Leave Zenyatta alone, Discord >:(
Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.
americans LOVE enshittifications.
What a funny coincidence that I’ve heard about this discord alternative in a post just a couple before this one in feed.
Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:
Startup - Geeks are in charge and you’re creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you’re gamifying ad clicks.🤢
They truly have zero clue how users actually use their software. Not a single person is going to use this just like every other stupid gimmick feature they’ve added in the past and then promptly removed.
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
Part of that is because ads that are enjoyable and for things people enjoy often don’t even register as ads to people. When people think of ads they typically think of unwanted distractions for things they don’t want. They don’t necessarily think of something like a free sticker for their favorite video game given to them at s convention. They may even put it on something like a laptop or water bottle. The same people may say they “hate ads”.
I’m not trying to throw shade on those people, I think pretty much everyone is going to be accepting of at least some type of hypothetical thing that’s enjoyable and/or useful to them. A prime exam is having a business listed in a directory. Someone mentioned that as an alternative to advertising as if companies don’t pay to put their names in those directories.
None of this is meant to be any sort of criticism against anyone based on what they do or don’t view as an ad, I’m just trying to help explain why, at least some of the time, it seems “people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads.”
I swear they are soulless NPCs put on this earth by demons to torture us.
I told my sister she can use an adblock to block ads while she’s browsing. She said “why would i want to do that, ads show me what to buy” she loves personalised ads and the idea that all her interests are being track so she can be served relevant ads.
I’m obsessed with this xkcd because it eloquently explains something I’ve been trying to explain to my techs (I’m a director of IT) and my more techy friends.
Its not that most people like the ads (although personalized ads are really nice), it’s that most people legitimately don’t give a shit. Nobody really cares that PC gaming is “better”, or Linux is “better”, or building your own PC is “better” except the turbo nerds like us (and yes, im including you kind reader as you are on Lemmy)
The bigger servers i am in always have someone “boosting” it.
I close every popup, ad, and whatnot. Read nothing, join my voice channel and talk with friends.
Discord has no features imo but voice and text. Everything else is useless and not needed. I will never give them a dime. No point.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
People actually use the shop. they are spending $10-20 on a profile picture border. Now you are telling them that they can get them for “free”? You bet people will do it. Paid cosmetics have poisoned minds.
I always lose respect for someone when I see they gave money to discord.
Ehhhh I see people with Nitro-included cosmetics but not a lot that have the individually-purchased cosmetics. They exist, sure, but not even close to as many.
I mod a server with 40,000 users and I’m scrolling through the member list as I type this. Majority are either unsubbed accounts or they have the cheap basic Nitro. A lot of the cosmetics I am seeing are the free ones they’ve given away in recent events. Not many users have full Nitro and have their profiles all decked out with additional cosmetics.
I have the “touch grass” one from April Fool’s day. It’s pretty funny.
I paid $30 for a year of Nitro basic. I don’t think I’ll do it again. All the actually useful features for me (longer messages and bigger uploads) are behind the more expensive one, and it’s not worth it.
I see some servers with hardly any, some with lots, the cat ears are popular. It depends on the communities you look in. Obviously the majority use Discord completely free, but there’s a significant amount of Nitro subscribers and a good portion of them are also buying things in the shop.
Yeah, Discord whales exist. Some people are REALLY proud of their profiles.
The thing is I’d much rather they do things like this, where the ads are opt in and the monetized features are mostly just extra for if you are enjoying the platform, than something like introducing ads you have to pay to remove or locking core features behind a paywall.
Oooh yeah, dust off the hotline auto clickers.
The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.
Wel there goes my discord account. Bye you won’t be missed
Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you’re doing.
“please ponder your verification orb”
Nah, switching takes time. Better start now.
The end is coming
How do I bot this so I don’t see the ads and get free nitro so ads are removed?
No need, use discord canary.
How in the hell has that app gone so far down? This must be a record in enshittification.
I warned my friends that Discord is looking to go public. Just wait, it’s going to get a lot worse.
