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It feels to me like Discord is speed-running the developer relations playbook that we've seen happen over a longer timeframe with large platforms like Apple and
by pnw 1y ago
It feels to me like Discord is speed-running the developer relations playbook that we've seen happen over a longer timeframe with large platforms like Apple and Google. This is the second high profile incident like this in recent weeks IIRC.
What's even stranger to me is that Discord was putting on a full-court press to get developers onto their platform over the last twelve months. This kind of response is certainly not going to help make devs feel all warm and fuzzy about continuing to build on Discord.
- PokemonNoGo 1y agoHas there ever been anything warm and fuzzy about discord?
- altairprime 1y agoDiscord has a monopoly on access to its users, and so does not need to concern themselves with making it attractive to build there: the users are the draw, not the developer-friendliness of the platform. BotGhost should seek anti-monopoly enforcement; having EU users file the appropriate EU claims to appeal for Discord to be subjected to the DMA would be far more a threat to Discord’s monopoly than user support tickets are likely to persuade them.
- brookst 1y agoWait, doesn't every company have a monopoly on access to its users? Are we all monopolies?
- altairprime 1y agoNo? LinkedIn lost a lawsuit about prohibiting third parties tools from accessing its site, Matrix has strong interop, Elite Dangerous offers OAuth API for sign-in and player data download, and so on. There are others but that’s sixty seconds worth of thinking about it. Mastodon metastasized the user store but each site is still a tiny centralized user store. That’s how user stores work. Doesn’t mean they’re automatically monopolistic. Discord’s taking the Reddit-Apollo approach to forcing them offline — half-assed conversations for months followed by an abrupt fuck-you moment with little recourse — which given Discord’s free of charge growth mechanism, means that — just like Reddit — they’re likely going to shutdown anything by that’s providing a valuable service to a significant fraction of their users, either to Sherlock and charge money for it, or simply to terminate what they view as an obstruction.
- brookst 1y agoSo my small app that had maybe 50k users at peak never allowed third party integrations. How is that not a monopoly by this definition? Would it have been more or less of a monopoly if I had allowed third party integrations?
- altairprime 1y agoThe DMA has language defining thresholds below which it doesn’t apply. At 50k users, I would not expect or call for the DMA to apply. Discord has slightly more than that and I would expect the DMA to apply to them, assuming the EU found them to be an in-scope platform. Given their recent introduction of gaming and such inside their ‘we’re not just a chat server anymore’ feature expansion, one could argue that they’re now voluntarily opting in to platform regulations that wouldn’t have applied if they’d just stayed focused on messaging.
- pnw 1y agoFor consumer products the DMA focuses on companies with at least 45m monthly active users in the EU. They also exempted some categories that might otherwise qualify e.g. the DMA doesn't appear to cover video gaming consoles because they are "special purpose hardware". You can see the list of covered companies at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Identified_gatekeepers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Identified... It's basically Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Bytedance and Microsoft.
- altairprime 1y agohttps://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12477677109143-Digital-Services-Act-Information-on-Average-Monthly-Active-Recipients-in-the-European-Union https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12477677109143...
- brookst 1y agoIsn't that moving the goalpost from "monopoly" to "gatekeeper as a technical term under DMA"?