6 ms·

Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

57 points by cglong 3y ago

cglong 3y ago
https://archive.is/SPgOM https://archive.is/SPgOM
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
VelesDude 3y ago
"Discord “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” she said. " ..For now. Eventually they have to figure out how to get paid.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  They are getting paid, quite a lot. They have a quite expensive subscription which is quite popular.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    My impression is Nitro isn't making them enough money. Why? My impression of Nitro is "incessant spamvertisement". I've never bought Nitro, spamming that shit in front of my face every chance it gets is not going to make me buy. The only reason they keep spamming me is because they want (read: need) me to buy.
nighthawk454 3y ago
The enshittification progresses... you hate to see it
- tomcam 3y ago
  What would be a better way to pay the bills?
  - thegrim000 3y ago
    I'd rather the product not exist in the first place if their business model is unsustainable and requires them to eventually enshitify after they've lured people into using it.
    - Pet_Ant 3y ago
      A subsidised product that is unsustainable crowds out a product/project that is perhaps more basic but is sustainable. Critical mass is important so creating something that captures market share and then turns to shit actively harms the market.
      - dns_snek 3y ago
        This addresses the crux of the issue as I see it. We will never have nice things if this cycle is allowed to repeat endlessly. I hope that people will eventually wisen up to these tactics but realistically I think regulation would be required if we wanted to stop it. I see parallels to classic price dumping but I don't know how applicable those laws are in the digital world.
  - f1refly 3y ago
    Not having a ton of debt with the sole purpose to capture a critical mass you can later milk due to network effects would be a start.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    They make a huge amount of money from Nitro.
  - rkachowski 3y ago
    why do you think they have problems paying bills?
bloqs 3y ago
This kills the discord
- tcfhgj 3y ago
  You wish
Lucasoato 3y ago
I hate ads, I hope they will limit them to a small amount for free users, but remember the issue Discord has been able to solve: we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. Also it’s much more than a voice-only communication channel, it’s becoming a community, some sort of Facebook group with steroids!
- worble 3y ago
  > we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. I'm on old fogey who still hosts a teamspeak server and I have to say, teamspeak is one of the simplest and easiest things I've ever hosted. In the 6 or so years I've been running it on my VPS I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had to do anything with it, and all of those were simply required updates. It's seriously rock solid software, never once let me down.
  - maccard 3y ago
    I've been a discord user since the very beginning - I joined in July 2015. In almost 10 years of using discord, I've never had to do anything, even a required updated. I've paid for Nitro on and off over that time, and am currently paying $3/mo. I think less than a take away coffee per month for a decade of hassle free chat is worth it, and it's less than running even the cheapest of cheap VPS's
- t-sauer 3y ago
  It becoming a Facebook group on steroids is my biggest issue with Discord. So much knowledge, information and documentation is lost in an unindexed proprietary black hole. It‘s a chat that people started to abuse for all kinds of things just because it can be done. Often time normal forums would be more beneficial for everyone involved. Also I host my own TS server since 2019 and never had to deal with any real problems.
  - Lucasoato 3y ago
    If any discord employee sees this, here’s an idea: 10$/month subscription to run a LLM on the chat history daily, grouping and indexing all information, structuring it in articles, etc… Killer feature, that’d solve a lot of issues with the current experience. Next one: teach someone born before 1999 how to deactivate channel notifications.
magsarion 3y ago
[dead]
toastal 3y ago
RIP to all those FOSS projects that thought it was good to build their communities solely on proprietary chat. I don’t expect the average folk to understand the ethical, privacy, or ownership issues, but in the software community, I do. Now your members get ads, & those ads are almost certainly expecting to siphon user data (as if Discord isn’t doing enough of that as is & not buying “seem minimally intrusive”). The home base server should be free or otherwise ethical software the community can own, ideally decentralized (in practice, not theoretically decentralized)… & then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy-sapping platforms.
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  > then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy sapping platforms. These bridges do in fact send a lot of data still to the proprietary, privacy sapping platforms, even of those who are not using them, no?
  - toastal 3y ago
    But our GMO (growth metric officer) outlined we must interact with the proprietary networks. Without algorithms, what will we trying to ‘hack’?
- SquareWheel 3y ago
  How many FOSS projects are live streaming video games in the first place? I don't enjoy communities moving to Discord either, but this seems unlikely to affect any software group.
  - toastal 3y ago
    These projects do other non-gaming livestreams for certain events, meetings, etc. Twitch was just a game streaming platform for many years with more incidental gaming / just chatting now than not. Unless there’s a lot of pushback, this will likely just be the tip of the iceberg before allowing more ads in more places in the future.
thih9 3y ago
