Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform

I've grown with ICQ, MSN Messenger, TeamSpeak, Skype, several local chat apps, then people obsessed with Facebook Messenger, then Snapchat... I just know any particular chatting app is a temporary fad that will eventually end, it's just their cycle. Don't get attached to them.

Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn't be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don't hide your support behind a platform that can't be searched from the web. It's not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.

Remember the emails from 2015? The plan was to have a platform, that just works. No bullshit, no issues, just functional features.

Even when Nitro was originally added, it was 5 bucks to optional support, if you'd like to help the company. Now the same sub is 10 a month, and half of the client is unusable without it.

Not to mention all the paid account banners and borders they're selling for an egregious amount of money

.. and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.

Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn't start earlier.

This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix

Good move discord, I like it

Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.

The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord.

So they're still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.

I’m shocked they’re moving to ads when I’ve been paying them $4/month for Discord Nitro for several years now. Surely, that revenue is enough for their upkeep???

I never ever understood and still doesn't understand why people like Discord. It's not indexed, it's a constant background noise. It's absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.

They also are forcing US users into arbitration unless you opt out by May 15th by emailing arbitration-opt-out@discord.com, so you can't sue them. This is similar to LG with their compressor fiasco in their fridges where they put arbitration agreement crap on the box.

I'm afraid that every generation runs into this and learns the hard way. Discord isn't the first and won't be the last. The moment someone wants to become profitable, all bets are off.

They're going full Microsoft Skype mode

And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.

Neo, Matrix is calling

Quests will show up tastefully in Discord where you can opt-in to stream your game to friends and win rewards for playing.

Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.

Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can't die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.

Sincerely hope this will be the beginning of a D-Exodus, and that all those open source projects who made the choice to only use Discord for community communication will move to something which is search engine friendly for searching for answers.

In 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/

mmmm, i hate discord, anybody have any good self hosted recommendations? Preferably, fully featured, or featureful, and not some random garb.

Flirting with matrix, the concept fucks. I just haven't gotten around to doing anything with it yet. I know there area few others, like revolt, which is kind of a mess, and various others in the same category.

I'm down to distributed social networks and irc.

I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I'm just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.

I'm kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general "real time" transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.

Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it's terrible.

This is the future!

10 years from now....

I needed to go 💩 poop and I had to wait for a Home Depot ad before I could open the lid. I flushed but I had to learn about Spandex hot pants before the water rushed down.

Imagine using discord without Vencord, I'm sure someone will add a plug-in to remove all its crap at least I hope so, it already has some really good ones that give you access to free nitro bs.

At worst, I could just use Discord in Firefox and block the ads.

I've been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord's format.

In the past month I noticed ads inside Viber desktop (it's used a lot here, instead of WhatsApp)

Later I got a call from a friend that his windows defender picked up a trojan in Viber files.. Next day I got it too.

I shit you not, they let out an update with malware, on a popular chat app. I uninstalled and got the next update, with blind trust, I can't migrate atm...

Well, that's what you get for letting a private company replace and open protocol with a proprietary solution because it's easier to use and has some cute emojis.

Not related to the article itself, but I'm curious why use of archive.is has become so popular around here considering that they refuse to provide DNS replies without edns personal information attached? I'm not familiar with the politics involved, but a lot of DNS providers are getting blocked by archive.is for not providing that info, including my own home DNS server and cloud flare 1.1.1.1 and many others, so I'm surprised to see it gaining popularity on Lemmy.

how do you get more money out of a product once you reach a point where anyone who will ever use it is already using it?

less money out, more money in, which is to say you make it shittier and more expensive. Remember, you're only as good as your most recent revenue change.

Been happily off discord ever since the CEO's disastrous, anti-encryption speech at the "Protecting Children Online" hearing. Evil little dude, that guy is.

https://revolt.chat/ Cope, but would be good for this to become a thing.

It was either that or they start charging. They're gonna piss people of either way but at least it's still free.

I just noticed this today.. I barely even use discord. Now I really don't like it.

Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.

Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.

Vote with your feet. Have to leave the platform if you want to stick it to them.

Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It's totally understandable.

This is why I set my server up to mirror to a Revolt server (we're an rp server)

Eventually, folks will want to move, some will say, "But all our posts", and I can go, "Good news!"

I get so tired of this "servers are expensive" cycle. Anyone know of a good P2P alternative? No servers, no ads, no subscriptions.

Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?

Anyone tried revolt.chat?

Discord was 1st wave . It’s always been a terrible choice.

we probably need to build it ourselves.

A federated, decentralized system that you can either self-host or join the servers of others, even better if we can offer to donate bandwidth, hosting, and processing power to servers we join in order to distribute the operational strain.

Same as it ever was.

Good. I hate how it became essentially the default

*its free

"free"

Makes me miss Xfire. Feature-rich, customizeable, great quality, overlay feature that didn't suck, no bullshit. It was orders of magnitude better than Discord ever was.

...but not popular outside of gaming; and ofc the other big tech companies litigated the fuck out of it, so it never really took off and now it's gone. Boooooooo

What do the Lemmings recommend as a replacement for discord?

I'm happy to revert back to teamspeak if need be, I heard it's app recently got an overhaul (or at the very least a facelift).

I'm disgusted (though not shocked, I fucking called it years ago), that discord would go down this rabbit hole being that their main demographic is gamers. The stats are in, gamers (among every other living being) hates ads.

In fact, I pay for YT music because I think it's good value, but ive never once had YT premium, and I haven't seen an ad on their site for close to a decade now. (Still no pihole, that's likely next).

To circle back, if possible Lemmings, I would like to find a discord replacement that my folks would be willing to install/try out. I've got a couple people who have said "hey man, find a better spot and we'll tag along", however I have yet to find a suitable replacement on my own time.

Matrix works pretty good.

At least it is not "Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it's fediverse platform"

Okay, I was expecting something a lot worse than what the article describes. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but at least these ads seem somewhat topical and also give tangible rewards for doing something that you might do already anyway (stream a game to a couple of friends in a private Discord server). Maybe I'm misinterpreting the change, but this doesn't seem that bad?

I'm not sure what everyone's hangup is about Discord. My group that I play video games with swapped over to Discord from Skype years ago and it's still a good experience. You want to hear about enshittification? Just look at what they did to Skype over the years. That platform is completely unusable now.

I doubt Discord will remain totally useable forever, but at least there are budding alternatives out there that might be able to carry the torch if Discord can't continue it's freemium service. One that I've tried in the past is Guilded and they are sort of like a Discord clone if you really want the same general user experience - pseudoforum live chat with VOIP lobbies, streaming capabilities, etc. I tried it out and it was fine but not worth swapping everyone on our Discord server to the new one since it wasn't substantially different or better in any way.

Well I am finally ahead of the curve. I mostly stopped using discord after I learned of their horrible privacy practices and braindead statements on e2e encryption.

Long live Matrix!

its free

https://github.com/Discord-Client-Encyclopedia-Management/Discord3rdparties

on its* free platform

Well I guess its done its job for the US Government. Funding has obviously stopped.

Feels good to never have used it lol

skype > discord