Discord To Start Showing Ads This Week After History of Shunning Them (pymnts.com) 70
Starting this week, Discord will show ads on the site from video game companies, some of which will offer users gifts for carrying out in-game tasks. According to the Wall Street Journal, Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings. From a report: The sources said Discord aims to hire more than a dozen ad sales people. WSJ said the addition of ads marks a pivot for Discord, whose CEO Jason Citron has repeatedly said the company would not rely on advertisers the way platforms like Facebook and Instagram do.
The second... (Score:4, Informative)
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It sounds like you're sending funds to 3rd parties only. I think the issue here is the Discord company isn't getting a taste of your revenue. It's unfortunate that their business model was not designed to make money from the outset. Having a "no ads" philosophy is nice an all, but being a tech company apparently means you need to offer a free product and hope someday you can monetize it; no one who is successful today in tech used a different business model, even Amazon offered free shipping. I too wish the
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Re:The second... (Score:4, Informative)
Matrix exists, and the main reason it hasn't really caught up is because discord sucked up all the bot developers.
Re:The second... (Score:5, Interesting)
Matrix is slower than old people on a Royal Caribbean Cruise fuck. It's HTTP + JSON nature is insanely bandwidth hungry. Even with the new lazy load state added with v2, the protocol just suffers massively from all of the verbal garbage that is all of the various JSON properties and the optional nature, having to parse, check, and validate all of that non-sense.
The main reason matrix didn't take off is because it's slower than literally everything else. In terms of speed, literally any other choice is vastly better than the mess that is the Matrix protocol. It is fucking Java 1.1 ass slow.
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Probably true, but if you remember early days of discord, it wasn't much better. Slowness, de-syncing and audio disconnects were a norm until they were fixed.
I.e. slowness doesn't really stop adoption if product is actually good. And what made discord actually good is the bots. Because administrative tasks for messaging and voice servers suck ass, but someone has to do it. When you just need to configure a bot once, and it does everything 99,9% of the time, its great. And when there are organisers who have
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"The bots are what makes Discord good" has to be the hottest take I've heard all year. Bots are usually the first things I mute as they're all annoying and spammy.
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Not spam bots. Management bots.
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That makes a lot more sense haha.
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I figured it was sort of obvious since I talk about "administrative tasks":
>Because administrative tasks for messaging and voice servers suck ass, but someone has to do it. When you just need to configure a bot once, and it does everything 99,9% of the time, its great. And when there are organisers who have free hands, they can focus on organising communities rather than managing them.
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Pretty funny considering that 25 years ago XMPP (aka Jabber) came out that is heavily XML verbose based protocol and it actually performed rather well as both an instant messenger and IRC bridge and alternative chat medium.
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XMPP sucked when bandwidth was low (even between servers), but nowadays it works quite well. For fast chat there is nothing that could beat IRC, but for the "Whatsapp style" chats XMPP is quite good.
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Matrix
IRC exists.
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BBS exists too. As do pen pals.
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Matrix is neither a good protocol, nor a replacement for Discord.
Why is it not a good protocol? Most problem stem from it not delivering messages, but synchronizing a DAG, including message delays, synchronization issues and the inability to reliably edit or remove messages. Sometimes rooms do not even reach the same state.
Why is it not a Discord replacement? Because Discord servers can be influenced a lot by bots in ways Matrix does not implement (and that would be hard to implement with Matrix' architectu
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What I said is that in its current state, Matrix is way behind. Mainly because Discord just sucked out the developers due to first mover advantage.
You seem to mostly agree that its current state is poor, and lack of developers pushing for those specific features, especially in the bot department is hampering it.
Teamspeak seems to be dead as far as I can see. TS5 was supposed to be a discord replacement with discrete servers and ability to host them. But it increasingly looks like they ran out of money. Revo
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I don't think Matrix can become Discord and I don't think they should try. The reasonable goals for Matrix do not match the goals for, e.g., Revolt.
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So instead of saying "Russians are genocidal murderers" which implies all Russians are that way, the more accurate term would be: "The Russian govt. are genocidal murderers."
See the difference?
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You can criticize the Chinese govt or the Russian govt. I think they just don't want people being wholesale slandered because of their nationality by trolls.
So instead of saying "Russians are genocidal murderers" which implies all Russians are that way, the more accurate term would be: "The Russian govt. are genocidal murderers."
See the difference?
But it's the Russians who were committing crimes in Butcha. It's the Russians who kill and rape in Ukraine. Also it's the Russians who are pro-war.
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So, you're willing to pay to use Discord, right? Right? Yeah, that's what I thought.
I do pay for Discord, and I'll definitely be gone the moment they show me adds I can't opt out of. I don't mind them showing adds to generate funds, nor do I mind having to turn them off, as long as it's not hidden behind a mired of menus selections, but I'll be dammed if I'll pay them by the month, and still have ads forced down my throat.
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Absolutely, I'll pay a small fee, it's worth maybe a dollar or 2 a month for me. The day a non-removable ad appears on discord I'm uninstalling.
Same for all these ad-blocker detecting websites. No, I wont disable my ad-blocker, and yes, I'll add you right now to my blacklist and never visit again.
If nothing else, these ads will certainly induce.. (Score:5, Funny)
Discord.
(But seriously - if it's truly optional, is there anyone who *won't* immediately turn this off?)
Re:If nothing else, these ads will certainly induc (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question is where will everyone go now that Discord is enshittified?
I will be monitoring this for GDPR compliance too. There is currently an investigation into Facebook because of their "pay or okay" scheme. Basically you can pay to get an ad-free experience, but if you don't the ads try to track you without consent. It appears to be illegal as you can't charge for privacy or use money to induce consent under GDPR.
