"No. Fuck you. Pay me. Now pay me more. Now enjoy ads. Pay me again. We're now introducing fees associated with the privilege of paying me. So pay that while paying me."

-- approximately everything

Dude i am so glad. Discord was always a cancer, i hope this will spell the beginning of the end of discord. Its the number one biggest offender in terms of limiting access to information on the internet right now. It needs to die.

I don't know why people trusted Discord, it's one of the worst platforms and I say this while I use it because I had to settle for that (friends) like I had to settle for WhatsApp (family and work)

Irc was better for chat, ventilo and mumble better for audio, and matrix is pretty much the same but better. Discord sucks like Twitter did and I can't wait for it to go away. And forums are a better platform for help and documentation.

Thank God I convinced my fiancee to move our VCs to Wire, away from WhatsApp and Discord.

Can it be any more enshitified tho?

I've been wanting a replacement for ages now. The problem is that Discord does everything it does very well (with a few exceptions), way better than any of its competitors. It's incredibly hard to replace, because no other product really matches it in any category. Cost, ease of use, feature set, cross-app API support... Nobody else comes close; even if you paid a ton of money for premium services to replace Discord, you're still likely going to downgrade your overall experience.

I really want to see more competition in this space.

Matrix needs more time in the oven before it's ready for widespread adoption.

I really did try to make it work (for months) but it's a buggy and unpolished experience, everyone that tried it with me ended up going back to Discord and Signal for communication.

Matrix and XMPP are decentralized, much better than Revolt for that purpose.

accelerates

The worst part about discord to me is that it’s used as a knowledge base for open source projects and games and such. This puts things in a walled garden. I instantly get turned off by a thing when the homepage is “join our discord” or I see a comment like “oh it’s explained in the discord.”

It’s only a matter of time before discord becomes paywalled, and all the knowledge out there ceases to be public.

it's literally just money

It's about money, specifically with a near-term "exit strategy" for investors.

It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits... without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.

I won't shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world's online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity's cultural development and history.

It’s the path for the startup industry to rewards the venture capitalist investor basically either IPO by going public or M&A by being bought (like instagram by meta).

Here some more info on the different startup stages https://www.latitud.com/blog/stages-of-a-startup

mumble works very well and is foss as well.