Quokk.auDiscord in discussions of going Public Trading, economics expert discusses how that might change things
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/36840985
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Bad. It’s always bad for the user. It’s good for the people at the top, but the reason for going public is never ever for the benefit of the consumer.
The reason is that even if the initial buy-in helps fund innovation, that will inevitably be replaced by enshittification as the board of investors demand “line must go up.” You can’t be consumer focused and chase profits; they are mutually exclusive.
Legit question: when has any company’s IPO led to improved anything for end users?
The best case i can think of is that most of the big tech that IPOd probally helped more users even if they over all quality didnt go up. Kind of hard to measure though. IPO give the company cash but at the trade of stakeholders.
Exactly every business that goes into market to be owned by finance hedge fund bros that use pensions as leverage and insider lobbying tactics to develop retail investor siphoning schemes become worse, because that’s how they make money
SaneMartiganIf nitro was $10-15 a year I’d have signed up ages ago. $10 a month is more expensive than my mobile phone plan.
Expert at what? At ignoring the overwhelmingly clear global enshittification pipeline that is hedge fund open market attrition abuse and its in-your-face openly aggressive shorting cycle strategies that are laid bare for absolutely everyone to see?
Discprd sucks, but there is no good alternative.
LeonThis just pointedly isn’t true. There are good alternatives, there’s just not a single drop-in replacement for the role that Discord fills.
For the most obvious drop-in replacement, you have Stoat, previously called Revolt. It’s basically Discord but self-hosted. For text and voice chat you have things like Matrix or Signal, both having the added bonus of being end-to-end encrypted so your shit is private. There’s also the old-school options like Mumble and IRC.
For forums there’s Discourse, or if you want to go traditional phpbb is still around.
The big problem is that not all your friends are gathered on a single platform. This was always the case before Discord, and will be the case again after Discord. Be the change. Encourage people to switch away, and move your communities. Prune those that you don’t need any more.
There is no alternative because the software is irrelevant. The communities are what’s good about it, and the alternatives don’t have that.
Sure, if you want to start a chatroom with some friends, you can do a lot better than discord, but if you want what used to be discussion boards on specific topics, you’re stuck with discord as that’s where everyone went.
Again, be the difference. I harass companies over mail because I don’t want to fucking use Discord to get project or order status updates.
“Thanks for the update. You know, it’d be really prudent to post this kind of thing on your website, or even send out updates via newsletter.”
For me personally, if a software project or game server has its own web forum, its preferred way to communicate and talk about this project or server specifically. I would rather register 100 accounts on one hundred forums, than create one account on discord, and be able join 100 communites. I am talking about large communities, and not personal or group chatting, for which i can use matrix or signal.
And what i meant by “no good alternatives”, is that there are no alternatives which are both, good as in quality, and actually popular way to host a community and not some niche project.
Matrix (basically federated Discord), which is already used by a lot of open source projects, but due to the Network Effect, is not as popular as Discord. It is possible to bridge Discord and Matrix, but the server admin has to implement that, and isn’t the cleanest solution.
Basically all non-corporate social media platforms suffer from the same problem, that being the chicken and the egg.
You’re welcome
Update: I was wrong you do not need to create an account for each server
Original with misinformation stricken out:
I don’t think stoat is federated… People need to make a new account for every server, so I can’t see this catching on.
I wouldn’t personally care, but it’s a problem for a lot of people.
If I’m wrong let me know though. I’d love to get away from discord and my attempts to get friends on mumble or TS6 have been unsuccessful.
It is not federated indeed, but you don’t need to make a new account for every server. I am on multiple servers and never was asked to create an account per server. Given that there is no federated alternative to Discord and having looked for other alternatives, Stoat is the only Discord alternative that actually works like Discord. If there’s a federated alternative to discord that works like it in the future, though, I’ll gladly hop on that train
PrivateNoobIsn’t discord already profitable?
Not at all. But even if it was, an IPO always means shareholders want infinite double digit growth, and post IPO companies will do ANYTHING for the shareholders and they all hate the users.
