man, as someone who used to be so into foss/privacy i refused to use anything that i couldn’t compile/host & giving out my gpg key to friends, & someone who used to always make charged, sweeping generalizations like the title of this article, reading this just made me remember why people didn’t like to talk tech with me. i was so focused on always spouting why every app/software/os everyone used was “evil” (with poorly thought out & overcharged arguments, because i was coming from a place of anger & “justice” rather than logic) that i became insufferable to have a conversation with. i’m not gonna knock the author too much because i know it comes from a place of passion & morals, but this person has really fallen into the trap of radical black & white thinking that plagues the field of foss so much.
op, if you are the author of the post (or if the author happens to be reading), my advice to you if you want to reach people better would be to avoid generalizing/judging (& any non-logical statements at all) when advocating for foss/against propietary services. always blame the companies, not the users, because most users are just uninformed. remember that software is not a political or moral issue to most people, it’s just a tool & they don’t research or know anything about it beyond that. all that headline is doing is losing the target audience - no one likes to be told they’re “morally lazy” for simply texting their friends & not knowing about issues in an app. if you are going to post sweeping judgements like this, then at least make sure the article is at least finished before you throw it out there, or else it’s gonna leave a really bad taste in people’s mouth.
on a positive note, the rest of the site is really cool; reminds me of the site i used to have up in high school. i really liked the “places” & “strong women” sections on the abyss page.
This is the concept that Stallman was never mature enough to get through his head.
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.
Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable
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.
I use Lemmy to talk to strangers, but I use discord to talk to specific people. Unless I can convince the vast majority of them to switch to matrix it doesn’t matter how much I prefer the foss service, it’s useless to me. I still have an account, sure, but I don’t use discord out of laziness. I use it because matrix literally can’t provide that service.
People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?
These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It’s like people that were mad at “any mods not privating their subreddits” during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it’s almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it’s also engaging with the people there
I use a discord bridge to connect to communities while using matrix. When new communities pop up, I try to convince people to switch to matrix. It’s not perfect because I still need to run discord to connect to video calls on the platform, but I don’t need it running on my phone or in the background on my computer all the time, which is really nice.
Wouldn’t work for most of my use cases but a good point nonetheless
The author of this post seems to not be super aware of what he is talking about.
As of 2021 discord has received a TOTAL of $980 million in VC money. Ok that seems like a lot until you look at their year over year revenue:
From ONLY nitro subscriptions: Year Revenue ($mm) 2016 5 2017 10 2018 30 2019 45 2020 130 2021 200+
So as of 2021 discord has created $420 million in revenue.
This isn’t counting anything from 2022 or 2023, because now server boosts are a thing and also discords version of Patreon rewards that server owners can implement (discord takes 30%).
So while discord isn’t out of the VC hole yet, it’s on a meteoric rise and making more and more money every year.
Data retention: I never have seen a discord official policy that they don’t delete data ever. I specifically remember a blog post where they outlined deleting data from servers when it reaches a certain age. This was the blog post where they were detailing a database move. I cannot remember specifics. I did some searching about discord policies on deleting attachments and came up with nothing. To my knowledge discord has no policy stating that your attachments will live forever. That said, storage is cheap. Storage is very cheap.
Morally lazy: Honestly easily when someone says something like this I tend to think that they are probably a blithering idiot who has no idea what they are talking about (in a lot of cases this is true, and usually someone with a chip on their shoulder). In this case after reading the post I have come to some conclusions…
The author does not use discord much The author does not nor has he ever paid for nitro The author does not nor has ever run a server with actual people on it The author is someone who thinks that matrix is in any way feature comparable with discord (it’s not, not even remotely close)
The author is weirdly offended by discord referring to servers as “servers”. Because ackshully “a server is, generally speaking, a piece of compute that operates some software that serves users in some way. Each server is isolated from each other server, and they may run a mariad of difference pieces of software. They may be based in different countries.”
This is the dumbest and most pretentious point possible, and the fact that it’s passed off as a supporting point to the post makes it impossible for me to take the author seriously.
