What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.
https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...
"Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising.
The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.
Upselling is basically just unlocking additional features. If you object to that, then you're objecting to the freemium model, not to "ads".
They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests
The article that parent linked even says it.
* please drink verification can
It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.
I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?
I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...
Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.
They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.
Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.
> What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
These are the most common complaints I see from people
- They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)
- Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.
- Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )
- Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders
- Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server
- The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source
As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.
I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.
15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.
Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
But only IF you are good at regex.
On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.
I would not get more advanced than that, personally. Sure you'll have matches that aren't exactly what you're looking for, like that'd match both lines I said and lines mentioning me, and URLs that aren't images (better than trying to account for all types of image URLs, IMO) but I'll probably find what I'm looking for fast enough for it to not be worth looking up more complicated regex. Often I'll remember who posted something, too, so then maybe I'll throw their nick in the search as well, before mine. Or at least I could narrow down who posted it to a few people and just try a few searches pretty quickly back to back.
I would also say this particular search you're talking about would be fairly uncommon. I might even remember something like "oh, Bernie said that image was the funniest thing he'd seen all day, I'll search the word 'funniest' starting from the end of the file since it was under a month ago and should end up near the URL".
IRC had so much potential, but somehow we fumbled it. A simple search based on local logs and for the user hidden reg-ex could have been implemented 10+ years ago.
Maybe there are some secret incantations I don't know about, but Discord search is positively useless most of the time and I have to manually scroll up until I find what I want (or give up).
Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.