Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform
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from empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world on 31 Mar 2024 18:30
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17617609
from empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world on 31 Mar 2024 18:30
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17617609
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
threaded - newest
I’m shocked they’re moving to ads when I’ve been paying them $4/month for Discord Nitro for several years now. Surely, that revenue is enough for their upkeep???
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
It’s never enough. Growth must be un-ending. Also gotta pump them numbers up for an IPO so they can bail with a pocket full of cash.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
It’s like how Netflix ended the basic no-ads plan to force people to either pay way more or pay a little less but be bombarded with ads. Serving ads is more profitable than letting people pay a little bit to skip them, apparently.
I assume that’s sarcasm, but no, they almost certainly aren’t anywhere near probably from nitro subscriptions. I don’t know how many employees they have, but they surely have a lot of developers working on all their features. And that cloud server time isn’t cheap either, especially when you’re handling video.
They could have stopped adding features years ago.
There’s some weird corporate obsession with always constantly “innovating” and “improving”. Adding complexity for the sake of complexity. Completely blind and oblivious to the fact that most consumers actually want something consistent that just does what they ask it to without much fuss, not just additional complexity.
Discord has added probably a hundred features since I started using it- ultimately, the only things I ever touch in the app are the same set of 5 that existed back in 2015 when I switched. Text, voice, basic file and image sharing, group servers, and (after they added it) video+screen sharing. Literally everything else is total fluff.
Yup, it’s sometimes called box-checking. “Look boss, I did a thing.”
Often a thing nobody wanted or asked for.
$4 is probably way more than enough to cover the cost of your account, but the problem is what percentage of people are paying. If it’s 1 in 100 or 1,000 and $4 covers 75 average accounts they might be in a bind.
Remember the emails from 2015? The plan was to have a platform, that just works. No bullshit, no issues, just functional features.
Even when Nitro was originally added, it was 5 bucks to optional support, if you’d like to help the company. Now the same sub is 10 a month, and half of the client is unusable without it.
Not to mention all the paid account banners and borders they’re selling for an egregious amount of money
Everyone is optimistically altruistic until the corporate greed comes a-knockin’
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
And regardless, you’re going to end up being the product if they can discern anything marketable about you from your use of the “free” product.
But just be ready to jump to the next free product.
(Obviously it’s possible for there to be FOSS but that comes with some challenges as well.)
It all comes down to capabilities, and expectations. Under current circumstances, they fail to meet the expectations, but vastly exceeded their capabilities, by trying to chase the hype, rather than provide what the users needed. It costs them next to nothing to create a new profile border, but fixing issues from 2019 takes engineer hours
It will become enshittified unless that new service is open source and “free as in beer”. With no profit motive, it can grow gradually and be supported by it’s users. Like Lemmy/ kbin / Mastodon.
Lemmy’s development is to a large part subsidized by some kind of OSS fund.
That’s fine. Probably not venture capitalists that need paid back.
The 3rd option is FOSS with donations… But everyone expects everything on the internet to be free (as in beer) these days
Nothing is truly free/gratis…
a word to rebut this claim: Wikipedia.
The Post office should host community webservices. This is our internet.
I don’t get why micro transaction are never micro transactions. If a cosmetic item/feature in a game or sth. like discord would be 50ct up to a Euro, I would here and there buy sth. But they always want 5-15€ and that isn’t money I’m willing to spend. Take Signal for example 5 € for a badge for 30 days is just stupid. I recently donated 20 euros still 30 days. The thing is I don’t care for the badge but I think it could be beneficial to promote the ability to donate via the badge but the system they use, is really stupid.
I think the reason they’re not micro has to do with whales. I bet the whales outbuy normies at a rate that means companies make more selling 1/10th the volume, for 20x the price. The whales go hard. Did you hear that some games will task an artist with creating game-skins for a single person, because they know they can get that person to buy even at a really high price
it’s also about sustainable income. 50c one time purchases are garbage for the bottom line, subscriptions look amazing to investors because it’s effectively guaranteed income that you can assume a current subscriber will remain subscribed until the service shuts down.
Think you’re right.
Founders get told:
Raise your prices. Push them up 2-3x or something, and lose 10% of your customers. Those you lose are generally your worst ones. Huge net win.
a big part of the issue with micro-transactions are the payment processors.
visa and MasterCard basically own it, at some part of the process.
Genuine question, but what’s unusable without Nitro? I don’t use Discord very often, and the only thing that I’ve seen Nitro pushed for is reactions from other communities, and that’s pointless anyway.
video calls and screensharing is very, very rough (locked to 480/low frame rates) without nitro, for one. the file sharing limits are also extremely restrictive.
its actually locked to 720p/30fps w/o nitro
with some of the worst realtime compression i have ever seen
i agree, but you cant just lie to make a point
Fair enough. I tried video calling with it at the beginning of the first lockdown, and it was fine for what I needed, but most of the video calling programs were a bit rubbish then.
I very rarely share files with people outside of an already set up organisation, so I haven’t had a reason to try their file sharing.
Vencord is pretty decent as an alternative to nitro if you haven’t heard of it. It pretty much is a modded client that unlocks most of the nitro locked features
I use Vesktop for other mods. Not touching the paywalled stuff because I don’t want to put my account at risk more, than I need to
Checking this out now, ty! I was using Aliucord on mobile and loving it but recently Discord updated how they process messages and so Discord bot commands broke on Aliucord. I just confirmed they are still broken. Is there a different/better Discord mobile app with this functionality?
I’m actually not sure about modded clients for android/iOS, maybe someone in this thread knows of one.
I’m afraid that every generation runs into this and learns the hard way. Discord isn’t the first and won’t be the last. The moment someone wants to become profitable, all bets are off.
I guess that with discord (and many other non-foss free projects) the problem is that they start as free and then wanted to start to make money at a later stage.
For-profit software and companies are not necessarily bad, but they are bad when they take their existing software and start radically changing it for the sake of making more money.
If for example discord always had some features just for Nitro users and others for everyone, and those features (and the nitro price) would have always stayed the same it would have been much better
Every free service is built on the back of free money given out by the fed over the last 20 years in terms of near-zero percent central bank interest rates. Interest rates are up which means the VC faucets are closed. Users now need to pick up the massive debt tabs and they’re gonna get ass fucked ten ways from Sunday to do it.
Just a reminder that FOSS and for-profit are not mutually exclusive. Your FOSS product can be free (as in free speech, not free beer), but cost money to acquire (although once bought, you could redistribute it as much as you like, for any price you like).