Are there any laws against enshittification / unsustainable business practices? Sounds like an overreaction on my part, given the news is about something as small as ads. At the same time it’s an intentional worsening of the UX to increase profits. It’s possible because the provider has control over user data/community. And it’s likely not the last time this is happening. Perhaps we need more laws like in EU, so that the users could seamlessly switch between apps and communicate across platforms.
- ineedaj0b 3y ago
  You’ve really gotta separate is/ought in your world view. Is it good to make laws according to taste; ought we do so to help create the world we like? The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail. It generally better to allow even playing grounds. Our desires for what what ought to happen are often short sighted.
  - thih9 3y ago
    > The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail. I'm fine with discord failing if the alternative is discord enshittifying itself while keeping user data hostage. Same applies to other platforms or products. I guess what you're saying is that not just discord would fail but the whole network of advertisers and products that rely on them. I hope this wouldn't be as dramatic, I hope we'd find better ways to reach consumer audiences than creepy ads.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The EU has data portability obligations and anti gatekeeper laws. I think from a legal point of view, the EU is fine. More enforcement would be welcome, though. That said: you can't expect a free service to handle your streaming and file uploads without some kind of revenue stream. In my opinion, services giving away free stuff with their billions of investment should be fined, because no real company with a normal profit margin can ever compete. This approach has destroyed every market it's been successful in, from ride sharing to food delivery, yet nobody seems to care when it comes to internet hosting services, probably because the majority of users benefit from the free stuff until there is no serious competition left. Any law against adding ads to generate revenue once a critical user base has been attained would likely turn into every website requiring a subscription, or every free tier coming with ads from the get-go. I'm not sure if the people who are mad about this will accept either.
schmorptron 3y ago
Aw man, thought this was an april fool's joke with how much they leaned into marketing no ads beforehand.
williamvds 3y ago
Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it. I'm gonna look into hosting Matrix servers or something. I expect that soon their policy of banning client modifications (for a web app) will be applied to ban users with adblockers.
- junon 3y ago
  Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source. And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.
  - dijit 3y ago
    Wanting everything for free is certainly a problem though. I’m not sure how anything can compete with free and convenient, even things that work really well that take time to set up are hugely inferior because hosting is a cost if nothing else. If something is free you have a responsibility to be even more diligent to understand what happens when it goes away, is no longer free, or how they plan to extract value from you. Discord is not a charity or government subsidized project.
    - anthk 3y ago
      There are public servers for Jabber working just fine.
      - dijit 3y ago
        and I run an IRC network from my own pocket. But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.
        anthk 3y ago
        XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.
Svenskunganka 3y ago
So far the comments here seem to think they are introducing generic ads in the client, while the ads the article describes is to allow game studios to offer virtual rewards (aka hats) in their games when you livestream your gameplay to other Discord users, and those users (viewers) will then be seeing ads while watching that gameplay. This is somewhat similar to the Twitch Bounty Board for streamers and "drops" for viewers. Discord calls this "Sponsored Quests", and seems very unobtrusive.
7373737373 3y ago
Does there exist a good, open source Discord alternative yet?
- drpossum 3y ago
  The matrix standard is the closest competitor. Synapse/Dendrite and Element are all probably the most popular and are under various open source licenses. There was always an alternative with IRC
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    I don't think any Matrix client comes close to Discord in terms of usability and features, though. We have native calling, but nothing quite like the audio and video channels Discord has. I also don't think Matrix has the kind of rich presence that Discord has. I also don't think any Matrix client implements the game streaming feature quite so well. Then there are specialised Discord features like forums, image boards, and other fancy pants channel configurations. I've rarely seen them used, but when they are used, I can't think of a way to replicate them without writing a separate Matrix client at the moment. Widgets are good for embedding web pages, but they can't do the specialised content layout that Discord supports these days. All of these are frontend limitations: Matrix as a protocol supports all of this just fine. If all you care about is text chat, Cinny seems like an excellent Discord clone. I don't think there's anything like that on mobile, though.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      Element has a beta running for video/audio channels. I don't think other clients have picked it up yet but it should be a relatively small feature past the existing audio and video support.
      - jeroenhd 3y ago
        The beta has been running for a while, half a year at least. I don't think it should be advertised as a feature just yet, not until we have a solid release date. I'm also not sure if the audio and video channels work like Discord's, I believe these channels are rooms that you would need to be present in; I'm not sure if you can browse other channels and servers while in a call. That said, it's been a while since I last checked.
sammy2255 3y ago
April fools

