Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
The internet's favorite chat app is turning servers into storefronts.
![[HN] Discord is opening the monetization floodgates with microtransaction stores](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/ecb8b178-1a23-4509-bf7d-8f5cf9a9fe98.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
honestly as long as the stuff that discord is monetizing stays additive instead of changing services we already use to be paid-for, I really don't mind if discord gives creators (and, by way of that, themselves) ways to generate revenue. Discord, even as a completely free service, is really far ahead of other similar platforms and offerings. I don't expect them to be 100% consumer-first at the expense of generating profits (as much as i wish it were feasible for them to be), but the ways in which they've done that so far have been surprisingly unobtrusive.
Back in the day Discord's advantage was that it provided a way for people to set up a voice communication server with push-to-talk without any technical knowledge and for free. I don't know how they're ahead of competition now.. I don't know what their killer features are.
I use it occasionally but there are a few problems that always drive me away . 1) I have muted all the servers but I still get occasional sound notifications and just cannot find any source for them, might be a bug 2) there is no global notification history. To me that seems like a must-have feature and I don't know how people stand to use discord without it 3) ui feels very clunky. To me it seems like I spend way too much time navigating through the ui and searching for things. For example, scrolling through the servers and trying to remember which icon was which. Anyway, I would be interested in hearing why people do use it besides everybody being there.
1 is definitely a bug, I'm in like 50 servers and I don't have that happen like ever. 3 I can't dispute, but I think that's largely because they've increased their feature set for different kinds of users faster than their UI team has been able to accommodate for them. Better sorting for servers would be amazing
2, there definitely is. On mobile it's the bell icon at the bottom when you pull out the sidebar, on desktop it's the icon that looks like a desk tray at the top right, they let you see notifications either from the active server or globally, so idk what you mean.
I was boosting my server so everyone could use animated emojis. Thing is, people now have to be Nitro subscriber to use them. There has been no warning. I really don’t like those manners of making things that once were "free" premium features.
The last feature I liked from Discord was screensharing. Everything else since has been useless or outright terrible.
And the enshittification continues.
But the sooner Electron dies the better, there is literally only one Electron based program that works well and that is VS Code, but you've got to blame Microsoft for being so incompetent that they never even set the standard for a desktop UI after years of monopoly that people turned to just mushing Chrome into a box.
There was a time where about 70% of the apps I ran on my Windows machine were written in GTK, and that was long before I even touched Linux.
Ahhh GTK and Qt! The true cross-platform experience! This brings back some cozy memories
I really like Trilium Notes as a Joplin/Obsidian alternative!
I don't know if this really is as harmful an enshiftification as we've come to expect from other projects, it mainly seems to be allowing you to have a "patreon" or "gumroad" type project tied to your actual community. There's an argument that the centralization is harmful in the long run when everything goes belly-up but this move in a vacuum seems like a logical next step for Discord itself
i honestly do not care about having the option to pay for things
i consider the quality of a platform as if monetised features dont exist, and discord is still a pretty solid platform besides them
if they start monetising existing features, sure, that effectively removes features, but until then getting mad at things that simply do not affect me is silly
And people wonder why I prefer forums. The "Discordifcation" of everything is out of control.
I never got the appeal of Discord anyway, after a while it simply becomes a dump of notifications that I cannot follow up on.
Or, get ready for an influx of fediverse users on Matrix?