Yep it happened to Skype and slack.
And team speak too…
Teamspeak never died. It’s always had a fairly dedicated core userbase, but it’s inability to video chat/screenshare and the need to self host puts off most everyday users from getting onto it.
it’s arguably WAY better for actual video game voice chat though. faster, higher quality, less resource intensive.
“free”
I’ve grown with ICQ, MSN Messenger, TeamSpeak, Skype, several local chat apps, then people obsessed with Facebook Messenger, then Snapchat… I just know any particular chatting app is a temporary fad that will eventually end, it’s just their cycle. Don’t get attached to them.
Same here. I’m just surprised at how well Signal is holding up.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to get people to switch to it
And they didn’t make it any easier by removing SMS support from the mobile app.
It was pretty easy to get a couple of my friends to switch by saying it’s just another SMS client that also supports highly encrypted messaging with other people that use Signal. Now that it’s standalone, nobody will even fucking touch it.
which is weird, I don’t know any other country that still uses SMS other than the usa, for chatting.
it’s for 2FA from banks (which are now switching to authenticator apps) and bulk scams mostly that I can see.
Canada. Now you know two! Granted, we are basically the 51st state at this point…
America’s hat/touk!
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
“preinstalled”. lol.
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.
I use sms quite a lot when network conditions are bad… with poor service (rural areas) or heavy congestion (sport events) SMS messages piggybacking on voice channels often stand a better chance of getting through than anything that requires an Internet data connection on 4G. That said I do have unusual use cases, the other 99% of the time normal messaging apps work fine.
Yeah I got rid of Signal when they got rid of SMS because literally nobody I’ve ever met uses it and they’re not gonna switch.
It’s unfortunate, I had just gotten a few people to take it up… but that progress is lost. People prefer convenience over all else and having to use 2 different primary message apps sucks.
If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…
Oh yeah, I’ve been through the same. Discord was nice while it lasted.
TS and Matrix will hopefully be the replacements I use if I can get people to switch. A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though, which I’m sure they’re banking on to maintain momentum as the service quality continues to degrade.
As a casual user I find the entrenched communities more of a bug than a feature. Reminds me of reddit cliques. But, I do get your point, and I agree that the inertia will be a challenge when it comes to getting groups to migrate.
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
door opening sound knock knock
I can still sometimes “hear” ICQ, and that’s going on almost 30 years ago now?
I still have the “uh oh” sound - use it on my phone for notifications.
Same, however, I keep my phone on vibrate so I never actually hear it.
I hear you! 🤣
I so want a smart “watch” just for subtle notifications, with vibration patterns that can be configured.
I’d even pay for an Apple device, if it could be made to work well.
Oh, and it needs a battery that can last 3 days at least, preferably a week.
I can still recite my ICQ number off the top of my head
I remember mine, and my childhood best friend’s Prodigy account IDs.
Okay, now you guys are making me miss CompuServe.
Big spenders here, NetZero crowd checking in.
Always kept the Netzero around, but the best were the fly-by-nights who were sure they could run a successful business without Juno or Netzero’s investment or technical debt by just asking you to pretty-please use their site as your home page.
Well, “best” for as long as they lasted.
63094052 add me A/S/L?
And then you wonder WTF you want my age, sex, and location.
39148895 add me plz
Ha, same. Best thing I can do for my social security number is “That looks about right”.
Mine is 6 digits long and I remember it too. The whiteboard function was particularly fun.
Uh oh!
One will stick once it’s sensible
Hello twin!
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
Sir IRC is still going strong!
The difference is you’re not relying on one corp with IRC.
In Matrix we trust
This is why I set my server up to mirror to a Revolt server (we're an rp server)
Eventually, folks will want to move, some will say, "But all our posts", and I can go, "Good news!"
Is revolt a client or a seperate app from discord?
Separate app. There is a bridge bot. It's effectively part of a Fediverse of chat programs
Oooh
I’ve just been using vencord for a couple months which is just discord with added features
Ranging from additional functionality to totally legitimate real nitro
Can it federate with Matrix?
Feels good to never have used it lol
Vote with your feet. Have to leave the platform if you want to stick it to them.
Easier said than done. All your friends on discord? Can’t leave.
https://disroot.org/en/services/audio
“All your friends on discord? Ok, just go use this other random service and still have your friends on discord”
You’re not very bright, are you?
use the service, and tell them to use it. just like how they made you use discord. and you can whine every time they refuse.
Fair enough.
Maybe everyone agrees it sucks and all change?
Turn it into a group ‘stick it to the man’ effort?
I don’t have friends,.no problem for me 😋
Also,.I’m old and just text my friends!
Discord was 1st wave . It’s always been a terrible choice.
IRC was first wave.
Discord is nth.
… and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.
I'm kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general "real time" transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.
Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it's terrible.
.
With an asterisk.
Free* is never Free
revolt.chat Cope, but would be good for this to become a thing.
github.com/revoltchat
Sincerely hope this will be the beginning of a D-Exodus, and that all those open source projects who made the choice to only use Discord for community communication will move to something which is search engine friendly for searching for answers.
This!
Discord was great and I’m pretty sure that some projects will take its place (like Revolt maybe that others are mentioning) but PLEASE FOSS PROJECT JUST USE AN INDEXABLE FORUM like Discourse, so that people don’t have to signup and enter a server for each project they use!
I get so tired of this “servers are expensive” cycle. Anyone know of a good P2P alternative? No servers, no ads, no subscriptions.
Skype was P2P for voice, video and files- only text chat and user discovery had any major server usage so users could receive chats while offline. Microsoft still sought to centralize & monetize it, they actively removed a lot of the P2P networking to “improve user experience”. Any service owned by any profit seeking corporation will have the same end result regardless of the underlying tech; their excuses will just change forms.
Yes, and that will always be the case. But I feel like P2P software tends to get shittier slower. There are probably some open-source solutions out there right now, waiting to be adopted.
Quick search turned this up, but I’m on mobile, so not in a great place to dig into how viable it is. A Reddit post indicated it’s in some sort of alpha/beta stage, but I think it is something you can use today
Edit: Forgot the link like a fool positive-intentions.com
Thanks! Worth a look!
Briar, Jami, SimpleX and Tox are all semi similar to what you might be looking for.
Thank you!
I thought P2P still requires a server (STUN, TURN)?
we probably need to build it ourselves.
A federated, decentralized system that you can either self-host or join the servers of others, even better if we can offer to donate bandwidth, hosting, and processing power to servers we join in order to distribute the operational strain.