I don’t know if you saw the news last month but Discord just replaced a founder with a former Activision-Blizzard exec as CEO.
Well that fucking sucks.
Yeah, di$cord has definitely been speedrunning the deterioration of their platform.
It’s a shame because they started as a darling of the gaming community with a lot of loyalty when people were switching to micro$hit like $lack and team$.
I guess capitalism and endless growth don’t actual translate to improved products for the rest of us. Go figure.
It’ll be nice when our species moves to decentralized platforms like Matrix, but every day we wait is another day I don’t get to enjoy it.
Well they changed CEOs a month ago
It’s over
We’ve never reached levels of Joever this high and Biden stopped being President in January, so you know its bad.
Mark my words, any free service that hosts images is on the cycle. I saw it happen to Reddit and Imgur
Promising to host everyone’s data for free forever is a promise that only a devil at a crossroads can make
Don’t forget to tip your instance admins!
Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.
I’ve never used Discord – is it similar to Mumble? I tried Jami but found it too unreliable to recommend. What about Nextcloud Chat? I do use that though it is kind of clumsy.
Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they’re being worked on.
Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there’s Mumble.
For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)
I use Jitsi for my voip / screen share
Works great if you don’t want/need PTT.
That’s what we’ve started using my friends and I, can’t complain, sure it doesn’t integrate all the gaming shit but we just have it running in the background so we can talk anyway
Yeah, I’ve done the same and it works quite well.
The only thing I was really missing from Discord was Ai noise cancellation like Krisp - and I got that by installing Easy Effects
Seems like you have to keep something running for it to work. Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working. Though it would help so much if it would be p2p.
“something running” - do you mean the server binary? Because, yes, if you’re using your own server you do need it to be running. Same for the client, I guess? I guess I don’t really understand what you meant by that.
Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working.
That’s an issue with any federated service, yeah. If the server is down, it’s down. But as a bonus, unlike Discord, when a server is down you can just move to another. So, honestly, I see that as a boon.
As far as p2p goes, there was an effort to make that a while back, but it looks like people lost interest.
Though, personally I think federation is good enough. That’s why I’m on Lemmy/the Fediverse, after all.
I only mean that the requirements are high enough for someone to stop using it at some point, losing users of that server in the process. It might be different if it didn’t require running a server. Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
I mean, that’s sort of the point, right? Don’t host unless you want to.
There are lots of great, long lasting servers with open registration out there. This blog post has some good examples:
Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
i self host matrix and some other docker runs the voice for it, so it is there if you got a server. which i mean, not everybody does so that sucks. it was a bit of a pain but im not the best at server stuff
Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.
yeah you could all pitch in and get one hosted on a server farm somewhere. hard to beat free fitty tho. ive got friends who wanna stay on discord too so im still on it. as long as its free. mostly did the matrix thing to move family chats off off whatsapp. only used whatsapp bc ios sucks about sharing full quality pics and videos with non ios.
i say all of that bc i didnt host it to move from discord, but now that its up i got an easy out if discord goes all in on enshittification
This is outdated and no longer preferred, it now has its own internal system called Element Call (aka an implementation of MatrixRTC).
i use coturn for voice on mine
I meant for video. The classic coturn connection is fine for voice - though I wish it had push to talk. 🥲
Technically speaking, Element does have “voice and video rooms” available as an experimental feature, but until it’s out of prime time it totally makes sense to wait.
Gotta remember that Element/New Vector (the company spearheading Matrix’s development) is getting funded mostly by orgs who are looking for a replacement for internal comms like Slack or WhatsApp.
Fuck this shit.
🤢🤮
You know, I’ve seen this image at least 15 years ago and thought it was a joke.
Now that I’m older now, I’m guessing this is an actual diagram for implementing and perhaps patenting interactive commercials?
We literally reward people in our society for being as shitty as possible. Can we stop doing that?
Yes, this is real.
I’m waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn’t start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through
And the ad is like my dead mom selling me dick pills
