How that MIGHT change things?
Just look at every other tech company in the space that’s gone public to see how it WILL change things. It’s not a mystery at this point.
The real question is how do you enshittify a product that is already shit?
Since when is Discord shit? Oh no, an easy to use application with incredible sound quality! Ahhhh
Anything annoying I can think of is stuff that makes a lot of sense considering said application is, for most people, 100% free.
The gamification, closed protocol and grey patterns make sense? It really doesn’t have to be that way.
That said, up to this point, Discord at least appears to have made a good faith attempt at providing a useful service while also making a profit. I suspect we’re about to see the dial crank over into “turn a profit for the next quarterly report” territory.
You don’t need to engage with the gamification thing. Closed protocol sure I guess, and also I’m sorry I don’t know what “grey partterns” are and am gunna assume that you’re not referring to the colour palette.
But it’s a solid product that largely just works. I’m still worried, obviously, that certain voluntary things will become less voluntary and things will get much more frustrating as they search to go public.
Discord is technologically lightyears ahead of their competition. Its by far the smoothest large scale chat application out there. The only “dark pattern” is them pushing Nitro and you know what users should buy nitro not free to run a service at that scale.
Let the final enshitification commence
╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:・ﾟ
Is discord not enshitty?
I open it and it updates 6 times, then I get a full page ad for nitro. Then all the settings push nitro. And all the “servers” push nitro.
It’s the best at what it does, but had been getting shitty in the way you described. However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow. I’ll put up with the nitro pushing and understand that’s my cost of doing business. If they go public, I’ll probably actively start looking for an alternative, because that always kills a product and it will for sure mean “AI” will be forced into it.
However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow.
These arguments might just give me an aneurysm.
This has let so many horrible free to play games off the hook while they literally make billions in profits and have astounding profit margins.
Discord makes money.
In a non hyper greed infested world, they could simply coast at the level of wealth they are at now, still making free money for their investors, paying their workers, and improving the service, without making peoples lives shittier.
There is no reason to justify this shit.
I agree, this is just an inexcusable reasoning that is essentially flawed. In all essence, the ads, the intrusive popups, the 1000 cookies which you have to accept and giving money to those poor billionaires is implied to be as the right thing to do - which is not.
Justifications like this is why we still have shit software lying about the web and nothing is done about it. The companies dont care about the people, and they don’t care about op. Being a suckup for a corpo will get you nowhere - in fact saying that they’re the best, is just a false narrative.
In the end that statement is essentially an oxymoron. Op is trying to justify the oppressive strategies of corpoware, while not realising that they already have info about op’s stepmother’s maiden name.
It is. Which is why I‘m baffled they didn’t go public already.
discord is one of those things i struggle to find an alternative to. not because i lack the skill to do it myself or to make something else do the same tasks, but because all my friends who aren’t as techy as me or big servers i like talking to wouldnt migrate.
having seen its decline since 2016, sooner or later ill have to make the jump but its gonna be harder than ditching google or microsoft because of the community aspect of it.
A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.
If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.
This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.
The basic maths of it just doesn’t work for any sort of bottom up action.
It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.
You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.
There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be enough as there are thousands more issues.
It will inevitably focus more on pleasing its public investors than anything else, therefore enshittification.
Maybe Steam/Valve is a unicorn, but it’s not publicly traded and it’s doing just fine.
It is a unicorn. I dread the day Gaben dies and Valve ends up going public. It feels like the last bastion of decent online services.
Valve’s margins are almost criminal as-is. They make cash hand over fist, and they’re basically a monopoly already.
…So not much might actually change, at least at first?
But this why they don’t need to go public. They have plenty of cash. And it’d just shrink the slice of profit Valve’s owners get.
Still, even private, I’m afraid of what Steam might look like if big competitors like EGS and Microsoft footgun themselves out of the market, and GoG fades away due to their DRM-free policy.
“I wish all my friends would leave discord and go to an alternative chat platform”
The monkey paw curls and all your friends move to MS Teams.
ICQ
I’m guessing this will lead to more things being locked behind their subscription model. Ransoming core features for cash is the standard template of this process.
This news comes immediately after they floated the idea of embedding AI, you say?
Pretty much immediately after yeah
Well this gives me time to start my own Mumble server now
I ran one off a raspberry pi for years before we switched to discord. It just worked for voice chat.
I genuinely do not know how that would change anything. It‘s already monetized thoroughly. They will just add even more ad campaign quests and stuff which you can ignore.
Have you not seen the world? Everything, no matter how horrific, can always get infinitely worse.
The PIF could buy it and ban gay people. Israel could buy it and persecute people against genocide. A rich right wing billionaire could buy it and force even more nazi memes upon the youth. They could make a monetized limit to how many servers one can join that is purposefully below any sane reasonable or normal level. They could make PMs pay per message.
There are infinite ways it can get worse. Infinite.
I‘m pretty sure Discord is already selling data of every single chat message to everyone. Especially secret services for prosecution. If they make it too shitty people will just migrate somewhere else and nothing of value was lost. It does not have the strong network effect of a Xitter or Youtube.
Until they lock it up where you can’t. Or they’ll decide on selling data and injecting ads into your convos or streams.
In other words this hasn’t been enshittified to the max yet at all. There are new and horrible depths to explore.
Oh, sweet summer child.
You just wait.
They can lock more features behind nitro. They can charge to run a server. They can add servers you have to pay to join. There is a ton of stuff they can do that would just make things suckier for users on the platform.
let the enshittification continue
I didn’t think Discord could get any worse!
