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I'm so tired man. I just want it to stop. It feels like everything nice is slowly being squeezed in all aspects of life.
Anything that capitalism touches or influences has begun to choke us out. It just seems to continue and doesn't seem to ease up or improve. Maybe I'm just noticing it more, but the past 4 years felt like things accelerated quickly
This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker's job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.
But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can't wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.
this will always happen unless we move to FOSS
It's often not the cost of the software, but the hosting costs, especially on a growing platform.
platforms can be peer to peer too, with maybe a cheaper to host tracker. i think its viable for a chat app, like matrix, for example.
overall yes though, i wonder when lemmy is gonna start having these issues, its still mostly run by unpaid volunteers....
I think it's why many decentralised platforms don't want very big instances, and prefer them to split off into smaller federated sites.
Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don't want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don't.
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the Discord Nitro subscription has been around for a long while. From what I’ve seen using the platform it seems relatively popular. I’d guess adding ads to the free tier is as much about enticing people onto the subscription (which presumably won’t have ads).
Ubtil they go to the Netflix model where users can experience both a subscription and ads at the same time.
And Nitro isn't exactly inexpensive either, or wasn't last time I used Discord.
I've been using Discord almost since launch, and in that time, not a single feature did I find as an important addition to the program. It is now much more bloated with unnecessary stuff, stuff for which they paid those talented devs you mention.
I would have been perfectly content with a one-time payment to use it and it would have worked perfectly well for them with that model if they didn't get greedy and want to stuff it with random junk to justify a subscription.
I don't mind paying as long as it's not a subscription scam for no reason at all.
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I've never really used it.
It does mean I'm excluded from some FOSS projects' support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon.
You mean like they moved away from Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients and openly began selling user data to data brokers?
Or how they left Twitter when it was bought by an egomaniac who killed 3rd party clients, fired the entirety of the moderation staff, then required users to log in to view posts?
Or maybe how they left Facebook after any of the many times they've been caught collecting user data against their will, promoted genocide, never allowed 3rd party apps, and willingly manipulated elections?
Nevermind the fact that those platforms have had ads for decades.
Yeah sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Hey I am here
never allowed 3rd party apps
Facebook used to allow third party apps (e.g. Snaptu started as a third-party app before the acquisition) and exposed most of the functionality via their API, but it's not really a thing any more after Cambridge Analytica - the API was locked down significantly. You can't really have it both ways... Allowing third-party apps also allows those apps to scrape and store user info, which is what Cambridge Analytica did.
You can't really have it both ways...
I don't want it both ways.
Allowing third-party apps also allows those apps to scrape and store user info, which is what Cambridge Analytica did.
Accessing an API is not scraping. Scraping is still possible without an API. All CA did was access public information. The problem in that case is not access to public information, it is intentional paid disinformation.
Accessing an API is not scraping.
I probably used the wrong words... What I meant is that given API access, a malicious third-party can gather a large amount of data and store it in a way that goes against the service's terms of service, without the proper privacy guarantees (e.g. user data being deleted if they delete their account). Obviously that's a problem for a social network where people can post a lot of friends-only posts.
ideally such changes to advertising and the ToS arbitration clause removing consumer rights will help give a lot of the open-source communities a gentle push to get off of discord. It's become far too central to too many communities and is impossible to search for knowledge.
Hopefully those FOSS projects will gain some sense as discord becomes more shit and will leave. One can hope.
I never understood how a chatroom took off as a tool to document stuff. Who seriously thinks this is a good idea? 😵
If a project only has Discord for support (no docs, no bug tracker), I'm not using it. Don't want to deal with trying to find anything in Discord.
Don't forget that it saves even your deleted DMs for as long as you have an account!
IRC still rules. No ads in my irssi.
Does IRC do voice nowadays? I think that is the main reason people use Discord
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slowly moving myself to https://revolt.chat/.
Its sad since I've been with discord since almost '15.
Compared to Matrix, or any E2EE chat, this doesn't sound good:
we take your privacy very seriously. And with end-to-end encryption coming to DMs and group chats soon
Compared to Discord, or other established voice chat systems like Mumble, this doesn't sound great either:
We are currently rebuilding the client and the voice server from scratch. The old voice should work in most cases, but it may inexplicably not connect in some scenarios and / or exhibit weird behaviour.
The "app" on Android seems to be just the webapp running in a standalone window.
I'll concede them the OpenSource and self-hosted factors, and it does look like Discord, but it doesn't seem like a suitable replacement for average users... yet. Then again, the ads might push them over.
Guess it's worth to keep an eye on it.
so this Revolt project is open source, which is nice, but still seems to rely on centralized servers. Does it use P2P for voice+video+fileshare so that the original devs aren't on the hook for insane bandwidth requirements? I can't see anything about their networking systems in the FAQ or info pages.
I may consider getting my friends to switch sooner or later if it's more P2P based. But I don't really want something that runs ALL traffic through central servers, because the bandwidth costs will inevitably just lead to the same situation that Discord is now in.
It's self-hostable, and they seem to be switching to webrtc-rs, not sure whether with P2P or not:
https://trello.com/c/Ay6KdiOV/1-voice-overhaul-and-video-calling
In 2022, they claimed it was using minimal resources on the server:
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
They also don't seem to consider federation as a priority, but then again neither does Discord.
“Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings.”
usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new "pro" features actually nobody needs nor wants.
maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)