In-house can be practical (Score:2)
After putting up with Slack... slacking... for a while, Ryver ignoring bugs and getting worse over time, I wrote my own system from scratch. No ads, no randos, no spam, no cost. I am running independent family and business instances.
It's got a decent set of features, including a broad range of text formatting (it does _x_ and *x* and emoji :) markdown-like formatting too, but that's just for the comfort of our oldies), audio/video
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Is it online somewhere?
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I have not shared it with the world, which I think is what you're asking. Nor do I plan to, at least anytime in the near future. This reduces the attack surface and the support loading.
Otherwise, yes, it's online — it's a networking WAN application bringing together people from widely disparate locations.
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. Basically you can pay to get an ad-free experience, but if you don't the ads try to track you without consent.
You are fighting the wrong animal here. Facebook will escape that GDPR mess because Facebook is not inducing the advertisers to track people. They are merely selling an ad free experience.
But yeah, let's ignore that the advertisers track you on EVERY site, not just Facebook, but yeah, let's fine Facebook for that.
(to be honest, I don't care if Facebook is fined into the ground... but let's show some integrity when we do it)
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The regulator in at least one country has already taken this up.
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Discord.
(But seriously - if it's truly optional, is there anyone who *won't* immediately turn this off?)
I may keep them on if they are game ads exclusively.
How far we've fallen (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why it was such a bad idea that everyone accepted Discord could ban you for running a modified client.
I always thought it was a shame when people moved away from XMPP and towards proprietary shit like Skype and Discord that don't offer encryption, sell your data, police your speech, and do shit like this.
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Re:How far we've fallen (Score:4, Informative)
Let's go back to IRC!
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Use Element with IRC connected then.
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Let's go back to IRC!
An encrypted IRC client would literally cover about 99.99999% of my chat needs at work or with the gang at home. But I guarantee you the second it enters a business it will be shitted up just as badly as any of the current crop. We just aren't capable of leaving good things alone at this point. Until it's a data-sucking nightmare for usability? It's not done.
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XMPP
XMPP isn't an easy to use widely used program. It's a protocol. Protocols can't compete with programs because they do different things. This may sound like being pedantic, but it is core and fundamental as to why we aren't using XMPP - people don't give a shit about protocols, they give a shit about apps and how easy they are to communicate with other people.
Fun story to demonstrate:
We were playing a nice multiplayer VR game the other day, three of us. One of us has a Quest 2. Two of us were communicating o
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My point since you missed it: I just checked, none of my friends on Discord or Whatsapp are on Snikket. That makes it less than useless to me. I can't talk to anyone with it, and it wastes storage space on my device.
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When Discord was launched in 2015, all users on my server moved almost overnight. The main reason they told me for moving was that Discord allowed to set the volume per user (so they could boost somebody who was barely audible, and make the ve
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I miss the days when chat companies fought alternative clients instead of their users. Yeah, gaim (now pidgin) couldn't connect to ICQ or MSN from time to time. Still no user was banned and you either used other clients in the meantime (e.g. the official ones) or waited until the open source libraries implemented the protocol changes.
Ads in the client itself (Score:5, Interesting)
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You could put tape on your monitor over the advertising areas.
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How to tell someone who didn't RTFA.
The ads are going to be in game streams. They will be a "do X while the streamer plays, and you affect their game and get a discount on Y".
At least, that is what Discord said. The issue is, WSJ is a walled garden, and no one who uses Discord subscribes to it (it seems). So what with all these news sites looooooving clickbait titles, they are shouting wolf as loud as they can without actually telling you what the wolf is doing.
Uninstalled. (Score:2)
Bye.
adblock the web version (Score:3, Interesting)
i guess its time to demote discord to running in a browser tab again.
Re: adblock the web version (Score:2)
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I don't see how that will stop the in-stream ads from showing while you're watching someone play a game, but you do you.
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Well, I don't watch someone play a game. For the same reason I don't watch porn. What's my benefit when someone else does it?
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TBH i use discord almost exclusively as a chatroom/forum/messenger.
voice call some mates while gaming
if our conversation gets interrupted by an advert it'll be back to teamspeak.
Discord takes your credit card hostage (Score:5, Interesting)
They won't let you delete the card while you have an active nitro subscription. However, you auto-renew before the subscription expires. You aren't given a chance to remove your card and they continue extracting money from you.
Even worse, they somehow get your NEW card details (mine expired, I got a new CCV and EXP date, somehow discord got the EXP and that's all they needed to continue charging me. I didn't give it to them as I was expecting the card to be rejected for an improper expiration and I was not planning to renew.)
Discord CEO and CFO need to be tossed in jail for wire fraud and theft by wire.
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Nope, card exp was totally different month as it was issued early.
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The credit card companies helpfully inform the companies using said card for payments the new CCV and expiration date.
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Are you able to use a VISA gift card instead?
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Discord CEO and CFO need to be tossed in jail for wire fraud and theft by wire.
LOL, Good luck with that in this regulatory environment. You would be lucky if a judge only ordered you to pay for their legal fees.
Do you think the business behind Discord is the only business doing that? Why would it so widespread if there were any laws or regulations to follow? Nobody cares as long as money is switching hands. It doesn't even have to be legal anymore. Our regulators are completely owned by money.
It has been showing ads for a while (Score:1)
There is already plenty of spam all of the site for it useless Nitro service.
Discord will be for boomers in 5 years (Score:1)
I will leave if I see an ad (Score:2)
It's that simple.