This is the path I was hoping to see Matrix go, but so far I haven’t run across a method of joining servers, or if there is one, I also haven’t actually seen any multi-server groups anywhere. Not that I have much experience with Matrix, so there certainly could be groups like that already?
The closest thing to a Discord server Matrix-wise are Spaces, which basically are groups of Rooms that people can join by invite (and maybe by link? But not sure)
I see in Matrix as a protocol great potential but it needs some more projects that will focus on the different aspects of communication.
Element cannot aim to be both a WhatsApp replacement, a Slack replacement and a Discord replacement, but for sure 3 different alternatives for those services can be built all using the Matrix protocol
Maybe this move by Discord will be an incentive for others to just in and start coding new services to fill the gaps. We can only hope…
Maybe you want to take a look at Spacebar, a FOSS Discord reimplementation with its own client and server for self-hosting in development
Discord clearly feels comfortable enough to begin enshitification. Feels like anything related to it has a short lifespan. Like third party apps for reddit and the api fiasco.
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn’t be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don’t hide your support behind a platform that can’t be searched from the web. It’s not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I couldn’t agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it’s being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
If a service ever says discord only when I try to login, that service no longer exists. Find an alternative or make do without it.
You found out about Nostr yet?
I completely agree, fuck discord
On the other hand, after looking for and failing to find an issue I’m facing, discord servers usually have way faster response times compared to forums.
I think this is the main disconnect for people.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they’d actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they’re better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.
We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We “solved” this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.
Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder’s team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of “collaborative editing”: sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with “I looked for X on Confluence and didn’t find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?”
So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between “what experienced people want” and “what beginners want”, but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.
This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.
I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.
The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.
A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.
People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.
The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.
RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.
If there is one belief that I’ve held for long is that we Free Software would be in a better situation than it is today if we simply dropped the whole idea “community”, “done by amateurs” and “volunteers in their spare time” and really start treating the whole thing as a professional industry. This whole xz crisis further exacerbated this belief.
Almost everyone takes this work for granted and this is why is not properly valued. We should raise the bar at all levels: someone who wants to contribute in a project needs to show that they can deliver everything, maintainers should not accept “half-baked” proposals because “it is better than nothing”, developers should be more than comfortable sending a quote with a proper rate to someone that requests a feature.
And if those people don’t want to do any of that, then let go see how much the commercial alternative would cost them.
I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.
That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.
For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.
My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.
If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.
So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.
Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.
Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.
I personally use Matrix. I haven’t gotten very far into using it but it does have groups, text, calls, and encrypted messaging so I’d say check it out.
I know it’s still in development, but check out Revolt . It’s basically Discord, but open source.
i looked into revolt and pretty concerned with these two stances of the project
ref
ref
like, to me it seems they want to get communities invested and then later monetize in ways those communities don’t yet know about?? idk that sounds extremely sus. especially when competing instances will fight against network effects with no federation.
I can sort of see why a chat client wouldn't have a use for activitypub/federation, with the possible exception of identity sharing once that starts to take off.
yeah, i agree that i don’t think federation of something like this would be through ActivityPub (matrix has its own). i guess it just feels unfortunate that if users want to access communities across multiple instances, users will have to have separate logins and identities for each one.
Yeah, identity is a real problem, but someone posted a proposal to solve for that that looks perfect for this sort of thing. Wish I remembered what it was called, but basically each account could attest for the others via export of encryption keys/signatures so while you has multiple 'accounts' there was only one identity which was pointed to in the signature blob.
The tricky part would be getting everyone (matrix, lemmy/kbin/mbin, pixel fed, and masto) to conform to a single identity standard. If one existed, I could see them implementing it, but we're not there yet.
hmm that sounds really interesting! if you end up remembering it and also remember to respond i’d love to know lol. yeah i hope if something good enough comes along two platforms will implement and then others will just follow suit.
1st. implementing activitypub or any other federation protocol is quite a task. also in my opinion it does not need to be federated. there are basically no benefits, except convenience for the users.
2nd. it’s open source. if you don’t like the way it’s monetized, fork it and make your own. it’ not foss.
that’s all very fair, i guess i was just hoping federation was at least on a long term roadmap
Entrenchment is the LotR ‘One Ring’ for Enshittification.
IMO the easiest solution for the usecase would be Signal
Element/Matrix
Spacebar, Revolt, Matrix in ascending order of completeness and descending order of Discord-likeness
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
So they’re still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
You could simply not use the service instead.
It’s not as simple as that, which is why e. g. laws to control monopolies exist. Just look at the recent changes in rulings regarding essential services, right to repair etc.
This is really an outdated, “the market will regulate itself” perspective that has been shown time and again to not work - people just get fucked by corporations.
Why should that be illegal?? It’s definitely disgusting, but if the paid customers don’t want to see ads (they don’t), then they will leave. I don’t see how or why to make it illegal to show ads to paid users.
edit: I didn’t really say that right, I just think that this is a complex problem, and saying “oh just make it illegal” is not a realistic solution. Some antitrust regulation is good for innovation, some more might be worse for innovation, and we need to be realistic about that, and not just act like we can regulate it all and then there will be 5 competing discords or whatever.
because at a certain critical threshold, which I think discord has reached, expecting users to simply stop using a platform when it is the only platform remaining for such tasks is shortsighted and ignores the true monopoly that’s been created.
See: Facebook and it’s complete consumption of most social media, VR headsets, and for-sale pages largely replacing Craigslist. If I want to buy or sell cars it’s basically impossible to do without Facebook Marketplace. I hate giving data to them.
You probably still think prices are determined by supply and demand.
No they won’t. The whole point of a platform like Discord is to bind its users to it. At first because the platform itself offers good value, and second because of network effects. Once you’re good and hogtied the bullshit barrage begins.
It’s the default enshittification playbook.
Enshittification isn’t illegal though. And making it illegal sounds pretty draconian and anti liberal to me.
I, for one, will never pay for discord, and if the communities I do use it for decide to move elsewhere, I’ll happily move over.
Yeah that’s true, and I agree trying to regulate enshittification out of existence will probably have some heavy handed implications. However I do think it’s worth rethinking how network effects as extreme as Discord implements them relate to monopoly.
It’s definitely not “draconian” to make enshittification illegal. But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.
We’ve essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.
Yups, that’s what I was getting at. There can be very good reasons to do things that are impopular with end users.
At the same time, without reddit turning to shit, Lemmy wouldn’t have thrived the way it is now. Change is part of life, as is platforms turning to shit. You move over and learn to deal with it. You might be able to nudge it in the right direction, but in the end, corporations gonna corporate.
