Comment by lumenwrites | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumenwrites | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm really excited about this. For two reasons:

1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in).

2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.

> Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value.

This is why protocols are better than walled gardens. The walled gardens have appeal in the honeymoon stage when they're growing, flush with cash, and funding feature development specifically to attract users, way beyond what open source or just benevolently-built software can manage. The money grab and decline that tends to come after is very destructive, not only destroying the business underlying the system, but the things people built on top of it. Network effects mean you have to do significant harm to your users before they're willing to rip the band-aid off, but the monetization always seems to get more desperate until that point is reached. I hope Discord ends up the exception, but excepting that, I hope IRC outlives Discord. It has a good chance at doing so.

I mostly dislike how this is adding nothing new to Discord syncing subscriber status from Twitch or Patreon; doing that assigned the subscriber who connected their accounts a role, which could then be used for permissions to access content. This is all that a Discord Subscriber gets (role access to exclusive channels), besides "Premium Emotes", which is nebulous in value.

Discord are streamlining the process that wasn't particularly complicated to begin with. I'm imagining someone went "wait, why aren't we getting a piece of that pie?", and this is what they arrived at: make fans and communities need to choose where they put their subscription money to, and hope that enough people decide that Discord is the central venue they experience a community.

For Twitch streamers, this might not be as successful as they'd like it to be, if there's more value associated with being a Twitch sub than a Discord sub. Streamers really need to be leaning hard on a Discord-specific product in order to justify a second (or well, primary) subscription, and I don't see a ton of people doing that.

> I mostly dislike how this is adding nothing new to Discord syncing subscriber status from Twitch or Patreon; doing that assigned the subscriber who connected their accounts a role, which could then be used for permissions to access content. This is all that a Discord Subscriber gets (role access to exclusive channels), besides "Premium Emotes", which is nebulous in value.

Having to use a fiddly separate system is a pain. I've got more than one membership where the whole community and content is on Discord and the Patreon exists solely to manage subscriptions; having that built into Discord seems like an obviously better alternative.

Nitro is how discord makes money today, "creators" don't get a cut from it, instead they or their community pay for discord as a service like every other "creator".

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