Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

And the enshittification continues.

But the sooner Electron dies the better, there is literally only one Electron based program that works well and that is VS Code, but you've got to blame Microsoft for being so incompetent that they never even set the standard for a desktop UI after years of monopoly that people turned to just mushing Chrome into a box.

There was a time where about 70% of the apps I ran on my Windows machine were written in GTK, and that was long before I even touched Linux.
- Ahhh GTK and Qt! The true cross-platform experience! This brings back some cozy memories
I really like Trilium Notes as a Joplin/Obsidian alternative!
I don't know if this really is as harmful an enshiftification as we've come to expect from other projects, it mainly seems to be allowing you to have a "patreon" or "gumroad" type project tied to your actual community. There's an argument that the centralization is harmful in the long run when everything goes belly-up but this move in a vacuum seems like a logical next step for Discord itself

honestly as long as the stuff that discord is monetizing stays additive instead of changing services we already use to be paid-for, I really don't mind if discord gives creators (and, by way of that, themselves) ways to generate revenue. Discord, even as a completely free service, is really far ahead of other similar platforms and offerings. I don't expect them to be 100% consumer-first at the expense of generating profits (as much as i wish it were feasible for them to be), but the ways in which they've done that so far have been surprisingly unobtrusive.

I was boosting my server so everyone could use animated emojis. Thing is, people now have to be Nitro subscriber to use them. There has been no warning. I really don’t like those manners of making things that once were "free" premium features.
- animated emojis were never under server boosting as far as I know? I can't think of a feature that Discord has made paid that was once free outside of trial periods... ever (with the possible exception of gamewisp emojis which I believe we should discount)
undefined> honestly as long as the stuff that discord is monetizing stays additive instead of changing services we already use to be paid-for,

Narrator: "The microtransactions did not, in fact, remain only additive."

It never does. Greed always wins. And we will once again be left hopping ship to another platform.
- Sure, and when that day comes I'm there to criticize discord for it. But, given they need to make money (they have to, they don't have the option to just operate at a loss for the rest of time), it's worth acknowledging their attempts to make money without infringing on the service the users actually signed up for.
Back in the day Discord's advantage was that it provided a way for people to set up a voice communication server with push-to-talk without any technical knowledge and for free. I don't know how they're ahead of competition now.. I don't know what their killer features are.

I use it occasionally but there are a few problems that always drive me away . 1) I have muted all the servers but I still get occasional sound notifications and just cannot find any source for them, might be a bug 2) there is no global notification history. To me that seems like a must-have feature and I don't know how people stand to use discord without it 3) ui feels very clunky. To me it seems like I spend way too much time navigating through the ui and searching for things. For example, scrolling through the servers and trying to remember which icon was which. Anyway, I would be interested in hearing why people do use it besides everybody being there.
- 1 is definitely a bug, I'm in like 50 servers and I don't have that happen like ever. 3 I can't dispute, but I think that's largely because they've increased their feature set for different kinds of users faster than their UI team has been able to accommodate for them. Better sorting for servers would be amazing
  
  2, there definitely is. On mobile it's the bell icon at the bottom when you pull out the sidebar, on desktop it's the icon that looks like a desk tray at the top right, they let you see notifications either from the active server or globally, so idk what you mean.

Or, get ready for an influx of fediverse users on Matrix?

Personally, I see Revolt as more likely to win out if/when Discord collapses than Matrix. I've only heard Matrix discussed on platforms within the fediverse, whereas Revolt I've heard some rumblings about by others who haven't touched anything like Mastodon or Lemmy/Kbin in their lives.

Either way, I'd be glad to see more FOSS win out over yet capital controlled social media.

I never got the appeal of Discord anyway, after a while it simply becomes a dump of notifications that I cannot follow up on.

To some extent Discord servers have replaced forums and now you have to try to search through a chat room's history to find out info instead of using a forum. Seems like a pretty big downgrade.
- why not just use forums for questions
I'm in a couple of small Discords that were set up for my local circles of friends, for coordinating our RPG sessions and general hangout stuff. Those are good.

I've tried joining some of the big Discords for various games and other big topics, and those have basically been useless. I never think to go check them, and when I do it's just a big blob of useless text.
You can mute servers or chat channels inside servers. People like it because it is nice looking, has all their favourite emojis and gif memes. And decent voice chat.
- I have them muted, but it always feels overwhelming for me to catch up with servers I try to follow. The information is either not structured at all, or too structured/scattered that you won't find anything useful anymore. I myself indeed use it for voice when playing some games, but it is in no way a replacement for a chatroom or forum, it is in my opinion too chaotic for that.
- It's also one of the better instant messaging applications, and it's great for community interactions.
I agree, even if it is much more active and has quite good ways to catch up on past conversation, the notifications and various icons and unusable emoticons make it feel bloated.

And people wonder why I prefer forums. The "Discordifcation" of everything is out of control.

I hear ya. The problem is, they're a dying breed, a few users active here and there, that's about it.

The last feature I liked from Discord was screensharing. Everything else since has been useless or outright terrible.

i honestly do not care about having the option to pay for things

i consider the quality of a platform as if monetised features dont exist, and discord is still a pretty solid platform besides them

if they start monetising existing features, sure, that effectively removes features, but until then getting mad at things that simply do not affect me is silly

To the surprise of no one lol.

No one has figured out how to reach FAANG market cap through subscriptions yet. I would be shocked if Discord was anywhere close to profitable.

@Fallstar So... Is it now a competition about who commits suicide first?

Maybe. Hopefully, not everyone is a moron