How that MIGHT change things?
Just look at every other tech company in the space that’s gone public to see how it WILL change things. It’s not a mystery at this point.
The real question is how do you enshittify a product that is already shit?
Since when is Discord shit? Oh no, an easy to use application with incredible sound quality! Ahhhh
Anything annoying I can think of is stuff that makes a lot of sense considering said application is, for most people, 100% free.
The gamification, closed protocol and grey patterns make sense? It really doesn’t have to be that way.
That said, up to this point, Discord at least appears to have made a good faith attempt at providing a useful service while also making a profit. I suspect we’re about to see the dial crank over into “turn a profit for the next quarterly report” territory.
You don’t need to engage with the gamification thing. Closed protocol sure I guess, and also I’m sorry I don’t know what “grey partterns” are and am gunna assume that you’re not referring to the colour palette.
But it’s a solid product that largely just works. I’m still worried, obviously, that certain voluntary things will become less voluntary and things will get much more frustrating as they search to go public.
Discord is technologically lightyears ahead of their competition. Its by far the smoothest large scale chat application out there. The only “dark pattern” is them pushing Nitro and you know what users should buy nitro not free to run a service at that scale.
discord is one of those things i struggle to find an alternative to. not because i lack the skill to do it myself or to make something else do the same tasks, but because all my friends who aren’t as techy as me or big servers i like talking to wouldnt migrate.
having seen its decline since 2016, sooner or later ill have to make the jump but its gonna be harder than ditching google or microsoft because of the community aspect of it.
And so many things using it instead of a forum for information or questions
It’s especially bizzare when git repos for “open source corporate alternative” type software uses it over their own repo’s issue trackers and forums.
WTF
They want the social media engagement, I guess. But still. It’s ridiculous how much of a blind spot folks have for it.
It also makes giving or getting any kind of support a hellish time sink, but that’s almost besides the point…
It is an insane choice for a support tool.
You know, this comment just made me realize this might actually be the point for some companies.
Its a cheap way to pretend that you care about customer service, while actually dissuading customers strongly from actually trying. Its also completely easy to bot vs having a human on a phone line.
A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.
If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.
This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.
The basic maths of it just doesn’t work for any sort of bottom up action.
It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.
You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.
There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be enough as there are thousands more issues.
It will inevitably focus more on pleasing its public investors than anything else, therefore enshittification.
Maybe Steam/Valve is a unicorn, but it’s not publicly traded and it’s doing just fine.
It is a unicorn. I dread the day Gaben dies and Valve ends up going public. It feels like the last bastion of decent online services.
Valve’s margins are almost criminal as-is. They make cash hand over fist, and they’re basically a monopoly already.
…So not much might actually change, at least at first?
But this why they don’t need to go public. They have plenty of cash. And it’d just shrink the slice of profit Valve’s owners get.
Still, even private, I’m afraid of what Steam might look like if big competitors like EGS and Microsoft footgun themselves out of the market, and GoG fades away due to their DRM-free policy.
Let the final enshitification commence
╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:・ﾟ
Is discord not enshitty?
I open it and it updates 6 times, then I get a full page ad for nitro. Then all the settings push nitro. And all the “servers” push nitro.
It’s the best at what it does, but had been getting shitty in the way you described. However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow. I’ll put up with the nitro pushing and understand that’s my cost of doing business. If they go public, I’ll probably actively start looking for an alternative, because that always kills a product and it will for sure mean “AI” will be forced into it.
Locking data away from search engines so that unless you’re in that little fiefdom you don’t get the information.
And preventing any internet archiving so any and all information on it is lost whenever the server is deleted. It never should have been used for anything but game chat.
Probably that too, but specifically the ability to spin up a private space to communicate with people for things like video games. Anyone that’s using it as their means of customer service is an idiot.
Apparently I struck a chord with my post, so I’m curious what is better than discord, and free that made my statement controversial?