You want the government to regulate discord? That’s a new one. Hadn’t heard that position before.
You don’t? In civilized countries, companies don’t just get to do whatever they want.
I thought Discord was USA-based.
Right, which is why they mentioned civilized countries in comparison. Over here in the US, yes, companies get to do whatever they want.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be regulating Discord specifically. It would be regulating the business practices and advertising methods. If Discord is affected, then it sucks for them. But it wouldn’t be something specific to Discord. It would simply regulate how companies are able to go about including ads on their programs, especially when it comes to interactive ads and player rewards.
Wow you’re serious.
So create a law to prevent something that charges money from showing ads? It would have to be pretty targeted because that’s how the rest of media works. Magazines, newspapers, cable television…. It’s an age old model you’d be fighting.
I’ve got some news for you about Magazines, newspapers, and cable television in the past couple of decades…
They’re made obsolete by internet devices which also have advertising?
I’m not tracking with the logic here. A ban on advertising? I’m an app dev. I’m not allowed to put an ad in an app? What about paid placement, is that ok?
Wanting a nanny state to punish software devs for putting ads in applications is a fine way to not have software devs in your country.
I didn’t say it should be banned, but I think this is not a very good defense for just about anything:
You cited three age-old institutions that had their legacy business models destroyed the very moment consumers could escape them.
I already barely use discord (after all these years I have only joined two servers, and both make my eyes bleed every time I look at them) - and I can get along just fine without those communities if they make it the tiniest bit less pleasant for me as a consumer.
The only reason I use it at all is for a small number of niche communities that aren’t very active elsewhere. My life would be nearly exactly the same as it is today if I never visited those communities again.
Not in a million years will I pay for discord, and if their ads can’t be blocked, they better be damn near invisible or I’m out. Considering I’ve never heard one person say how much they enjoy using Discord, I feel confident there are a great many others in the same boat.
It’s also how the internet works. I left it off because it was the subject of the comment. People didn’t flee those because of the advertising. People left because the internet is undeniably better by being larger, more convenient, timely, and is a 2-way comms channel. Advertising still drives everything there.
I use discord as my primary work app. If they add ads, I’ll likely move to something else also. And that’s the point. Platforms should be free to do whatever they want and consumers are free to react.
I fled cable because of advertising and prices.
I fled traditional newspapers because they were no longer needed, and their prices, and have not paid for one since then in any form. There are many facets to the shittiness of the newspaper industry, but IIRC they seemed to think they didn’t need to worry about their old business model until it was too late.
Same for magazines, although I generally view them more favorably than either of the others or Discord - and some magazines have very much been criticized over the years for being far too much advertising for the value/content they provided.
The underlying point is - when you are the only game in town, as discord currently de-facto is (as cable once was, and as newspapers and magazines once were), you can treat your users like shit. To a point. There are already other options, and people already don’t enjoy the experience. Giving users a choice of “pay us or we’ll make it even shittier” is going to end exactly like those others.
I just want to reiterate again, I haven’t called for banning of anything. My reaction is to call out that they are taking a shitty product and making it shittier. Their own greed will hasten their demise. (Like cable, at a minimum.)
various edits due to typos etc
Yeah I agree!
Perhaps my original post sounded like I supported advertising in discord. I don’t. But I support their right to add advertising. The more these centralized corporations enshitify, the more people move to decentralized services.
Keep govt out of it.
I understand you aren’t OP.
Fair point, I may have been more argumentative than was called for. My bad if so. :)
No, it’s not about whether or not it’s a paid service. It’s about the fact that the ads are interactive, require users to complete in-game “challenges” for rewards, require users to go live and stream their game, etc…
You need to get out more.
Why is that
What a dense comment.
Makes me miss Xfire. Feature-rich, customizeable, great quality, overlay feature that didn’t suck, no bullshit. It was orders of magnitude better than Discord ever was.
…but not popular outside of gaming; and ofc the other big tech companies litigated the fuck out of it, so it never really took off and now it’s gone. Boooooooo
we were happy and we didn’t know it
github.com/…/Discord3rdparties
These are all near unusable and against ToS
Same as it ever was.
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
I never stopped using irc (I know I’m old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can’t find any communities that aren’t turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I’ve found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I’d like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don’t even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
“RTFM” but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they’re implementing ads, it’s not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It’s not likely to be blockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
Will filtering elements not work?
If it’s downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It’s impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn’t even been able to keep users from doing it; they’ve had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It’s your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can’t imagine enough people put money into it that they haven’t just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It’s hard for me to exactly call it greed if they’re just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
We have no clue if they’re profitable since they’re private… but given they’ve laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they’ve been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
Exactly. Everyone wants an ad-free platform that’s free to use. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
I don’t think paying will stop enshitification.
Line.
Go.
Up.
It’s not a publicly traded company smh
They’re probably trying to IPO like Reddit.
Maybe they are, but they fought off a Microsoft buyout only a few years ago, seems if they wanted to sell out, they would have done it then. Meanwhile, we don’t have financial figures (since it is a private company) but reportedly they are profitable Regardless, it’s just speculation and the “line must go up” meme generally refers to increasing share price to enrich investors and c suite, which… Doesn’t make as much sense for a private company who’s shares do not trade on an exchange.
Was the Microsoft offer before or after interest rates rose? That has been the catalyst for a lot of the enshitification online recently.
2021, which was before the rate hikes which started in 2022, my conjecture would be Discord wouldn’t be hit as hard as some other online sites that are enshittifying, simply due to one fact… They’re not ad-based, they make money from direct subscriptions from users, there is something to be said for the other issues with cost of living rising so people have less spending money in general, it is possible they’ve taken a hit, but it’s impossible to say as they don’t have to publicly disclose that sort of info.
Does Discord make a profit? A lot of big tech has historically operated at a loss, even with subscriptions. Not sure if that data is available since they’re private.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren’t devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn’t profitable.
I mean they’re almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You’re telling me we aren’t in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn’t have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that’s too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
In the past month I noticed ads inside Viber desktop (it’s used a lot here, instead of WhatsApp)
Later I got a call from a friend that his windows defender picked up a trojan in Viber files… Next day I got it too.
I shit you not, they let out an update with malware, on a popular chat app. I uninstalled and got the next update, with blind trust, I can’t migrate atm…
It is possible it was a false positive, though I am not familiar with Viber and its recent history in terms of malware incidents.
