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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood these tech company's intolerance to 3rd party clients, which are almost always niche or used by the ad-blocker using tech savvy subset of their userbase. Open clients is how most of the internet was built and will continue to be built.

They should spend more time focusing on building their own best-in-class clients themselves. If they're not able to accomplish that for the vast majority of their users it's a sign of a bigger problem than some monetization optimization strategy which will only push people away.

The valuable power users have multiple clients anyway and bring in more regular users (who just use the standard clients) than they're worth individually.

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The reason is simple. Discord's users are it's product, not the software services it provides them. Its clients are intentionally spyware. If you made your own client then they could not spy and sell information about you.

They send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a "server" (not really a server), etc. The URL was named "/track" before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response).

Also their desktop client is literally a remote sdministration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

I’m not even talking about 3rd party clients becoming the main clients. As I said that would be a sign of a much bigger problem than just reduced ability of monetization.

The reasons why they default to lock in are obvious, what I’m saying is that it ultimately benefits their business or has a neutral effect as the type of users to use a 3rd party client isn’t and is probably still using multiple clients (mobile/desktop) and still buys the subscription services.

Discord will always make the most popular client. It’s just how this stuff works. Just like Twitter 95%+ of people go to discord to download the clients. It’s the niche ones on the side that end up getting banned.

It’s not like the advanced features of a freemium model couldn’t be replicated in the client or in Twitters case they can still send ads in the API stream. If the client doesn’t show the ads + is very popular (a key part of the equation) then you can cut them off.

They could charge to allow people to use private clients equivalently (or maybe even more) to what they make per client selling that track data. Either way things go they'd win that way.

> I've never understood these tech company's intolerance to 3rd party clients, which are almost always niche or used by the ad-blocker using tech savvy subset of their userbase.

In the case of Discord specifically, iirc there has been issues in the past with abusive behaviour coming from people automating their own accounts (spambots etc.), which was one of the main reasons it was prohibited.

Banning all 3rd party clients and shutting down apis seems like an overreaction to spam... just give them keys which can be disabled.

They already do disable keys. The official client collects a ton of hardware information and posts it back to Discord and a third party repeatedly.

Part of it is due to having to worry about breaking changes made to the client-server protocol, and adding new features which may not available to all of the userbase soon, if ever. Look at the various enhancements made to IRC server software over the years and how fragmented things are.

It’s unlikely to have a good outcome for a service that’s already dominant in the market. They fear being commoditised, or even strangled.

Imagine one of those clients becomes really, really good - so much so that it becomes the default way to use the service. The client starts adding features only available in that client. Then the client introduces its own competing service, inside the same client.

The service just becomes a dumb pipe, with all the real value in the client. This is why we want protocols, rather than services, to decouple the client from the service provider.

Discord was okay with it for a long time, then it a abused heavily.

In the case of discord, in my opinion, they won't be able to monetize anything if they allow rd party clients.

How do they make money now? Are they profitable?

Selling discord nitro and selling games I think. Not sure if that's already profitable to them.

A monthly subscription that offers mostly cosmetic perks (animated avatars and emoji, a profile badge, larger file uploads, etc)

Well, keeping it this way encourages lock-in.

Discord does build a best-in-class client, users love Discord. Tinkerers just like tinkering.

They want to control all the features under the guise of a unified experience.

A third party client's shitty coding broke the entire network repeatedly in early 2016. Third party clients are mostly used to spam users with userbots. The only sane option is to blanket ban them.

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