The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.
there’s a post above yours with details but the tldr is that discord is getting pretty close to profitable already. it’s in the part of the web app lifecycle where it’s bringing in new users, new features are being developed, it’s a pretty functional product that keeps improving and it’s free for most people’s use cases. Soon it will reach the webapp event horizon where everyone has heard of it and everyone either already uses it or would never use it under any circumstances. at this point it will do what every other web app does in a system where growth must always be infinite: make itself worse and more expensive. then we will move on to something that is earlier in its lifecycle. hell, a lot of us are only here having this discussion right now because reddit reached the profitability event horizon.
The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.
there’s a post above yours with details but the tldr is that discord is getting pretty close to profitable already. it’s in the part of the web app lifecycle where it’s bringing in new users, new features are being developed, it’s a pretty functional product that keeps improving and it’s free for most people’s use cases. Soon it will reach the webapp event horizon where everyone has heard of it and everyone either already uses it or would never use it under any circumstances. at this point it will do what every other web app does in a system where growth must always be infinite: make itself worse and more expensive. then we will move on to something that is earlier in its lifecycle. hell, a lot of us are only here having this discussion right now because reddit reached the profitability event horizon.
That would be the enshittification I was talking about.