Still any platform that serves up ads needs to secure them… and as none bother I simply block all ads.
I find it hard to believe viber isn’t some IoT connected sex toy name.
.
They also are forcing US users into arbitration unless you opt out by May 15th by emailing arbitration-opt-out@discord.com, so you can’t sue them. This is similar to LG with their compressor fiasco in their fridges where they put arbitration agreement crap on the box.
What should I put in the opt out email?
“get fucked! Best regards <username>”
I am so happy there is no other country where this bullshit is legal
Wait what? Can I get a link to read more about this?
pcgamer.com/discords-tos-update-forbids-lawsuits-…
Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
Yup, also my experience. Maybe Jabber. Jabber was great.
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere…
xkcd.com/1782/
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It’s a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
Several messaging services that started on PCs already had mobile apps when Whatsapp got big so there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
But all those you listed weren’t available internationally I believe. Atleast in the US, ask anyone who came to work how they keep in touch with people back home, and they’ll likely say whatsapp.
Skype certainly was. It would make an interesting case study - what drove adoption when there were established competitors with more resources?
Phone numbers, phone apps and the international market. Skype was in a lot of places only popular for business, Whatsapp was everyone’s very first doorway into a modern messenger app.
Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.
For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history
Not related to the article itself, but I’m curious why use of archive.is has become so popular around here considering that they refuse to provide DNS replies without edns personal information attached? I’m not familiar with the politics involved, but a lot of DNS providers are getting blocked by archive.is for not providing that info, including my own home DNS server and cloud flare 1.1.1.1 and many others, so I’m surprised to see it gaining popularity on Lemmy.
Do you have an alternative that it would be reasonable for people to know about?
I use the .is link for everything because it’s the only way to reliably get into most of the paywalled articles form sites like WSJ. The other archive sites have already been blacklisted and get served a paywalled copy or blank “please enable javascript” page.
I knew nothing of it’s DNS funkiness.
mmmm, i hate discord, anybody have any good self hosted recommendations? Preferably, fully featured, or featureful, and not some random garb.
Flirting with matrix, the concept fucks. I just haven’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet. I know there area few others, like revolt, which is kind of a mess, and various others in the same category.
TeamSpeak 3 now has a UI similar to discord.
hmm, interesting. Teamspeak was never really something i’ve bothered looking into. Might give it a look, though to be clear, im not interface picky, i hate discord, through and through, it’s awful.
Needs a license for larger concurrent user counts, which is probably why it fell off in favour of Mumble and then Discord.
yeah this is my main concern, anything with licensing can change at a moments notice, just look at vmware lol.
I do use mumble though, it’s great, just a little feature lite. But what it does is perfect so can’t really complain.
If you want to get to know Teamspeak, you could start by trying to share a file with someone on the same server! Good luck have fun!
yeah, i might give it a shot if i find nothing else interesting.
Kinda surprised TS is still around. It’s all we used in the ‘00s for gaming, but slowly lost relevance thanks to in-game VoIP and other popular solutions like discord.
Mumble is better
IRC.
IRC has been in the back of my mind, not familiar with it other than the fact that it’s ancient as fuck, and it works:tm: so. I’ll probably consider it at some point.
Soumds like revolt might be interesting to you.
i’ve messed with it, i know you can technically self host, but last i checked that’s docker only, which is not what im looking for. I want something more stable than revolt, with more features. And i’m not married to the discord UI personally, so anything that does a better job is welcome lol.
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
mmm, when i click on a website and the first button that appears is “contact sales” i’m sure it’s a good product.
Agreed
maybe i’m just a little too open source pilled, but if i click on a page, and it’s not immediately apparent to me what is going on, immediately ignore everything on the page, because IMO, if you don’t think your front page is important enough to explain what your product actually is, i’m not going to be acquainted enough to ever use it lol.
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can’t die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won’t care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000’s of people keep coming back again and again.
Neo, Matrix is calling
*its free
Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?
After however many years I finally joined two discord instances for some niche topics where community was hard to find elsewhere.
I haven’t used IRC in a few years I admit, but I’m a few months in with discord, and so far it has never stopped feeling like IRC with a confusing interface, a gaudy new coat of paint, and emojis everywhere.
I have no idea why it’s seemingly the ONLY place anyone wants to create an interactive community anymore for so many things.
Because its zero-effort to make a functional forum (no hosting or backend to be set up) and you have almost full control over the space / it’s isolated from other communities (unlike reddit)
EDIT: I don’t like discord either, but I can see why content creators and the likes would prefer it to other forums
It’s decent for voice chat in games.
I’m not sure why it became the open source world’s documentation platform of choice.
Yeah, but so is mumble.
Great, now you just need somebody to rent a server for you.
That’s where Discord won, along with being able to run in a browser for those who didn’t want to fill their PC with crap comms software for one PUG run through Uldir.
So, the answer is as usual laziness and minimum effort for anything. We really all deserve what we are experiencing.
Well yes, but at the same time if you had to pay a few bucks a month for Lemmy or it only worked on a special app, would you be on it?
Yes. In fact, I’m sponsoring the project and I am currently using a special app.
OK. And how many other people would be here for you to talk to?
I remember the times when projects had their own infrastructure or at least used infrastructure they could easily move away from, like irc. It works, we just don’t want to anymore.
I think there’s definitely room to have an open source Discord alternative.
IRC with history and images
Voice/video chat
Wiki hosting
Have a client and website that can link right to them and you’re away. But again, it’s going to cost something to run it, be it hosting fees or a small server in somebody’s house along with bandwidth. And Discord doesn’t unless you count privacy, which most people don’t.
Discord nitro is a thing. They are bleeding money like mofos. There’s no more investor money, they are desperate for income.
sounds like it's time to allow third-party clients distribute the server software, shut down free "servers" and offer paid hosting and support. that would cut costs a great deal.
??? I hope you don’t actually think this
There’s no reason to require everyone on earth to prioritize a better computer interfacing environment over their free time.
My time is worth way more to me than video game voice chat – but it’s not either/or. Thanks to other developers, I can have both.
there are web clients for mumble
Does it also do temporary passes so you don’t have to give full access to people who only want to play alongside you once?
One issue I had with the Discord web client was the lack of push to talk. Anyone who raided with a Darth Vader will relate. I presume Mumble would be similar. You don’t really want to give a browser full key logging access. Useful for listening in though.
Mumble does that one thing just fine, but it doesn’t do all the things discord does.
And it’s not just the fact that discord does all those things that’s made it so dominant; it’s the fact that it does all those things in one place.
