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Discord starts down the dangerous road of ads this week
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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"Choose not to engage with them..."
No. The first time I SEE an advertisement, I'm removing Discord and telling my friends to find other paths. Fuck greedy morons selling my time against my will.
Exactly! Ads are designed to force you to engage with them. Even noticing the ad at all is engaging with it, and they've got teams of psychologists figuring out how to make that second of engagement influence you.
People who dismiss the influence of advertisements seem to forget that companies wouldn't spend a combined $615 billion globally every year on something that people can just "choose" not to engage with.
Genuine question, no snark: what do you think a company like discord should do for revenue? I agree that ads suck, and selling of personal data is gross, but are there good examples out there of orgs generating revenue in an agreeable way that doesn't violate their customers while maintaining or surpassing their expenses?
they already generate revenue in an agreeable way. they have two methods of paying them: Nitro and Server Boosts. they made $440 million dollars of revenue in 2020 off this. if your business can't find a way to be sustainable off of half a billion dollars then it probably doesn't deserve to continue existing.
Right, I guess that's another approach, locking certain features behind a paywall. I guess that's less egregious than the other two options provided that users can still get a wholesome experience from a free tier.
I think most of us are just tired of the fact that these companies can run at a loss, wait until they become default by starving out the rest, and then go full throttle towards making it the worst experience possible. I have no issue with leaving discord, the part that stings is porting all of my favorite bots and members over.
Its a nice wake up call that free things don't last, or atleast are never truly free.
nothing, we should move to open, federated platforms not unlike lemmy. everyone contributes a little, thats what the internet was designed for.
even if it fell in popularity, theres a reason IRC is still very much alive, going and ad-free.
And how has the Lemmy thing worked out? Seems Reddit didn't even notice the people fleeing and most have gone back as the engagement here has dropped alot.
it will take time. the digg > reddit transition took a while too.
in the meantime its much better here imo
Would you pay for Discord? That is the problem everyone thinks everything is free but running stuff costs money.
I've paid for Discord Nitro for at least a few years now. Primarily I wanted to do my part to stave off exactly this sort of thing.
This feels bad. I don't like this whatsoever.
I paid and still get peppered with their promotion. So I stopped paying, then if it gets worse I will uninstall and use the web app as you can block elements with the ad blockers. (so even site hosted stuff you can single out elements to block. )
edit: yeah, unfortunately I can't really just stop using it entirely, until my regular group server and some of the game's server move somewhere else.
I'm donating 5€/month to Signal because as far as I'm concerned they're doing good work.
I wouldn't pay for Discord.
I don't have to pay to use Matrix/Element.
Also, how much money? Their entire purpose is to maximize profit. It's not about keeping the lights on.
Sucks because yeah, we're now used to being on Discord by default. Makes me miss the TeamSpeak/Ventrilo days.
holy shit, it's still around
https://www.ventrilo.com/
Same with teamspeak
https://www.teamspeak.com/en/
I remember hosting a TS2 server back in the day on my home linux server. Unlimited slots (based on how much/little of my internet I wanted for myself) for free. The windows version was not so much (limited slots). Then TS3 came out and it was not so nice on linux
I am in 25+ Discord servers for various topics/projects, and sure speaking to friends is one of them and we could migrate away, but that's about 5% of my Discord usage. What am I supposed to do about all the others? I don't have a choice in what platform a given thing has chosen to use. Sure I can just refuse to use it, but then I'm just cut off from the communities I'm part of, which is a much worse outcome.
So what's the solution? "Just delete Discord, and with it half of your social life" doesn't sound great. I would love for everyone to migrate away, but they aren't.
Don't choose to be a victim just because they've managed to tie a carrot on a stick.
All ears for your solution.
I mean, it is a free service that costs you nothing so they have to cover their costs somehow
I'm a developer and see their stories about moving databases and it's quite cumbersome at their scale. So there are real costs and covering those costs aren't always easy. Most people don't want to pay. Not sure what the alternative is either.