I knew enshitification wasn’t far, since Discord has investors now.
I guess we can start looking for an alternative.
Alternatives that move us backwards towards the old days are things like TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo.
Alternatives that are similar to Discord and not owned by a for-profit company are:
- Matrix
A huge missing piece of almost all not-for-profit alternatives is a lack of low-latency game streaming / screen streaming. The best Matrix gets is running a jitsi meet. I think Matrix is the only one that theoretically could work for some users because Discord bridges allow people who are finally fed up to move to Matrix for text chat.
It’s difficult, though.
Matrix is not a good platform. Especially as a discord replacement. All clients suck in their own unique ways, and so does server software. It doesn’t have any meaningful moderation tools. It doesn’t have half the user facing discord features (like streaming or functional pins). The search sucks.
You’re not getting out of the corporate hellhole that easily
Matrix is my personal vote as well. Encryption by default is already much better, though we would need a lot of community work for parity with Discord (though I’d argue most of the fluff on discord isn’t exactly necessary).
though we would need a lot of community work for parity with Discord
Not sure if it was FUD or not, so please treat this as an unsubstantiated rumour, but I recall another lemming telling me that Matrix was quite insular and not very accepting of outside code contributions.
So if that’s true, it could be a spanner in the gears.
Fucking called it.
This shit isn’t hard to predict, yet huge numbers of people treat you like a delusional conspiracy theorist when you say that a tech service provided by a company/org that converts into a public corp and plans to do an IPO… is now fully shifting into ‘make everything shitty and squeeze as much money out of it as possible’ mode.
Yep this is the explicit strategy. 1) fund growth off of VC cash at a huge loss; 2) when VC gets tired and no other VC wants to step in, turn to enshitification to provide the VC with liquidity options.
That’s it, that’s the playbook for the past 20 years and probably longer.
As one of the earliest Discord users, it pains me to see this, but it doesn’t surprise me. Ever since Nitro became a thing, Discord has been slowly but surely digging its grave.
I have no particular attachment to the platform, we will just move to something different if alternate Discord apps aren’t available to disable the ads.
Good riddance to this un-indexable deep-web mess, where information goes to die and never be found again. We only really used it for the voice chat anyway 🤷🏻♀️
Discord already allows users on other platforms to hide in-app promotions for specific Quests, or opt out of personalized promotions. These options will also be available for mobile users.
Wonder how long that’s going to be an option… The way every tech company is going I’m fully expecting them to force ads on everyone in the next two years.
Before everyone freaks completely out, the headline is a little bit clickbaity. Yes, they are ads, and yes they will be on mobile, so I suppose that technically wasn’t a lie. But they are probably not what you’re expecting based on reading “mobile ads” alone.
Desktop Discord has had “quests” for a little while now. You watch a thing and then get a thing. Normally it’s an in-game item, or might be a temporary discord profile frame or something.
These are optional and in my experience they’ve only popped up once a month or so. They are a mild annoyance to hide once in a while at worst and at best I have watched one or two for games I actually play.
This is that, coming to mobile now.
Yeah, not buying it. I’m getting spammed with „quests” from multiple apps now that got the same idea. Seems like a workaround for Apple App Store rules where apps shouldn’t be using notifications for ads, but „quests” are fine somehow. It’s always apps that need notifications and are so important you can’t uninstall them. Gee, what a coincidence.
These applications likely know they can get away with it, as people classify them as “too important” to uninstall.
The solution is to make them wrong: To uninstall. Who woulda thunk.
Yeah, so get this. One of those apps is a shipping company that’s close to being a monopoly. You could pick up their parcels with just a phone number but now you need account for safety. So I can’t uninstall it. I need notifications on because I’m a klutz and need reminders. And so I’m also invited to collecting some dumb coins or NFTs they sell. Discord made way into people’s lives too, they’re now dependent and screwed.
No, this is worth treating with just as much disgust as if it was what people think “mobile ads” means. It’s ads in the client, on mobile. Desktop discord “quests” and nitro upsells and flashing graphics on a “shop” button that shouldn’t exist in the first place are ads too.
Every time I’ve opened mobile discord this week, several times a day, I’ve been getting a full screen ad asking me to upgrade to nitro.
That’s annoying enough. This will be worse, soon.
The code is already there, just swap out nitro for world of tanks and the conversion to crap will be complete.
