Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

https://www.wsj.com/tech/discord-to-start-showing-ads-for-gamers-to-boost-revenue-bf5848b9

I’m sure most of you have already heard about this, but imagine when this goes through I will be jumping ship. :S glad I investigated Guilded now tbh.

eta: whoops I literally did not even read far enough down to see it was paywalled lol. bad sourcing, taybi.

there we go.

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This stinks!!! Really not looking forward to trying to track down where a bunch of friends and communities move to once it starts being untenable for the average person. I’ll probably be looking into alternatives to try and push people towards (Guilded, maybe).

I just want a nice text and voice chat program that lets people stream video, I don’t need a Shop or cringey gamer loading screen messages.

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yeah it sucks for sure… like as much as it does look like they’re going to be relatively unobtrusive, I think it does speak to The Attitude of Discord’s staff, so it’s likely to only get worse. :(

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that homer simpson meme but it’s him telling bart “the ads will be unobtrusive…so far.”

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dyr when they said they were going to get into crypto/NFTs and then backpedalled violently when everyone yelled at them :skull:

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I might try to push my friend discord to move to guilded like I tried two years ago (it’s still only me in there really right now orz) but man, I wish It wasn’t so hard to get people to move.

I dunno why but ppl dropping skype all those years ago felt faster than people trying to drop discord (and refusing to.)

mannn

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Discord took over Skype imo because it’s always easy to move people away from Microsoft because everyone hates them. Discord allured peeps with the gamer aesthetic and snagged them from there

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Also, how easy it was to make your Own Server. I was part a decent sized Teamspeak server that was focused around Mega Man speedrunning and hanging out, and the second Discord launched, a bunch of people left and set up their own servers. Everyone immediately fractured into their own shit, focusing it around their own Streams, and the centralized place fragmented. The close group of friends I had from there each now have their own server. not only that, all of us are in each server. It’s… something.

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Omg

Discord turned the Internet into a suburban neighborhood

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Skype/Microsoft was still recovering at the time from killing MSN, which added a little vengeance to the move.

The biggest hurdle to swap nowadays is that back then it was just a chat program, and now its a community space. I only regularly DM like, 4 people in Discord, but I am in several groups, a lot of them made by artists and some spaces that folks made with their close friends.

Which means both of those case have the issue of 1) Moving to another app could hurt your audience/revenue or 2) Moving to another app could mean losing contact with long term friends

And there is, of course, the entire idea that Discord became a repository for information, and the sheer amount of things that are pinned/saved on each server that would be “lost” with a move.

Like all modern processes of product degradation, they made themselves essential or deeply personal, as to always make people consider it would be worst to not have it, no matter how bad it gets.

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This is the (second) biggest hurdle for me personally I think. It’s become a prevalent community organization and gathering tool; I can’t foresee all of them making plans to leave over this, and leaving Discord means leaving those spaces.

At this rate I’m going to just do what I should have done as a kid and get into IRC instead, or like. snail mail. delivered by actual snails

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I think I feel less strongly about the community aspects because up until relatively recently, I only used Discord for DMs and my group chat with my friends anyway. now, there’s a couple communities I would have to ditch to switch over completely, which would suck but I’d get over it. it’s a pros/cons issue for each individual user I guess.

@wren I will miss you if you disappear from the internet though :(

Jesus Christ. Yeah… I guess you’re right.

this was actually one of major benefits I perceived of Guilded - I too am in a bunch of servers which are just all the same people or subsets of the same people. being able to make groups within the same server for different purposes instead of having to make a whole new server every time and clutter up my server list sounds pretty choice.

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yep mentioned it in the guilded thread but having mini servers for our tabletop sessions or long-running multiplayer games is boss as hell

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The main issue that arose from Discord Fracturing is that everyone wanted their Own Server For Their Stream so they could use their own emotes and have their Communities. Sure it was like ~20 people with some overlap with each other, but they wanted their own Space that was not necessarily for intermingling of the “followings”

It sucks!

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