And then there’s this gem: "Discord is not a financially feasible company. Let us examine some very conservative projected operating costs:
- 500 SF employees * $150,000/year
- 50000sqft SF office space
- 15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average"
So all employees of discord make 150k a year? I’d love to see some supporting evidence there.
50000sqft office space Do we know how much rent discord is paying? Not to my knowledge
15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average" Storage is cheap.
A company making upwards of 200 million a year. "Not financially feasible“? In my mind this points to the contrary.
Just one particular thing, I’d honestly be shocked if any IT-focused employees at Discord who are based in SF are not making $150k. I started at a much smaller startup in SF back in 2017 making that, as a junior-level position. Every other company I’d interviewed with before being hired there was offering around that for my role as well. It’s anecdotal for sure, but it doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable salary to use as an average. Especially since the execs’ pay would easily drag that up in reality.
My biggest gripe with Discord is with people using it for FAQs or help for their communities. Search engines cannot index it and you have to sign up to see anything there. It’s very annoying to join a server, ask a question only for someone to just type “!faq” and have a bot reply with an FAQ post. Why not just have that somewhere else?
It’s not really Discord’s fault but I also don’t see them trying to do anything to alleviate the problem (why would they, more users is good for them). Are “forum-like” tools that difficult to set up? Even Reddit allows people to create subreddits easily. That is a much better solution in my opinion. Is it just that they’re already familiar with Discord so they use that? That’s my gut feeling.
100% my biggest gripe as well. It’s honestly a huge issue that needs to be addressed. I will never understand why the people that continuously put their stuff behind Discord’s walls can’t see that, and I don’t know why Discord is their first choice for dumping information.
Moral and ethical implications aside, I really want Discord to die specifically for this reason. Discord servers are increasingly becoming home to things that belong on forums and/or wikis, and it’s ridiculously frustrating. Literally 90% of the servers I’m in are designed for support for some piece of software or hardware. Just make a forum, I beg.
Like some other posts say, no idea if OP wrote this, but if the author is looking here, I want to offer constructive criticism.
There are a truly uncountable number of unjust things going on right now. There are possible solutions to many if not all those problems that exist. But no one has enough time I’m their life to fight every single injustice going on.
Do you still eat eat chocolate? A lot of chocolate is still produced with what is practically or entirely slave labor. Do you eat almonds? Those are using enormous amounts of water in California, which is already facing a mega-drought. China still has horrible labor practices in manufacturing. Most Americans still have to drive cars and that’s destroying the environment. I could go on for hours.
The point is, no one can possibly fight for every cause. Even the most dedicated, well meaning person will have to (indirectly) participate in some injustice. It’s honestly better for people to pick their battles. Find something you might have the power to change and focus your energy on that injustice.
But don’t lash out at people who are already overburdened by late-stage capitalism and don’t have the knowledge or energy to fight the same fight you are.
Have you seen The Good Place? There is a part of this where they’re investigating the “points” system that is used to determine who does and doesn’t get into the eponymous Good Place. It’s a dead simple system: you do a good thing and you get some points, you do a bad thing and you lose some points, the more gooder or more badder the more points get added onto or subtracted from your total, and anyone over a certain threshold gets into the Good Place. It makes perfect sense, and it’s exactly the kind of system I think most people would design if they were the ones given the task. I know it was my first idea when I considered the problem, and it seems like that system worked well enough when it was first rolled out. On investigation, the characters find out that
spoiler
no one has gotten into the good place for centuries because the nature of trying to survive in a system as complex and interdependent as the one humans live in means that everyone has to either choose to simply go without what they need to live or participate in some form of evil. There’s even a character who understood the nature of the good place, and led every second of his life abiding by the principles that he know would allow him to gain entry. He dropped off the grid, became self-sufficient, and is self-sacrificing to the point of being personally miserable. He does everything he can to maximize the good he puts into the world, and he accumulated about half the points he would have needed under that system to get into the good place.
