I honestly don't mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I'm not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.
This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.
I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).
I don't think I'm the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I'm kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won't hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.
I use discord for 2 things, my personal group chat with friends that I manage, and keeping up with Mechanical Keyboard artisan shops and manufacturers. So I mean it wont be a huge leap for me to migrate to something better.
The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I’m not too sure if 10% is high or low.
I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It's a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.
I imagine 7% isn't that much of a "loss" when compared to how much larger the market on discord is and how convenient it's going to be for these users to start spending on MTX.
Agree to disagree then, every percentage counts and the effects of each of those percentages is exaggerated with each additional patron. 7% of one patron is negligible, 7% of three hundred patrons is huge.
Edit: oh and the discord market is a niche market, the average person does not have a Discord and many aren't even familiar when it's brought up. I had a much easier time getting people to sign up for a paid Patreon than I had getting them to sign up for a free Discord account back when I was putting in the effort to grow a following on these platforms. I think it'll be good for people who are already building on that market but for every other creator it's an easy pass.
But the goal isn't to replace patreon with people that have to sign up for discord, it's to reach people who are already on discord and aren't funding the creator on patreon. Surely that's a huge untapped market, discord must have millions of daily users by now. You're not losing 7%, you are gaining 90% per each new customer obtained this way.
Sure, discord has millions of users but they're of a particular demographic. One that requires moderation, is typically higher maintenance, and less likely to spend money (speaking from experience from a few years back). Discord demographics screw young and young audiences spend a whole lot less than other groups. Not saying that as a knock against them, it's just the way of it.
But the potential to gain more is just that, potential. And comes with much more to manage. I don't have to moderate my Patreon comments for example. I did have to actively keep out trolls and shitheads from my Discord server though. More power to any creator who wants to try and deal with that, but it's an easy pass for me and most creators I personally know (which is primarily artists/musicians for context).
I see, thanks for explaining. I didn't realize you need to actually have a server with a community to sell these things, I assumed it's just a marketplace ran by discord staff. If it requires additional work on creator's side then I can understand the drawbacks.
Hmm. This makes too much sense to me for me to be mad. Discord can easily compete with patreon the way I see it. Obviously, they could fuck it up and ruin the whole platform but if their team has more than a few brain cells it should work out fine right?
Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.
Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: "What's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
I looked at my clothes and said Eddie Bauer and then came up with a wildly embellished tale of how I grew up with their sleeping bags in my closet, and now they're the only jacket I'll buy because they make quality products. I don't know ... I did well enough through the blind rage to get the job.
Turned out my new boss' background was in journalism, so what I thought was a liability was actually an asset. The job wasn't terrible. I hated coming up with flowery descriptions of pedestrian English muffins and exhausted any and all citrus and citrus-adjacent puns known to man. And then we lost the contract less than a year later.
I found out about that the day I got back from hauling a truck from New Mexico to get my stuff out of storage.
I don’t understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
I do, but the corporations I have a connection with are not the ones people think of usually, it’s the ones that are FOSS-first, or the ones that actually fight for what they believe. i.e. not 99.99% of corporations.
Well, this seems like powerful motivation for me to eventually find a free open source positive alternative to Discord, while ignoring Discord in the meantime. I would love to bypass their enshittification phase entirely.
Here's the thing... If your name was gamers_mate#2002 before the change, after the change you could make your name gamers_mate2002 and functionally nothing would change.
As I've said elsewhere, the user name stuff was stupid, but it's not that big of a deal.
you are working really really hard in these comments defending a platform thats pretty arguably indefensible when it comes to both privacy and basic UX
every thing discord does at this point is to increase numbers on a chart and make an accountant happy
Discord is a for profit company. Everyone here except you understands and accepts that.
I find discord's ux to be very pleasing. You want to cry and whine about element but ... Discord uses electron. I'm starting to doubt that you have much/any development experience and are just spouting off stuff you have heard.
