They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
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.
Same here. I’m just surprised at how well Signal is holding up.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to get people to switch to it
And they didn’t make it any easier by removing SMS support from the mobile app.
It was pretty easy to get a couple of my friends to switch by saying it’s just another SMS client that also supports highly encrypted messaging with other people that use Signal. Now that it’s standalone, nobody will even fucking touch it.
which is weird, I don’t know any other country that still uses SMS other than the usa, for chatting.
it’s for 2FA from banks (which are now switching to authenticator apps) and bulk scams mostly that I can see.
Canada. Now you know two! Granted, we are basically the 51st state at this point…
America’s hat/touk!
I use sms quite a lot when network conditions are bad… with poor service (rural areas) or heavy congestion (sport events) SMS messages piggybacking on voice channels often stand a better chance of getting through than anything that requires an Internet data connection on 4G. That said I do have unusual use cases, the other 99% of the time normal messaging apps work fine.
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
“preinstalled”. lol.
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.
Yeah I got rid of Signal when they got rid of SMS because literally nobody I’ve ever met uses it and they’re not gonna switch.
It’s unfortunate, I had just gotten a few people to take it up… but that progress is lost. People prefer convenience over all else and having to use 2 different primary message apps sucks.
If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…
door opening sound knock knock
I can still sometimes “hear” ICQ, and that’s going on almost 30 years ago now?
I still have the “uh oh” sound - use it on my phone for notifications.
Same, however, I keep my phone on vibrate so I never actually hear it.
I hear you! 🤣
I so want a smart “watch” just for subtle notifications, with vibration patterns that can be configured.
I’d even pay for an Apple device, if it could be made to work well.
Oh, and it needs a battery that can last 3 days at least, preferably a week.
I can still recite my ICQ number off the top of my head
63094052 add me A/S/L?
And then you wonder WTF you want my age, sex, and location.
I remember mine, and my childhood best friend’s Prodigy account IDs.
Okay, now you guys are making me miss CompuServe.
Big spenders here, NetZero crowd checking in.
Always kept the Netzero around, but the best were the fly-by-nights who were sure they could run a successful business without Juno or Netzero’s investment or technical debt by just asking you to pretty-please use their site as your home page.
Well, “best” for as long as they lasted.
Ha, same. Best thing I can do for my social security number is “That looks about right”.
39148895 add me plz
Mine is 6 digits long and I remember it too. The whiteboard function was particularly fun.
Uh oh!
Oh yeah, I’ve been through the same. Discord was nice while it lasted.
TS and Matrix will hopefully be the replacements I use if I can get people to switch. A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though, which I’m sure they’re banking on to maintain momentum as the service quality continues to degrade.
A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though,
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
As a casual user I find the entrenched communities more of a bug than a feature. Reminds me of reddit cliques. But, I do get your point, and I agree that the inertia will be a challenge when it comes to getting groups to migrate.
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
Sir IRC is still going strong!
The difference is you’re not relying on one corp with IRC.
Hello twin!
In Matrix we trust
One will stick once it’s sensible
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
Everyone is optimistically altruistic until the corporate greed comes a-knockin’
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
And regardless, you’re going to end up being the product if they can discern anything marketable about you from your use of the “free” product.
But just be ready to jump to the next free product.
(Obviously it’s possible for there to be FOSS but that comes with some challenges as well.)
Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
The 3rd option is FOSS with donations… But everyone expects everything on the internet to be free (as in beer) these days
Nothing is truly free/gratis…
It all comes down to capabilities, and expectations. Under current circumstances, they fail to meet the expectations, but vastly exceeded their capabilities, by trying to chase the hype, rather than provide what the users needed. It costs them next to nothing to create a new profile border, but fixing issues from 2019 takes engineer hours
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
It will become enshittified unless that new service is open source and “free as in beer”. With no profit motive, it can grow gradually and be supported by it’s users. Like Lemmy/ kbin / Mastodon.
Lemmy’s development is to a large part subsidized by some kind of OSS fund.
That’s fine. Probably not venture capitalists that need paid back.
a word to rebut this claim: Wikipedia.
The Post office should host community webservices. This is our internet.
I don’t get why micro transaction are never micro transactions. If a cosmetic item/feature in a game or sth. like discord would be 50ct up to a Euro, I would here and there buy sth. But they always want 5-15€ and that isn’t money I’m willing to spend. Take Signal for example 5 € for a badge for 30 days is just stupid. I recently donated 20 euros still 30 days. The thing is I don’t care for the badge but I think it could be beneficial to promote the ability to donate via the badge but the system they use, is really stupid.
