Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads
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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.
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What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.
It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
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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.
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Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system
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Hopefully Revolt (a Fediverse alternative to Discord) continues to improve and can completely take the place of Discord relatively soon.
Edit: it might only be FOSS, not federated. Still a promising project though.
Afaik it's a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs
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This has been tried and tried again. The first time I remember seeing this was in the '90's where a "free" dial up ISP was trying this. NetZero maybe? Didn't work then, won't work now. They'll pay out so little it won't be worth it. Don't do it kids!
I basically had an adblocker for netzero making it a free service. Was super useful for my broke teenage ass.
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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.
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)
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Happy to have folks on e2ee matrix. It supports calling directly and group voice and video chat rooms quite well IMO.
God, I just wish they'd add a fucking Push to Talk option to a client... Any client
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Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
If I care about my account, it would suck. Can't migrate unless server allows me to
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God, I just wish they'd add a fucking Push to Talk option to a client... Any client
Lol that's an absolutely fair request. Have you asked on Element github? Sounds like a Mich needed feature.
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Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.
I can't imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.
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Happy to have folks on e2ee matrix. It supports calling directly and group voice and video chat rooms quite well IMO.
Thanks for the suggestion; I'll download right away. =D
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Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave.
Because of the networking effect, people don't leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone's just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn't even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
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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."
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It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream
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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.
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Afaik it's a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs
I think you might be mistaking it with Spacebar
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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.
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Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave.
Because of the networking effect, people don't leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone's just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn't even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don't need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn't apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy
You don't need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
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Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don't need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn't apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy
You don't need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect.
Federation doesn't get around the networking effect. It inhibits the network's growth by allowing the community to fracture along instances, depending on the whims of the admins. But when one community outstrips the rest, its meaningless.
Federating mitigates the flaws of OG Mastadon, as it allows individual users to stack threads from multiple participating instances. But as soon as their native instance goes to shit, they've got to pick up a new account somewhere else and rebuild their profiles. And people - by and large - don't like doing that repeatedly.
It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else
"It takes 10 minutes to set up an account in App X" is the same line I've heard explaining why people would leave Twitter or Facebook or Reddit.
Why doesn't BlueSky have all of Twitter's business if it's so easy?
