They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
I’m down to distributed social networks and irc.
I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I’m just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they’re implementing ads, it’s not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It’s not likely to be lockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
Will filtering elements not work?
If it’s downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It’s impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn’t even been able to keep users from doing it; they’ve had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It’s your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
I never stopped using irc (I know I’m old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can’t find any communities that aren’t turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I’ve found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I’d like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don’t even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
“RTFM” but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
Well I guess its done its job for the US Government. Funding has obviously stopped.
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It’s totally understandable.
What do the Lemmings recommend as a replacement for discord?
I’m happy to revert back to teamspeak if need be, I heard it’s app recently got an overhaul (or at the very least a facelift).
I’m disgusted (though not shocked, I fucking called it years ago), that discord would go down this rabbit hole being that their main demographic is gamers. The stats are in, gamers (among every other living being) hates ads.
In fact, I pay for YT music because I think it’s good value, but ive never once had YT premium, and I haven’t seen an ad on their site for close to a decade now. (Still no pihole, that’s likely next).
To circle back, if possible Lemmings, I would like to find a discord replacement that my folks would be willing to install/try out. I’ve got a couple people who have said “hey man, find a better spot and we’ll tag along”, however I have yet to find a suitable replacement on my own time.
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can’t imagine enough people put money into it that they haven’t just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It’s hard for me to exactly call it greed if they’re just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
Exactly. Everyone wants an ad-free platform that’s free to use. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
I don’t think paying will stop enshitification.
Line.
Go.
Up.
It’s not a publicly traded company smh
They’re probably trying to IPO like Reddit.
Maybe they are, but they fought off a Microsoft buyout only a few years ago, seems if they wanted to sell out, they would have done it then. Meanwhile, we don’t have financial figures (since it is a private company) but reportedly they are profitable Regardless, it’s just speculation and the “line must go up” meme generally refers to increasing share price to enrich investors and c suite, which… Doesn’t make as much sense for a private company who’s shares do not trade on an exchange.
We have no clue if they’re profitable since they’re private… but given they’ve laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they’ve been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren’t devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn’t profitable.
I mean they’re almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You’re telling me we aren’t in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn’t have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that’s too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can’t die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won’t care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000’s of people keep coming back again and again.
Been happily off discord ever since the CEO’s disastrous, anti-encryption speech at the “Protecting Children Online” hearing. Evil little dude, that guy is.
Makes me miss Xfire. Feature-rich, customizeable, great quality, overlay feature that didn’t suck, no bullshit. It was orders of magnitude better than Discord ever was.
…but not popular outside of gaming; and ofc the other big tech companies litigated the fuck out of it, so it never really took off and now it’s gone. Boooooooo
we were happy and we didn’t know it
*its free
Anyone tried revolt.chat?
In the past month I noticed ads inside Viber desktop (it’s used a lot here, instead of WhatsApp)
Later I got a call from a friend that his windows defender picked up a trojan in Viber files… Next day I got it too.
I shit you not, they let out an update with malware, on a popular chat app. I uninstalled and got the next update, with blind trust, I can’t migrate atm…
It is possible it was a false positive, though I am not familiar with Viber and its recent history in terms of malware incidents.
Still any platform that serves up ads needs to secure them… and as none bother I simply block all ads.
I find it hard to believe viber isn’t some IoT connected sex toy name.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord’s format.
I heavily decreased my usage of Discord when I was lowkey doxxed by a user on a server that I never posted a single ounce of personal information to.
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn’t be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don’t hide your support behind a platform that can’t be searched from the web. It’s not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I couldn’t agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it’s being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
If a service ever says discord only when I try to login, that service no longer exists. Find an alternative or make do without it.
You found out about Nostr yet?
On the other hand, after looking for and failing to find an issue I’m facing, discord servers usually have way faster response times compared to forums.
I think this is the main disconnect for people.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We “solved” this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.
Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder’s team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of “collaborative editing”: sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with “I looked for X on Confluence and didn’t find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?”
So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between “what experienced people want” and “what beginners want”, but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.
This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.
I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.
The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.
A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.
People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.
The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.
RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.
If there is one belief that I’ve held for long is that we Free Software would be in a better situation than it is today if we simply dropped the whole idea “community”, “done by amateurs” and “volunteers in their spare time” and really start treating the whole thing as a professional industry. This whole xz crisis further exacerbated this belief.
Almost everyone takes this work for granted and this is why is not properly valued. We should raise the bar at all levels: someone who wants to contribute in a project needs to show that they can deliver everything, maintainers should not accept “half-baked” proposals because “it is better than nothing”, developers should be more than comfortable sending a quote with a proper rate to someone that requests a feature.
And if those people don’t want to do any of that, then let go see how much the commercial alternative would cost them.
I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they’d actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they’re better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.
I completely agree, fuck discord