I think the reason they’re not micro has to do with whales. I bet the whales outbuy normies at a rate that means companies make more selling 1/10th the volume, for 20x the price. The whales go hard. Did you hear that some games will task an artist with creating game-skins for a single person, because they know they can get that person to buy even at a really high price
it’s also about sustainable income. 50c one time purchases are garbage for the bottom line, subscriptions look amazing to investors because it’s effectively guaranteed income that you can assume a current subscriber will remain subscribed until the service shuts down.
Think you’re right.
Founders get told:
Raise your prices. Push them up 2-3x or something, and lose 10% of your customers. Those you lose are generally your worst ones. Huge net win.
a big part of the issue with micro-transactions are the payment processors.
visa and MasterCard basically own it, at some part of the process.
Genuine question, but what’s unusable without Nitro? I don’t use Discord very often, and the only thing that I’ve seen Nitro pushed for is reactions from other communities, and that’s pointless anyway.
video calls and screensharing is very, very rough (locked to 480/low frame rates) without nitro, for one. the file sharing limits are also extremely restrictive.
its actually locked to 720p/30fps w/o nitro
with some of the worst realtime compression i have ever seen
i agree, but you cant just lie to make a point
Fair enough. I tried video calling with it at the beginning of the first lockdown, and it was fine for what I needed, but most of the video calling programs were a bit rubbish then.
I very rarely share files with people outside of an already set up organisation, so I haven’t had a reason to try their file sharing.
Vencord is pretty decent as an alternative to nitro if you haven’t heard of it. It pretty much is a modded client that unlocks most of the nitro locked features
I use Vesktop for other mods. Not touching the paywalled stuff because I don’t want to put my account at risk more, than I need to
deleted by creator
I’m actually not sure about modded clients for android/iOS, maybe someone in this thread knows of one.
… 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.
Deffo waiting for lots of people to be on it before turning up that dial.
Seems to be the standard silicon valley business model these days. The old “drug dealer outside school giving away free samples to get you hooked” we all heard about but never saw.
But they also have monetization streams. Nitro. Boosts. Paying for servers. In essence a small number of users pay the costs to keep a server going.
They tried their best to make Nitro succeed first before turning to other methods of making money.
The paradoxical demand of ever growing profits made this unavoidable anyways.
To a degree, yes. But a non-public company doesn’t usually have that “obligation” for ever-growing profit. Unfortunately, Discord’s goal does seem to be to eventually get an IPO.
Which to me shows why enshittification is so closely tied to austerity and economic downturn. For example I have a buddy who bought Discord Nitro whenever he could. But he recently got laid off and of course that was the first monthly expense he cut.
I personally don’t like it and I don’t use it too much, but since its features, I don’t see how we can complain: nothing is free, they sure have costs
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.
Yup, also my experience. Maybe Jabber. Jabber was great.
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere…
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It’s a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
Several messaging services that started on PCs already had mobile apps when Whatsapp got big so there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
But all those you listed weren’t available internationally I believe. Atleast in the US, ask anyone who came to work how they keep in touch with people back home, and they’ll likely say whatsapp.
Skype certainly was. It would make an interesting case study - what drove adoption when there were established competitors with more resources?
Phone numbers, phone apps and the international market. Skype was in a lot of places only popular for business, Whatsapp was everyone’s very first doorway into a modern messenger app.
there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.
For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history
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???
It’s never enough. Growth must be un-ending. Also gotta pump them numbers up for an IPO so they can bail with a pocket full of cash.
It’s like how Netflix ended the basic no-ads plan to force people to either pay way more or pay a little less but be bombarded with ads. Serving ads is more profitable than letting people pay a little bit to skip them, apparently.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
I assume that’s sarcasm, but no, they almost certainly aren’t anywhere near probably from nitro subscriptions. I don’t know how many employees they have, but they surely have a lot of developers working on all their features. And that cloud server time isn’t cheap either, especially when you’re handling video.
They could have stopped adding features years ago.
There’s some weird corporate obsession with always constantly “innovating” and “improving”. Adding complexity for the sake of complexity. Completely blind and oblivious to the fact that most consumers actually want something consistent that just does what they ask it to without much fuss, not just additional complexity.
Discord has added probably a hundred features since I started using it- ultimately, the only things I ever touch in the app are the same set of 5 that existed back in 2015 when I switched. Text, voice, basic file and image sharing, group servers, and (after they added it) video+screen sharing. Literally everything else is total fluff.
Yup, it’s sometimes called box-checking. “Look boss, I did a thing.”
Often a thing nobody wanted or asked for.
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
$4 is probably way more than enough to cover the cost of your account, but the problem is what percentage of people are paying. If it’s 1 in 100 or 1,000 and $4 covers 75 average accounts they might be in a bind.