57 points by cglong 3y ago

cglong 3y ago

https://archive.is/SPgOM https://archive.is/SPgOM

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

VelesDude 3y ago

"Discord “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” she said. " ..For now. Eventually they have to figure out how to get paid.

rcxdude 3y ago
They are getting paid, quite a lot. They have a quite expensive subscription which is quite popular.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  My impression is Nitro isn't making them enough money. Why? My impression of Nitro is "incessant spamvertisement". I've never bought Nitro, spamming that shit in front of my face every chance it gets is not going to make me buy. The only reason they keep spamming me is because they want (read: need) me to buy.

nighthawk454 3y ago

The enshittification progresses... you hate to see it

tomcam 3y ago
What would be a better way to pay the bills?
- thegrim000 3y ago
  I'd rather the product not exist in the first place if their business model is unsustainable and requires them to eventually enshitify after they've lured people into using it.
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    A subsidised product that is unsustainable crowds out a product/project that is perhaps more basic but is sustainable. Critical mass is important so creating something that captures market share and then turns to shit actively harms the market.
    - dns_snek 3y ago
      This addresses the crux of the issue as I see it. We will never have nice things if this cycle is allowed to repeat endlessly. I hope that people will eventually wisen up to these tactics but realistically I think regulation would be required if we wanted to stop it. I see parallels to classic price dumping but I don't know how applicable those laws are in the digital world.
- f1refly 3y ago
  Not having a ton of debt with the sole purpose to capture a critical mass you can later milk due to network effects would be a start.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  They make a huge amount of money from Nitro.
- rkachowski 3y ago
  why do you think they have problems paying bills?

bloqs 3y ago

This kills the discord

tcfhgj 3y ago
You wish

Lucasoato 3y ago

I hate ads, I hope they will limit them to a small amount for free users, but remember the issue Discord has been able to solve: we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. Also it’s much more than a voice-only communication channel, it’s becoming a community, some sort of Facebook group with steroids!

worble 3y ago
> we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. I'm on old fogey who still hosts a teamspeak server and I have to say, teamspeak is one of the simplest and easiest things I've ever hosted. In the 6 or so years I've been running it on my VPS I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had to do anything with it, and all of those were simply required updates. It's seriously rock solid software, never once let me down.
- maccard 3y ago
  I've been a discord user since the very beginning - I joined in July 2015. In almost 10 years of using discord, I've never had to do anything, even a required updated. I've paid for Nitro on and off over that time, and am currently paying $3/mo. I think less than a take away coffee per month for a decade of hassle free chat is worth it, and it's less than running even the cheapest of cheap VPS's
t-sauer 3y ago
It becoming a Facebook group on steroids is my biggest issue with Discord. So much knowledge, information and documentation is lost in an unindexed proprietary black hole. It‘s a chat that people started to abuse for all kinds of things just because it can be done. Often time normal forums would be more beneficial for everyone involved. Also I host my own TS server since 2019 and never had to deal with any real problems.
- Lucasoato 3y ago
  If any discord employee sees this, here’s an idea: 10$/month subscription to run a LLM on the chat history daily, grouping and indexing all information, structuring it in articles, etc… Killer feature, that’d solve a lot of issues with the current experience. Next one: teach someone born before 1999 how to deactivate channel notifications.

magsarion 3y ago

[dead]

toastal 3y ago

RIP to all those FOSS projects that thought it was good to build their communities solely on proprietary chat. I don’t expect the average folk to understand the ethical, privacy, or ownership issues, but in the software community, I do. Now your members get ads, & those ads are almost certainly expecting to siphon user data (as if Discord isn’t doing enough of that as is & not buying “seem minimally intrusive”). The home base server should be free or otherwise ethical software the community can own, ideally decentralized (in practice, not theoretically decentralized)… & then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy-sapping platforms.

mrd3v0 3y ago
> then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy sapping platforms. These bridges do in fact send a lot of data still to the proprietary, privacy sapping platforms, even of those who are not using them, no?
- toastal 3y ago
  But our GMO (growth metric officer) outlined we must interact with the proprietary networks. Without algorithms, what will we trying to ‘hack’?
SquareWheel 3y ago
How many FOSS projects are live streaming video games in the first place? I don't enjoy communities moving to Discord either, but this seems unlikely to affect any software group.
- toastal 3y ago
  These projects do other non-gaming livestreams for certain events, meetings, etc. Twitch was just a game streaming platform for many years with more incidental gaming / just chatting now than not. Unless there’s a lot of pushback, this will likely just be the tip of the iceberg before allowing more ads in more places in the future.

