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.
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.
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.
Uh oh!
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.
A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though,
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
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.
Sir IRC is still going strong!
The difference is you’re not relying on one corp with IRC.
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
Hello twin!
In Matrix we trust
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 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.
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 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.
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
deleted by creator
I’m actually not sure about modded clients for android/iOS, maybe someone in this thread knows of one.
… and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.
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.
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.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
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.
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.
Will filtering elements not work?
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn’t start earlier.
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.
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere…
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It’s a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
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???
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.
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.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
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.
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
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.
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.
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
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 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 sheer amount of features and stability.
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.
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.
I am so happy there is no other country where this bullshit is legal
What should I put in the opt out email?
“get fucked! Best regards <username>”
Wait what? Can I get a link to read more about this?
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
is that they start as free and then
wanted to start to make money at a later stage.*run out of VC capital and find themselves in a cash crunchEvery 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.
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
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.
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.
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
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.
Quests will show up tastefully in Discord where you can opt-in to stream your game to friends and win rewards for playing.
Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.
Neo, Matrix is calling