Even just the core features of voice chat, text chat, and the ability to set up a new server where you have extensive moderation control in one click – it’s what people wanted.
They don’t need a handful of different programs to glue together a shittier experience, they need a FOSS discord/slack.
this thread is making me realize I’m clearly missing something. How do people actually use discord? Me and my friends basically use it as semi-permanent group chat. A few different topic areas, and no stupid android/ios compatibility issues. I’m also in two servers for some small clubs. Do people really use it the way they would lemmy/reddit?
This is basically how I use it as well. I am in a few game jam channels, but i only use them when the jams are running.
I like to watch twitch streams and play modded videogames (minecraft, lethal company, valheim). Every single twitch streamer has their own discord. Fine I guess, they want control over their space and it’s full of cat pics and tattoos anyway. But the mod makers do the same, patch notes on discord, feature discussion on discord, some even close their githubs and want bugs on discord. I don’t want to be part of your shitty community, I want to know which recolored slime is killing me through walls so I can disable it in the configs. And because the discord search is garbage, I still have to sift through racist memes and wildly outdated info to find what I need.
Every single entertainer (YouTuber, Twitch Streamer, etc.), community game server, some Open Source projects, Indie game developers and anyone who gets public support through Patreon uses Discord as the sole public hub. Colleges, Universities, Online courses also rely heavily on Discord. It’s a social network they can advertise, some servers are for subscribers only and is seen as a reward to get access to that. I’m part of a dozen or so servers for online things of interest to me, even though I hate the platform. It’s all silenced and without notifications, else I would go crazy, and I never chat with anyone there. But unfortunately there are several events, opportunities and activities that are exclusively communicated via the Discord server. It’s like cancer. Just like Instagram and WhatsApp, I have them not because I like it, but because if I remove them entirely or too aggressively it will take my social life with it.
Edit: tldr: I think I probably could’ve saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.
I didn’t think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That’s the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it’s a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don’t have as much moderation control. I dn’t think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that’s not something I use much.
I’m in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers’ communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn’t something that does it so well and so easily – and even then, I’d probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let’s say it’s like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can’t find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it’s more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we’re all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we’re all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there’s a social aspect, it is to replace “water cooler talk” which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works… fine. I don’t love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it’s terrible when it’s the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that’s the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord’s failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.
A few open-source projects I follow use it as their main community tool and it sucks.
I don’t mind my friend groups using it because it’s just for ephemeral chats and gaming anyway, but I want to know why these other communities think it’s appropriate.
Imagine using discord without Vencord, I’m sure someone will add a plug-in to remove all its crap at least I hope so, it already has some really good ones that give you access to free nitro bs.
Is that similar to betterdiscord? I’m not the most tech literate but I’ve used that with plugins for tabs and whatnot. If there’s a plugin for universal emojis I’d be sold
Pretty much yes, the plug-in you are looking for is called FakeNitro and it will give you the quality streams and the emotes for free.
I never ever understood and still doesn’t understand why people like Discord. It’s not indexed, it’s a constant background noise. It’s absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is “everyone else is using it”. Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It’s hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
Or does it make it easier to distance yourself from those who eat that garbage up? If you value privacy, are you willing to throw it away for someone else?
All my friends are on discord, if I’m not on discord I can’t really talk to them.
You’re basically going wHy dOnT yOu jUsT cuT oFf YoUr FrIenDs
Or maybe he’s saying your friends are garbage eaters. Or at least content to chow down.
Holy fucking shit please touch at least 1 (one) singular blade of grass I beg you motherfuckers
Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.
Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.
I don’t want to self host a bunch of shit and spend a week troubleshooting stuff, no one wants to do that.
edit: plus that way you’re still literally just using discord through a different UI, what’s the point of it anyway
there’s literally one person I ever knew that used Matrix and they fucking sucked
Rossman Repair moved their main group over to Matrix. There are people making the jump.
You don’t need to self host, there are servers that do this for you
Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It’s like girls who say they don’t date anyone who uses Android.
And how is that going to help if you’re the only one in the friends group that uses Matrix? Your messages still end up on discord and half the features won’t work. What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?
You will be the only one at first.
If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.
If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.
So what features do these bridges support? Does voice chat work? Can I share screen through them? Can I upload attachments?
I would love to switch to something open source, but communication with other people usually has to have the same thing on both ends.
Discord won because it offered more than mumble/teamspeak and did more and better than skype at the time and looks like even to this day. It’s even better than slack and teams when it comes to resource usage.
I’m pretty that they had valid reasons to have achieved such a dominant position in the market. But we can say the same about every other platform. Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Google… All of them were once the underdog who got a good product and leapfrogged the competition. The problem is what they did after to keep this position.
There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.
The reason open source solutions never end up overtaking these stupid services that come out and then commit suicide every 7 years is because they’re always technically inferior at first, and oftentimes the open source alternative doesn’t even have anything remotely close to the paid service on the roadmap.
Maybe this is because of the issues with scaling up a dev team that’s formerly just been driven entirely by people’s free time, maybe it’s just that the ball never gets rolling to begin with, and only people who are ideologically vested in the idea of open source over even their own efficacy of use are the only people who are going to use these alternatives, who knows. Probably, it’s just that venture capital is usually willing to back the private, “presentable” company, over the open source guys, for pretty obvious reasons.
It’s just short term interest vs. long term interest. In our current economic layout, the former wins pretty consistently. I’d even go so far as to say that the former wins pretty consistently with most kinds of human planning just generally.
I do not have a good solution to this problem.
Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?
I worry that you may be right, but at the same time I can not avoid the “History repeats itself. First as tragedy then as farce”:
It frustrates me to no end to think that the average Lemmy user is carrying a very expensive iPhone, yet can not be bothered to contribute even $1/month to the developers. It honestly makes me think sometimes that they deserve all the shit that keeps happening. It’s not for lack of warning.
I mean partially, yeah. I dunno.
I think in total I kinda just don’t see the migration, for these things, as a big issue. Any sort of, more crystalized or important knowledge, is usually saved on some ancient forum somewhere, or a book, or the internet archive, something to that effect, so realistically we’re not losing a whole lot with every migration, except for the kind of, ambient fomo and depression that people tend to have whenever they experience the death of anything, even a kind of shitty internet platform. The death of possibility that it represents.