thih9 3y ago

Are there any laws against enshittification / unsustainable business practices? Sounds like an overreaction on my part, given the news is about something as small as ads. At the same time it’s an intentional worsening of the UX to increase profits. It’s possible because the provider has control over user data/community. And it’s likely not the last time this is happening. Perhaps we need more laws like in EU, so that the users could seamlessly switch between apps and communicate across platforms.

ineedaj0b 3y ago
You’ve really gotta separate is/ought in your world view. Is it good to make laws according to taste; ought we do so to help create the world we like? The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail. It generally better to allow even playing grounds. Our desires for what what ought to happen are often short sighted.
- thih9 3y ago
  > The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail. I'm fine with discord failing if the alternative is discord enshittifying itself while keeping user data hostage. Same applies to other platforms or products. I guess what you're saying is that not just discord would fail but the whole network of advertisers and products that rely on them. I hope this wouldn't be as dramatic, I hope we'd find better ways to reach consumer audiences than creepy ads.
jeroenhd 3y ago
The EU has data portability obligations and anti gatekeeper laws. I think from a legal point of view, the EU is fine. More enforcement would be welcome, though. That said: you can't expect a free service to handle your streaming and file uploads without some kind of revenue stream. In my opinion, services giving away free stuff with their billions of investment should be fined, because no real company with a normal profit margin can ever compete. This approach has destroyed every market it's been successful in, from ride sharing to food delivery, yet nobody seems to care when it comes to internet hosting services, probably because the majority of users benefit from the free stuff until there is no serious competition left. Any law against adding ads to generate revenue once a critical user base has been attained would likely turn into every website requiring a subscription, or every free tier coming with ads from the get-go. I'm not sure if the people who are mad about this will accept either.

schmorptron 3y ago

Aw man, thought this was an april fool's joke with how much they leaned into marketing no ads beforehand.

williamvds 3y ago

Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it. I'm gonna look into hosting Matrix servers or something. I expect that soon their policy of banning client modifications (for a web app) will be applied to ban users with adblockers.

junon 3y ago
Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source. And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.
- dijit 3y ago
  Wanting everything for free is certainly a problem though. I’m not sure how anything can compete with free and convenient, even things that work really well that take time to set up are hugely inferior because hosting is a cost if nothing else. If something is free you have a responsibility to be even more diligent to understand what happens when it goes away, is no longer free, or how they plan to extract value from you. Discord is not a charity or government subsidized project.
  - anthk 3y ago
    There are public servers for Jabber working just fine.
    - dijit 3y ago
      and I run an IRC network from my own pocket. But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.
      - anthk 3y ago
        XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.

Svenskunganka 3y ago

So far the comments here seem to think they are introducing generic ads in the client, while the ads the article describes is to allow game studios to offer virtual rewards (aka hats) in their games when you livestream your gameplay to other Discord users, and those users (viewers) will then be seeing ads while watching that gameplay. This is somewhat similar to the Twitch Bounty Board for streamers and "drops" for viewers. Discord calls this "Sponsored Quests", and seems very unobtrusive.

7373737373 3y ago

Does there exist a good, open source Discord alternative yet?

drpossum 3y ago
The matrix standard is the closest competitor. Synapse/Dendrite and Element are all probably the most popular and are under various open source licenses. There was always an alternative with IRC
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I don't think any Matrix client comes close to Discord in terms of usability and features, though. We have native calling, but nothing quite like the audio and video channels Discord has. I also don't think Matrix has the kind of rich presence that Discord has. I also don't think any Matrix client implements the game streaming feature quite so well. Then there are specialised Discord features like forums, image boards, and other fancy pants channel configurations. I've rarely seen them used, but when they are used, I can't think of a way to replicate them without writing a separate Matrix client at the moment. Widgets are good for embedding web pages, but they can't do the specialised content layout that Discord supports these days. All of these are frontend limitations: Matrix as a protocol supports all of this just fine. If all you care about is text chat, Cinny seems like an excellent Discord clone. I don't think there's anything like that on mobile, though.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Element has a beta running for video/audio channels. I don't think other clients have picked it up yet but it should be a relatively small feature past the existing audio and video support.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      The beta has been running for a while, half a year at least. I don't think it should be advertised as a feature just yet, not until we have a solid release date. I'm also not sure if the audio and video channels work like Discord's, I believe these channels are rooms that you would need to be present in; I'm not sure if you can browse other channels and servers while in a call. That said, it's been a while since I last checked.

sammy2255 3y ago

April fools