Also, I don’t see locking data from search engines as a bad thing. The fediverse isn’t search engine searchable either and Google, bing, etc, don’t natively have the right to index private data.
The fediverse not being searchable is one of the biggest flaws with it, and make it similarly ephemeral to Discord, except its actually worse because the sizes of communities are just in that goldilocks area of awfulness where there are echo chambers, and people are rude and toxic. Whatsmore, availability due to the small size is relatively mediocre.
fediverse is search engine searchable. They’re public webpages being crawled.
Matrix?
IRC for chat and mumble for voice.
both of those are not remotely as feature rich or user-friendly as discord.
These arguments might just give me an aneurysm.
This has let so many horrible free to play games off the hook while they literally make billions in profits and have astounding profit margins.
Discord makes money.
In a non hyper greed infested world, they could simply coast at the level of wealth they are at now, still making free money for their investors, paying their workers, and improving the service, without making peoples lives shittier.
There is no reason to justify this shit.
I agree, this is just an inexcusable reasoning that is essentially flawed. In all essence, the ads, the intrusive popups, the 1000 cookies which you have to accept and giving money to those poor billionaires is implied to be as the right thing to do - which is not.
Justifications like this is why we still have shit software lying about the web and nothing is done about it. The companies dont care about the people, and they don’t care about op. Being a suckup for a corpo will get you nowhere - in fact saying that they’re the best, is just a false narrative.
In the end that statement is essentially an oxymoron. Op is trying to justify the oppressive strategies of corpoware, while not realising that they already have info about op’s stepmother’s maiden name.
discord recently did a survey about how users would react to adding AI
in the options, you could say that you would be ok with ai if it was easily disabled and if it was marked
i hope they follow the survey answers
It is. Which is why I‘m baffled they didn’t go public already.
“I wish all my friends would leave discord and go to an alternative chat platform”
The monkey paw curls and all your friends move to MS Teams.
Slack! 😱
I could live with all my friends using slack
ICQ
I’m guessing this will lead to more things being locked behind their subscription model. Ransoming core features for cash is the standard template of this process.
This news comes immediately after they floated the idea of embedding AI, you say?
Pretty much immediately after yeah
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They did, at least, be smart enough to already say no to a buyout attempt by Microsoft a few years ago
Well this gives me time to start my own Mumble server now
I ran one off a raspberry pi for years before we switched to discord. It just worked for voice chat.
Yes, finally! I’m ready for this shitty platform to fucking die already.
let the enshittification continue
Wonder what’ll be next after Discord enshittifies and alienates all the current users.
There’s like 4 contenders, but all missing the crucial thing, critical mass of users
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You’re right, guess I should’ve said “enshittify further”.
The only reason for a sub is to use emotes everywhere and thats it. Thank god there is Vencord
I genuinely do not know how that would change anything. It‘s already monetized thoroughly. They will just add even more ad campaign quests and stuff which you can ignore.
Have you not seen the world? Everything, no matter how horrific, can always get infinitely worse.
The PIF could buy it and ban gay people. Israel could buy it and persecute people against genocide. A rich right wing billionaire could buy it and force even more nazi memes upon the youth. They could make a monetized limit to how many servers one can join that is purposefully below any sane reasonable or normal level. They could make PMs pay per message.
There are infinite ways it can get worse. Infinite.
I‘m pretty sure Discord is already selling data of every single chat message to everyone. Especially secret services for prosecution. If they make it too shitty people will just migrate somewhere else and nothing of value was lost. It does not have the strong network effect of a Xitter or Youtube.
Until they lock it up where you can’t. Or they’ll decide on selling data and injecting ads into your convos or streams.
In other words this hasn’t been enshittified to the max yet at all. There are new and horrible depths to explore.
They can lock more features behind nitro. They can charge to run a server. They can add servers you have to pay to join. There is a ton of stuff they can do that would just make things suckier for users on the platform.
Oh, sweet summer child.
You just wait.
I didn’t think Discord could get any worse!
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