Discord is trying to find a path to fund itself. It is a business. Making money and being a good product are not at odds with one another. Via nitro and server subscriptions discord can fund itself while still remaining an excellent and free platform. What they have added is the ability for server owners to basically do Patreon type things inside their own servers.
I'm guessing that you didn't actually bother to read far enough to understand that server owners set up subscription terms, not discord. This is not discord forcing anything upon servers. This is discord giving server owners the ability to monetize their individual server by having subscriptions. If a server does this and you don't like it then just leave.
The usernames stuff was stupid, but pray tell. How did users get "screwed out of their usernames".
Did you know that when choosing a username you could just do your name and the number sans the hashtag and it's functionality exactly the same as before.
It was a stupid change and unnecessary, but nobody got screwed out of anything.
I'm sure most people got the username they wanted, definitely more than 1% anyways. But if more than one person had the same username, people would be "screwed out of their username"
Now if someone wants the same name they'd have to add numbers at the end, or something stupid like xX_
Not necessarily true. Celebrities and Nitro subscribers also got early picks, and it isn't like they wait for each person one-by-one: you are in a bucket with others who might get to your preferred username before you.
Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.
I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack's approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
It's definitely marketed that way, but I'm on a few Slacks that are just small, private groups. It's private by default while Discord is public by default.
Also, weirdly, a lot of people seem to use Discord for things used to be (and I would say should) be on a forum (or community, magazine, etc.)
Trying to follow the thread of a discussion about some obscure point you're interested in is much easier when it's in a thread, instead of an undifferentiated chat log with a bunch of unrelated cross-talk.
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn't fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can't find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Discord just switches it's business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn't killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it's trying to kill Patreon.
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.
I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing
First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.
While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.
If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.
So it's just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.
If you don't like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It's pretty simple.
I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It's the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.
You seem to be forgetting that it is the server owner who decides these things. If you're on a server that is monetizing memes and you don't like it, leave.
Monetizing memes was given as an example. A stupid example Yes but only an example.
I found the PC Gamer article a bit confusing so I read other articles and understood it better. I get it now. It's not Discord setting these sub tiers etc. They are allowing more servers. Doesn't sound so bad. I guess depending how much a person uses a server they are a member of, they can help support the server and receive premium benefits and Discord who gets a cut of the purchases. All optional. Not too bad as it is up to the individual servers.
Edit: this can be a good thing and help support discord financially. So far we are lucky discord has not sold to a tech corp or gone public.
The thing is, between stuff like this and nitro, discord can fund itself without ads. Something like this literally helps everyone involved. If you don't want to donate to a server, then don't. It's literally that simple.
I get tired of people jumping on this bandwagon because it's popular to hate on discord. The people that are hating on it generally are the ones who fundamentally do not understand what is going on. They read some ragebait article and instead of digging a little bit deeper in trying to understand they just take it at face value. It's very irritating. The latest buzzword is "enshitification", which, by itself is a good descriptor for some things but these people throw it around so liberally that it loses all significance. "Oh an app did something I don't like and I'm not going to take the time to learn more about it ".
Think of it this way... Discord is doing a Patreon but for discord servers. This is cool. This is neat. It hurts exactly no one and helps potentially everyone. At the most it's a net zero effect for most users.
It's the beginning of the entire platform turning to shit. Because it's never enough money. More ads, more tracking, more locked in features.
This is the cycle of monetization. It gives you a small revenue stream, but only until users get fed up and leave. Because it's never enough money coming in. More more more.
Do they even have a consumer version? I've seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is "Business - $5/month/user". I'm not an organization and while that's not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I'm paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My "senior executive discussions" consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there's even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
I typed a reply and it seems to have vanished, so my apologies if you end up getting two similar yet not identical replies to this.
Thanks for elaborating. I did end up trying out Fluffychat the last time I looked into Matrix. It looks like Element on the web isn't available on mobile, so I might give it a try later on my computer or download their app.
I still think the Element site should do a better job of explaining it's also available for personal users for free. I had to go 11 links into their footer to find that information, the pricing page has no mention of their personal offerings at all.
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