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.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it’s perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it’s always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it’s fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
Some people are downvoting you but you’re right. No other application is this all in one package. My only issues with input devices have been Windows’ fault, too. I don’t like Discord’s closed ecosystem and data privacy concerns, but the feature set is unmatched, especially at the amount of polish they have and their price.
Side note, people please stop using it as an alternative to a proper forum.
Thanks for the point about the forums. I get why people use Discord: the things it is designed for it does reasonably well. The problem is people using it in ways it isn’t made for, like forums or wikis. If your documentation, issue tracking, or patch notes are done via Discord, please stop for fuck’s sake. There are much better options for this and you can even webhook them into Discord if you insist on it, but stop using Discord to replace forums.
Also also the voice codec is (or at least was) a noticable improvement over anything that was available for free.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is “everyone else is using it”. Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It’s hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
Or does it make it easier to distance yourself from those who eat that garbage up? If you value privacy, are you willing to throw it away for someone else?
All my friends are on discord, if I’m not on discord I can’t really talk to them.
You’re basically going wHy dOnT yOu jUsT cuT oFf YoUr FrIenDs
Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.
Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.
And how is that going to help if you’re the only one in the friends group that uses Matrix? Your messages still end up on discord and half the features won’t work. What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?
You will be the only one at first.
What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?
If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.
If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.
So what features do these bridges support? Does voice chat work? Can I share screen through them? Can I upload attachments?
I would love to switch to something open source, but communication with other people usually has to have the same thing on both ends.
Discord won because it offered more than mumble/teamspeak and did more and better than skype at the time and looks like even to this day. It’s even better than slack and teams when it comes to resource usage.
I don’t want to self host a bunch of shit and spend a week troubleshooting stuff, no one wants to do that.
edit: plus that way you’re still literally just using discord through a different UI, what’s the point of it anyway
there’s literally one person I ever knew that used Matrix and they fucking sucked
You don’t need to self host, there are servers that do this for you
One person used Matrix and they sucked.
Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It’s like girls who say they don’t date anyone who uses Android.
Rossman Repair moved their main group over to Matrix. There are people making the jump.
Or maybe he’s saying your friends are garbage eaters. Or at least content to chow down.
Holy fucking shit please touch at least 1 (one) singular blade of grass I beg you motherfuckers
I don’t know anyone who’s used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn’t indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
I still use it occasionally. It’s primarily used for smaller, more private communities, but Wikipedia also hosts official IRC rooms, too. I don’t know of any other major companies that use IRC in an official capacity, though.
The alternatives at the time were steam voice chat or Skype, and both were awful to use.
Unless IRC has changed drastically in recent years, or maybe people are using proprietary extensions, it only supports a fraction of the features discord does.
The reason why gamers pivoted to discord is it was irc, team speak, and Skype in one platform that just worked
The sheer amount of features and stability.
IRC doesn’t have sub-channels AFAIK. Also no image support, search, video-conferencing, etc.
Comparing Discord to IRC is like comparing playing tennis to baking a cake. Just two entirely different things.
The usual answer is “people are stupid”, which can’t be true - people spend lots of effort to be less stupid, and when interacting with those people in unusual and unexpected ways you might find out they are much smarter than they seem.
The correct answer is that people don’t know what they can do with computers. So they accept any bullshit.
Stupid, no. Lazy, absolutely.
More stimuli means more being done with the same lazy person.
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 am so happy there is no other country where this bullshit is legal
What should I put in the opt out email?
“get fucked! Best regards <username>”
Wait what? Can I get a link to read more about this?
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.
I guess that with discord (and many other non-foss free projects) the problem is that they start as free and then wanted to start to make money at a later stage.
For-profit software and companies are not necessarily bad, but they are bad when they take their existing software and start radically changing it for the sake of making more money.
If for example discord always had some features just for Nitro users and others for everyone, and those features (and the nitro price) would have always stayed the same it would have been much better
is that they start as free and then
wanted to start to make money at a later stage.*run out of VC capital and find themselves in a cash crunchEvery free service is built on the back of free money given out by the fed over the last 20 years in terms of near-zero percent central bank interest rates. Interest rates are up which means the VC faucets are closed. Users now need to pick up the massive debt tabs and they’re gonna get ass fucked ten ways from Sunday to do it.
Just a reminder that FOSS and for-profit are not mutually exclusive. Your FOSS product can be free (as in free speech, not free beer), but cost money to acquire (although once bought, you could redistribute it as much as you like, for any price you like).
Yep it happened to Skype and slack.
And team speak too…
Teamspeak never died. It’s always had a fairly dedicated core userbase, but it’s inability to video chat/screenshare and the need to self host puts off most everyday users from getting onto it.
it’s arguably WAY better for actual video game voice chat though. faster, higher quality, less resource intensive.
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
Neo, Matrix is calling
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can’t die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won’t care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000’s of people keep coming back again and again.