Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
wsj.com
wsj.com
The home base server should be free or otherwise ethical software the community can own, ideally decentralized (in practice, not theoretically decentralized)… & then use bridge/gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy-sapping platforms.
These bridges do in fact send a lot of data still to the proprietary, privacy sapping platforms, even of those who are not using them, no?
I'm gonna look into hosting Matrix servers or something.
I expect that soon their policy of banning client modifications (for a web app) will be applied to ban users with adblockers.
and is open source.
And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.
I’m not sure how anything can compete with free and convenient, even things that work really well that take time to set up are hugely inferior because hosting is a cost if nothing else.
If something is free you have a responsibility to be even more diligent to understand what happens when it goes away, is no longer free, or how they plan to extract value from you. Discord is not a charity or government subsidized project.
But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.
If I stop running the community it will die unless a benefactor steps in as I pay it from my pocket. thats the point.
We are coded to expect services for free but it rests on the altruism of individuals or as an investment for companies.
If its an investment: at some point those companies will want something back and likely more and more over time.
Consider instead what the person stands to gain.
In my case I invest in my network because it makes me independent and that is my objective and I am happy to pay for that.
For other people its because they might want to foster open source (freenode for example) and thus your for-profit business or gamer clan isn't the right fit.
Due diligence is the correct term. Not skepticism.
When do you need voice and video with a big community btw? I can see if you have a group of like 8 core devs having their own communication channel, but that is something else then hosting the whole community.
Also, your boring, regular forum is searchable. Discord is a black hole, so if the value of information is more than just personal, Discord-like things should be a no-no, even if one doesn't value privacy issues.
> with good ownership management
This part is questionable. As the advertising news highlights, a private company operates primarily in the interest of its owners. For a venture-captial backed company, you expect to see the cycle of benevolence in order to grab market share, a model that induces lock-in (social lock-in, in this case), followed by exploitation (advertising and the other predatory FOMO stuff they have with the subscriptions).
The writing was on the wall from the get go, but people fell for it anyway. And now I'm hit by it too because I have to use it to hang with my friends.
It's all so tiresome
Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/
Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/
Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/
Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).
Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)
When it comes to exchanging information (especially if you want things to be searchable later), I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/
I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to be a part of your community, you go where they are, not vice versa. Plus, it doesn't seem that many out there are building gamer-centric platforms since the idea of making an enterprise version in parallel to the free one and earning money off of that is... unlikely?
I'm on old fogey who still hosts a teamspeak server and I have to say, teamspeak is one of the simplest and easiest things I've ever hosted. In the 6 or so years I've been running it on my VPS I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had to do anything with it, and all of those were simply required updates.
It's seriously rock solid software, never once let me down.
Also I host my own TS server since 2019 and never had to deal with any real problems.
Killer feature, that’d solve a lot of issues with the current experience.
Next one: teach someone born before 1999 how to deactivate channel notifications.
Normal forums have a lot of spam and moderation issues.
Do you hate them enough to pay to not have them?
There was always an alternative with IRC
Then there are specialised Discord features like forums, image boards, and other fancy pants channel configurations. I've rarely seen them used, but when they are used, I can't think of a way to replicate them without writing a separate Matrix client at the moment. Widgets are good for embedding web pages, but they can't do the specialised content layout that Discord supports these days.
All of these are frontend limitations: Matrix as a protocol supports all of this just fine.
If all you care about is text chat, Cinny seems like an excellent Discord clone. I don't think there's anything like that on mobile, though.
I'm also not sure if the audio and video channels work like Discord's, I believe these channels are rooms that you would need to be present in; I'm not sure if you can browse other channels and servers while in a call. That said, it's been a while since I last checked.
Sounds like an overreaction on my part, given the news is about something as small as ads.
At the same time it’s an intentional worsening of the UX to increase profits. It’s possible because the provider has control over user data/community. And it’s likely not the last time this is happening.
Perhaps we need more laws like in EU, so that the users could seamlessly switch between apps and communicate across platforms.
Is it good to make laws according to taste; ought we do so to help create the world we like?
The problem with the ‘world we like’ is it might not make sense economically - and will fail.
It generally better to allow even playing grounds. Our desires for what what ought to happen are often short sighted.
I'm fine with discord failing if the alternative is discord enshittifying itself while keeping user data hostage. Same applies to other platforms or products.
I guess what you're saying is that not just discord would fail but the whole network of advertisers and products that rely on them. I hope this wouldn't be as dramatic, I hope we'd find better ways to reach consumer audiences than creepy ads.
That said: you can't expect a free service to handle your streaming and file uploads without some kind of revenue stream. In my opinion, services giving away free stuff with their billions of investment should be fined, because no real company with a normal profit margin can ever compete. This approach has destroyed every market it's been successful in, from ride sharing to food delivery, yet nobody seems to care when it comes to internet hosting services, probably because the majority of users benefit from the free stuff until there is no serious competition left.
Any law against adding ads to generate revenue once a critical user base has been attained would likely turn into every website requiring a subscription, or every free tier coming with ads from the get-go. I'm not sure if the people who are mad about this will accept either.
Critical mass is important so creating something that captures market share and then turns to shit actively harms the market.
..For now. Eventually they have to figure out how to get paid.
Why?
My impression of Nitro is "incessant spamvertisement". I've never bought Nitro, spamming that shit in front of my face every chance it gets is not going to make me buy. The only reason they keep spamming me is because they want (read: need) me to buy.