steam hasn't done that, so on top of overcoming the market momentum in their favor, you also have to go above and beyond to make a better product.

sledgehammers 3y ago

I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.

JustBreath 3y ago
We already did: email. But seriously, in order for this to happen the platform needs to be a protocol. Basically Bitcoin but for sharing stuff, but all the attempts so far have been too nerdy/esoteric to gain mainstream adoption.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
There's the Fediverse sphere of platforms that largely fit your ideals but fragmentation is a glaring problem that prevents it from much wider adoption. Any centralized platform where data is hosted is going to cost an obscene amount of money to operate once it gains traction. So they need to find a way to monetize it in order to keep the lights on. Throw in some venture capital and you've got yourself yet another startup that thinks they can scale infinitely. My biggest fear is Discord gating old convos behind a paywall like Slack. Discord doesn't do that because it is still technically a different product from Slack, but should monetization drives intensify I'm afraid that'd be one of the easy channels they are going to take a look at.
nologic01 3y ago
We are a bullshit species. Our collective well being is secondary to each era's power games. With the amount of brain power and resources that exist today and the relative triviality of orchestrating social media platforms it would take, like two or three months of banging some heads together and solving this little nuisance once and for all. To the great relief and benefit of current and future generations. So that we can focus on some real problems. But no, we have to stick to the rigged game.
adamwong246 3y ago
We did. It was called "The Internet". It was great, for a while. But you had write your own webpages and host the pages yourself, which was hard and expensive. Only nerds could figure it out and the only people who got free servers were academics. At some point, some rich guys in california realized that you could trade a consumers info for a "free" service. Regular people went online and found all these neat free apps and all they had to do was watch some ads. It wasn't the best, but it worked ok, for a while. And suddenly _everything_ was a "free" app. Then walls came up and we found ourselves stranded. Nobody could afford to leave the walled garden and nobody could afford to make a better option.

vegabook 3y ago

Interesting that both "winners" in their relative spaces, Discord and WhatsApp, both ramped up using BEAM languages.

importantigrvty 3y ago

yeah it sucks that the best voip and messaging platform is trying to find ways to continue to operate. /s The product is the same and you don't have to use any of these new features if you don't want to. Like, what are we actually complaining about here.

Havoc 3y ago

Seems the era of free money is over for all the growth at any cost companies

ChildOfChaos 3y ago

Discord has been a buggy mess lately since they keep pushing all these updates to add further monetisation and breaking core features. The Mac version is handling calls horribly, often doesn't show connection strength on calls (greyed out), often completely kills Microphone and bluetooth headphones (starts working as soon as you close discord) or slows the entire machine down to a crawl unless you quit out of it. I had an issue for months with every update, I would need to go into the library and delete the discord folder and reinstall, hasn't happened for awhile now.

ziml77 3y ago

Not sure why the writer of this article is concerned about paywalling. That's already a thing. If you support someone on Patreon, it can come with the benefit of being able to join a subscriber-only Discord server. And you can have roles assigned based on the selected tier of support, which allows the creators to set up channels so only people above a certain tier can access them.