I mean it’s maybe kind of annoying, right, to see this happen repetitively, and for it to be the case that we can never have any “real progress” with any of these applications, right. Everything has to be conceived of as a totally new and independent thing, and nobody can every build on anyone else’s work. At the same time, people naturally leap to whatever the next best thing is when these services evaporate, so we usually don’t end up losing all that much in terms of technological progression. I’m also not too sure that you can really improve on Discord that much. It already has all your different chatting and video streaming needs, there’s not much more you could do without just kinda, turning it into a totally different kind of thing.
I think maybe a more pressing issue, or annoyance, for me, is those actual monopolies which crop up. Shit like youtube, that’s probably a bigger problem. They have the total power of a video sharing platform, if anything gets erased from there, it’s probably just straight gone, because everyone kind of assumes that the servers are just going to remain free and freely accessible forever. I guess you could always just save your videos, though, but maybe that presents some kind of unsung cost of like, ease of accessibility, right. There’s not a great way to sift through all of the millions of hours of video content uploaded every second anyways, so I don’t know if it ends up mattering much, most of the time.
In sum I also think it’s kind of, misguided to blame the consumer for these sorts of behaviors. They’re that way because they’ve been propagandized too, because their friends all migrate and they are powerless to stop it, etc. The real things at work here are just like, the arbitrary forces of venture capital and the market, and the market regulation that surrounds all of this.
So far, the only reasons I’ve seen people switch from 1 communication app to another, be it for gaming or just day-to-day messaging is either better features/better quality or what they’ve been using so far turned into shit. And once enough people switch to the new better thing, the rest will follow.
Unfortunately the open source alternative cannot offer either, it’s why they rarely succed.
When whatsapp first started to gain traction it was vastly superior to sms, mms was never really a big thing here.
Discord became king because Microsoft bought skype and made it shit and teamspeak/mumble were not as conveniant.
So next open source thing will have to be at least as good as discord and discord has to become really shitty before anything changes. So far, discord has been anything but flawless, but ads are the first step of the enshitification. People will likely switch to web client + adblock. And when discord decides to block that, that’s when the first massive wave of people will switch to the new big thing and probably never look back.
I am hopeful the next thing will be something open, I am very much into that, I always try to look for alternatives, but average person doesn’t care, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The usual answer is “people are stupid”, which can’t be true - people spend lots of effort to be less stupid, and when interacting with those people in unusual and unexpected ways you might find out they are much smarter than they seem.
The correct answer is that people don’t know what they can do with computers. So they accept any bullshit.
Stupid, no. Lazy, absolutely.
More stimuli means more being done with the same lazy person.
I don’t know anyone who’s used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn’t indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
I still use it occasionally. It’s primarily used for smaller, more private communities, but Wikipedia also hosts official IRC rooms, too. I don’t know of any other major companies that use IRC in an official capacity, though.
The sheer amount of features and stability.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it’s perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it’s always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it’s fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
Some people are downvoting you but you’re right. No other application is this all in one package. My only issues with input devices have been Windows’ fault, too. I don’t like Discord’s closed ecosystem and data privacy concerns, but the feature set is unmatched, especially at the amount of polish they have and their price.
Side note, people please stop using it as an alternative to a proper forum.
Thanks for the point about the forums. I get why people use Discord: the things it is designed for it does reasonably well. The problem is people using it in ways it isn’t made for, like forums or wikis. If your documentation, issue tracking, or patch notes are done via Discord, please stop for fuck’s sake. There are much better options for this and you can even webhook them into Discord if you insist on it, but stop using Discord to replace forums.
Also also the voice codec is (or at least was) a noticable improvement over anything that was available for free.
IRC doesn’t have sub-channels AFAIK. Also no image support, search, video-conferencing, etc.
Comparing Discord to IRC is like comparing playing tennis to baking a cake. Just two entirely different things.
The alternatives at the time were steam voice chat or Skype, and both were awful to use.
Unless IRC has changed drastically in recent years, or maybe people are using proprietary extensions, it only supports a fraction of the features discord does.
The reason why gamers pivoted to discord is it was irc, team speak, and Skype in one platform that just worked
At worst, I could just use Discord in Firefox and block the ads.
Until they stop supporting Firefox, because who uses Firefox /s
Them fighting sarcastic words there
Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn’t start earlier.
Deffo waiting for lots of people to be on it before turning up that dial.
Seems to be the standard silicon valley business model these days. The old “drug dealer outside school giving away free samples to get you hooked” we all heard about but never saw.
I personally don’t like it and I don’t use it too much, but since its features, I don’t see how we can complain: nothing is free, they sure have costs
But they also have monetization streams. Nitro. Boosts. Paying for servers. In essence a small number of users pay the costs to keep a server going.
They tried their best to make Nitro succeed first before turning to other methods of making money.
The paradoxical demand of ever growing profits made this unavoidable anyways.
To a degree, yes. But a non-public company doesn’t usually have that “obligation” for ever-growing profit. Unfortunately, Discord’s goal does seem to be to eventually get an IPO.
Which to me shows why enshittification is so closely tied to austerity and economic downturn. For example I have a buddy who bought Discord Nitro whenever he could. But he recently got laid off and of course that was the first monthly expense he cut.
It was either that or they start charging. They’re gonna piss people of either way but at least it’s still free.
They do charge for some features.
Yeah, I always assumed the free version was the loss leader and they made it back with people buying the paid version.
Yeah apparently not enough return on that for Amazon. I’m hoping my pihole will deal with the majority of the ads. Prime video ads are served from the same domain as the main content so I can’t block them with this method.
They tried to do that, but it’s difficult to make a decent subscription service for what’s essentially a chat app.
Isn’t that what Nitro is?
It is, but it’s not exactly a good subscription service for the average Discord user. In the past, they kept adding and removing features, trying to find stuff that stuck. While I think they’ve got a decent feature set right now, it’s still not great, and I don’t think the average Discord user would be very impressed by it.
“Pay $10/ month for increased upload size, custom emojis shared everywhere (and not tied to being used in only one server), and animated profile pics/ banners/ backgrounds!” There are other features, but I don’t think most people would use them.
The biggest feature, custom emojis being able to be used in any server, is also part of their $5/ month tier, so most subscribers don’t even have a need for the more expensive tier.
Yea if you don’t pay the call and stream quality is essentially worthless
Okay, I was expecting something a lot worse than what the article describes. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but at least these ads seem somewhat topical and also give tangible rewards for doing something that you might do already anyway (stream a game to a couple of friends in a private Discord server). Maybe I’m misinterpreting the change, but this doesn’t seem that bad?
I’m not sure what everyone’s hangup is about Discord. My group that I play video games with swapped over to Discord from Skype years ago and it’s still a good experience. You want to hear about enshittification? Just look at what they did to Skype over the years. That platform is completely unusable now.
