In my opinion, Discord has done a good job of withstanding the typical enshittification[1] of their platform. I've been using Discord for 7 years now, and while I have my complaints (poor archival functionality, video streaming can be hard to troubleshoot), it's my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to build a friendly online community.
I am deeply worried about their future because their path to profitability has always been a bit of question mark. As of this point in time, I pay for nitro namely for the higher video streaming bandwidth, and to hopefully vote with my wallet so that the platform doesn't try to squeeze more revenue out of its users in ungracious ways.
Discord's Partner program[3] seems like a good first step to assuage my concerns , but at the end of the day it puts them more closely in competition with Twitch and YouTube, since all of these platforms are basically competing for broadcast time from a small handful of entertainers with huge amounts of loyal followers willing to subject themselves to ads.
As someone who runs a fairly large community (~11k members) I think there are still a lot of low hanging fruit for monetization that can be explored. I do agree however that I am also surprised the quality hasn't taken a dip in all this time and in fact, they keep rolling out some pretty nice features (e.g. automod, welcome screening, etc.)
Mainly because MSFT’s equivalent would be Teams which is marketed to an office environment. We expect everything to be logged for corporate accountability. People get weird about trade secrets. We know MSFT has “access” but we trust that there’s a good Chinese wall in place.
But Discord is “marketed” towards gamers and we already expect everything on it to be logged/recorded/used for internal purposes.
I have different standards as a gamer than I do as a corporate cog. Like when I was a bartender -- at work I needed a $600 blender to make certain drinks. That same day at home, a $20 blender worked just fine.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadI am deeply worried about their future because their path to profitability has always been a bit of question mark. As of this point in time, I pay for nitro namely for the higher video streaming bandwidth, and to hopefully vote with my wallet so that the platform doesn't try to squeeze more revenue out of its users in ungracious ways.
Discord's Partner program[3] seems like a good first step to assuage my concerns , but at the end of the day it puts them more closely in competition with Twitch and YouTube, since all of these platforms are basically competing for broadcast time from a small handful of entertainers with huge amounts of loyal followers willing to subject themselves to ads.
1: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys 2: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20864278/discord-nitro-ga... 3: https://discord.com/partners
if Microsoft wound up buying Discord and this change happened, there would be three pages of negative comments by now.
hold everyone to the same standard, or don't claim that you have standards at all.
But Discord is “marketed” towards gamers and we already expect everything on it to be logged/recorded/used for internal purposes.
hold everyone to the same standard, or don't claim that you have standards at all.