Discord’s advertising push continues | Hacker News Reader

Discord’s advertising push continues

nowtoknow.com

14 pointsineluctable30 comments

Someone who was an executive at Zynga and then at Unity when they turned into spyware is in charge? How worried should I be about where Discord is going?

I think it is well past being worried and instead look to alternatives.

Remember when we used open protocols to chat and you could use whatever client you wanted?

1 to 1 comms is easy to make free.

1 to many and 1 to all is another matter entirely.

They have never been free no matter what the protocol or medium was used. If free, it has always been during market capture phase after which ppl pay one way or another.

So your choices are either pay for the pipes or get it subsidized via personal data for ads.

IRC servers were absolutely free and without ads. At most you could choose to support the network you were in through a donation.

I think it is much cheaper to run a few thousand irc servers than running discord, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp etc. How many active irc users do we have? 200k? 2mil? I don't know. But every other provider has users in the multiple millions or billions. This is not another League, this is an entirely other game.

I really want to have my old Internet back, were everything was provided for free by volunteers. But this is not the world where discord operates, discord and FAANG are dealing with the eternal September of the last two decades.

Fuck everyone else. We still have us.

IRC is still there, you can still use it if you dislike Discord. No-one is forcing you.

Reality is that IRC has so many issues (netsplit in 2025 LOL, retaining messages, lack of rich media, fragmented extensions to name a few) which is why it's not being used.

I honestly don’t remember ever using open protocols to chat, sorry.

Born in ‘97, I was too young for IRC’s height, and although I flirted with XMPP, none of my friends were there so it was just me and a handful of like-minded people I’ve met on the Internet. I think XMPP’s peak was when Facebook and Google supported it for a while, before erecting the walls.

Now there is Matrix which serves a similar niche (albeit more successfully) but doesn’t seem that interested in being a WhatsApp/iMessage replacement for casual day-to-day use. Discord and Telegram have a huge social network element to them but in my limited experience, the performance issues in the very protocol itself and/or with Element (the de-facto Matrix client) hinder its adoption.

Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great. But as the olds like me fade away nobody who remembers the open internet will be around to say what we lost :-(

> Yeah, in 1997 I was using gaim to talk to anyone I wanted on AIM, ICQ, MSN etc and it worked great.

But AIM, ICQ, MSN etc weren't open protocols either right? It was gaim/others reverse-engineering those protocols, like Pidgin [0] today.

[0] https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/

Good point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol

Though the lack of a reverse engineered Slack protocol (remember when they had an IRC bridge?) suggests companies are better at preventing this now.

Edit: apparently there's https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple at least!

Actually there was a golden age where XMPP supported Google Talk and Facebook Messenger.

This era is so full of paradoxical forces, I'm struggling to follow.

Could I interest you in everything, all of the time? https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

Timely Burnham

Yeah, it sucked.

Honestly XMPP might as well have been a false flag operation to sabotage open chat development. (I don't think it was, but the effect was the same). It sucked all the oxygen out of the open chat protocol design space, while being simultaneously too complex and extensible to allow an efficient implementation, but also too inflexible to actually adapt to new use cases (in particular it took ages for the "extensions" needed to make it not awful on phone to be adopted, sandbagging the biggest growth area at exactly the time when it might otherwise have been successful).

Out of curiosity, what were XMPP's alternatives at the time?

IRC, nothing else. All other protocols like ICQ, etc. where proprietary.

The open-source ones? I don't even remember nowadays, because they got squished under the XMPP juggernaut. I think there was one that was based off of Gadu-Gadu's protocol (may even have been basically the same protocol with just the servers switched out). But whenever someone tried to drum up support for a new open-source messenger it was always "Why not just use XMPP? It's the standard, and it's extensible, so I'm sure it can accommodate whatever features you were thinking of".

The original source is here: https://digiday.com/marketing/discords-advertising-push-cont...

nowtoknow.com has no contact info, and only has a halalboyz link in the about page. It looks like all of their articles are stolen.

I use the web version of discord because it cannot spy as much and I can block the internal ads with ublock origin.

WEI will kill that option.

Web Environment Integrity was abandoned two years ago. Do you know of any renewed efforts to reintroduce the proposal?

They have to make money somehow, unfortunately.

> Shumaker’s answer made it clear that Discord is taking steps to maintain its core identity as a gaming-centric platform

The thing is, I'm pretty sure the biggest Discord server (Midjourney) is actually not gaming-centric at all.

And I'm seeing more and more companies that are using Discord as their internal and/or external communication tool.

AFAIK, the only way to unlock power features is through Boosts. So companies that are not into gaming probably have a worker who's job is to maintain Nitro subscriptions & upgraded Boosts just to keep the server working as intended. And they must think it's stupid, since all the other software they are paying for are just a regular sub directly billed based on the level they of service they chose.

They probably already have some kind of account manager for companies like Midjourney (I can't imagine the company relying on an external tool with which they don't have a direct contract), but they could probably extend this with providing an actuall "Discord Business" offer for the big bucks; while still offering their Nitro/Ads-based offer for all the other less-serious, shallower-pockets users.

What makes you say Midjourney is the biggest one? How would you know?

According to Discord's public server list [1], Midjourney has over 21M members, making it the largest server. Discord published a technical blog post [2] detailing the infrastructure work needed to support Midjourney's unprecedented scale with 1M+ concurrent users.

[1] https://discord.com/servers [2] https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...

My mistake, I should have put the link to their public stats in the first place.

Thank you for fixing it!

As a followup, I just want to point out that I use slack at work, but it’s price per user makes it impossible to use at any non-profit, for any open source project, or simply to use with a large association of people.

I’m not sure how Discord can continue on the hopes that a few people will pay a large monthly fee and you can have this for free.

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