I doubt Discord will remain totally useable forever, but at least there are budding alternatives out there that might be able to carry the torch if Discord can’t continue it’s freemium service. One that I’ve tried in the past is Guilded and they are sort of like a Discord clone if you really want the same general user experience - pseudoforum live chat with VOIP lobbies, streaming capabilities, etc. I tried it out and it was fine but not worth swapping everyone on our Discord server to the new one since it wasn’t substantially different or better in any way.
I think people are more worried about the trend than the specific changes. Discord might still be okay for now but we’ve been down this path enough times to know where it might lead
I’ve been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord’s format.
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Matrix messaging is great but voice is still quite janky.
Haven’t tried calling using Matrix.
Just today I learned about Cinny which would make so much more sense to use for people who need the discord/slack experience but want to use matrix
Thing is, people don’t need the Discord experience. People need the people and servers that are on Discord.
There’s also Element which feels a lot like discord. The problem though isn’t moving to a new platform, it’s convincing the masses to do the same.
Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.
how do you get more money out of a product once you reach a point where anyone who will ever use it is already using it?
less money out, more money in, which is to say you make it shittier and more expensive. Remember, you’re only as good as your most recent revenue change.
In 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.
www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/
Revenue is not the same as income. Maintaining cross-platform apps and hosting nearly a decade of messages and media attachments is gonna eat into that. Also, Discord is in fact a private company.
Google says storage is cheap. This is solely for profit.
That’s not how hosting a platform works. The storage might be cheap per GB, but the database management for something on Discord’s scale is a complicated and expensive feat of engineering: discord.com/…/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes…
Correct. I did not locate a source for their expenses or profit margin. If someone can provide, I would be happy to update.
I haven’t given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.
The entire premise of Discord’s free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide “free service” based on venture capital like that.
TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they’re a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).
Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it’s received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).
Glad you feel validated after… 7 years
If I’m not mistaken, they are a private company.
Granted, they’re a private company with a goal of getting an IPO soon, though.
This is the future!
10 years from now…
I needed to go 💩 poop and I had to wait for a Home Depot ad before I could open the lid. I flushed but I had to learn about Spandex hot pants before the water rushed down.
Lol. I’ve seen a video in China of something like this. It’s a public restroom that requires you to watch an ad accessed by QR code in order to get toilet paper. The future!
Oh man so the future is now!? That’s crazy!
I’m down to distributed social networks and irc.
I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I’m just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.
Well, most clouds suck these days.
I just noticed this today… I barely even use discord. Now I really don’t like it.
Been happily off discord ever since the CEO’s disastrous, anti-encryption speech at the “Protecting Children Online” hearing. Evil little dude, that guy is.
What do the Lemmings recommend as a replacement for discord?
I’m happy to revert back to teamspeak if need be, I heard it’s app recently got an overhaul (or at the very least a facelift).
I’m disgusted (though not shocked, I fucking called it years ago), that discord would go down this rabbit hole being that their main demographic is gamers. The stats are in, gamers (among every other living being) hates ads.
In fact, I pay for YT music because I think it’s good value, but ive never once had YT premium, and I haven’t seen an ad on their site for close to a decade now. (Still no pihole, that’s likely next).
To circle back, if possible Lemmings, I would like to find a discord replacement that my folks would be willing to install/try out. I’ve got a couple people who have said “hey man, find a better spot and we’ll tag along”, however I have yet to find a suitable replacement on my own time.
Matrix.org has some Discord Clones that you can even self-host if that is what gets you off. Personally I’m planning to use their “Bridge” software to move everything from my old Discord channel to a private database but I have never maintained a database so it is currently safely on the backburner.
I’d say Matrix / Elements is a good alternative.
It’s based on an open and interoperable protocol, similar to the fediverse. So it doesn’t matter the client, as long as your friends are on something that support Matrix they’ll be able to join the group.
As an added bonus, if elements start going down the enshittification path you can just drop them. Also, you can host your server just like teamspeak
Appreciate the response, I’ll give matrix and elements a look-see.
Unfortunately I’m the only among the group that interacts with(or even knows of) the fediverse and it’s associated softwares, so I expect there to be some drama involved, hopefully I can be the salesman they need.
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
Well I guess its done its job for the US Government. Funding has obviously stopped.
Anyone tried revolt.chat?
On a glance it seemed to work well enough.
There’s also Matrix chat, which is federated.
Yeah, functionally it’s much more similar to Discord. It’s a shame it isn’t federated.
What does being federated give it?
It means users aren’t dependant on a centralized service provided by the developers themselves.
That doesn’t really answer the question since anything that is self-hostable already meets your criteria even if it’s not federated.
It’s a communication platform. People are forced to use the same host if they want to communicate on a non-federated platform.
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It’s totally understandable.
The users (the people generating the profit for iNvEsToRs) deserve better.
The hate for successful people here is ridiculous. Neither Discord nor its investors owe you a world-class service with private servers, video calls, screen sharing, voice calls, and many other features for free. The market operates on mutual benefit: you get the service, and the owners get the money. Those who complain about businesses aiming to be profitable are lunatics.
This isn’t hate for the investors, but for what they’ve pushed for. Discord was already profitable, this is just driving enshittification; per the article.
I honestly don’t understand why the people who do bugger all for services should be catered to just because they have shares or whatever.
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I would rather say it’s “predictable”, rather than “understandable”. Perhaps even, “no better than we can expect”. Calling this “understandable” tends to normalize greed for greed’s sake.
Well, that’s what you get for letting a private company replace and open protocol with a proprietary solution because it’s easier to use and has some cute emojis.
I dono what people expected. Discord costs money to develop and run. It was always just a matter of time before it cost money.
Matrix works pretty good.
I installed Element yesterday, and the UI is similar enough to Discord that it would probably be easy to make the switch, but who uses Matrix and is there a way to find communities?
Some time ago I was involved with GNOME applications and they use it. I have used Discord only for game chatting. So I guess we all need to create servers for our friends to join.
Well I am finally ahead of the curve. I mostly stopped using discord after I learned of their horrible privacy practices and braindead statements on e2e encryption.
Long live Matrix!
skype > discord
The internet should have just stuck with IRC
Old Skype, maybe, but then again even old Skype was a buggy horrible mess.
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???
I heavily decreased my usage of Discord when I was lowkey doxxed by a user on a server that I never posted a single ounce of personal information to.
At least it is not “Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it’s fediverse platform”