This is something that comes up in leftist circles from time to time as well, and a place where I break from doctrine. There’s a common phrase that popped up as a reaction to what you said above, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. Everything involves exploitation of the environment, or of labor, or generating waste and other externalities that you’re just not gonna deal with. You’re gonna have to do something unethical in order to create more value than you invest in something. But, on the other hand, we need to live here. We don’t have the luxury of designing a system from scratch with ethics at the forefront, our kids are hungry today. So you do your best, you keep your consumption to a comfortable minimum, you use the paper straws when you can, you try to shape policy toward decency with what little power you have and you don’t hold yourself responsible for what’s out of your hands. There are no ethical consumables, but their can be ethical people.
I am trying not to judge the person (specially since it says it is unfinished) but the arguments are so poorly written and there isn’t anything external to use as source of the accusations that my first thought was to think it was someone immature that want to feel good about their choice of not using Discord.
I don’t know OP, I don’t think this should is something worth sharing.
More and more the chickens are coming to roost with the venture capitalist fueled modern internet.
So many services take the money and either reinvent a wheel or dont pretend to but offer the same service but for FREE. Then once they gain their audiences and cripple the competition they either drop all the customer first policies and start embracing anticonsumer monetization, or they raise prices so that essentially it’s the same as the old industry it was “disrupting” (but like with an app so totally different).
If they dont do that, or fail at doing that, then they wind up freefalling into decline and possibly going out of business as the venture capitalists realize they waited too long before passing their investment onto someone else and got caught holding the bomb when it went boom.
That said I understand why people use discord. It’s a feature rich free to use chat app that also does voice chat very well. It makes the barrier of entry for starting a group chat easy and free. It’s mature software that also runs really well. I think for a lot of users they dont care if the business model is unsustainable because that model benefits them and if and when discord goes broke or starts making bad choices then they will jump onto alternatives.
Services still in the first stage of the enshittification cycle are always fun to use
Right? And at this stage, it’s basically subsidized by venture capitalists looking to eventually turn a profit. I see nothing morally wrong with enjoying a product or service paid for by a greedy billionaire.
I mean, you’re going to get screwed by those same greedy billionaires if you invest anything of yourself and your community in it and it enters the next enshittification stage.
Which it probably is on its way to doing.
But in the meantime… wheee!
That’s probably true, but there are always alternatives.
If you can convince my friends to switch to Matrix I’d appreciate it. Until then I guess im lazy.
Fellow lazy person here. My various circles are pretty much all on discord since pandemic started. We’ve hopped platforms many times before, and given the uptick of enshittification on other platforms lately we’re sure we’ll do it again. Maybe even soon. But not yet!
See you gotta play the long game, when it starts getting real bad and people start looking for something else boom, you’re already got the new place.
I agree im already on a self-hosted Matrix instance, my wife and I use it exclusively to communicate. I’m ready and waiting!
That’s your issue with Discord? Not that it’s a privacy nightmare, not that the users are toxic, it’s that it’s taking money from the poor starving venture capitalists. That seems like a feature to me.
Are there any good alternatives?
We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.
Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.
Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.
I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.
My main concerns with Discord are:
- They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
- It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
- It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).
Revolt is a FOSS discord clone, where its possible to self host a server. They’re very small though, something like 120K users and the devs are uni students. Funnily, they just moved to the Discrim model.
Currently only available through web and windows store though.
Sadly there aint much of other normie alternatives, and well normies are the ones who are the most important when it comes to that. Most of my friends are, and it would be really hard for me to even convince them to consider switchig, and for them it might even be a downgrade.
Morally lazy…Yeah No Does the author really live in a real world? There are many reasons why people use a messaging app. These include friends, families, communities. Just because you want to move to all FOSS doesn’t mean your friends will follow you.
I’d really really love for matrix to take off and to effectively replace discord, with continued development so things like stickers are supported in more clients, and to let servers be leaner.
However, if the friends and communities I want to talk to are all on discord, it’s hard to pioneer the alternative chat.
I’ll keep my matrix account and use it when I can, but discord will have to be on all my devices for the foreseeable future
I had to fight to get my friends to move from Messenger to Discord, and man, I dunno if I could convince them to swap to Matrix until Discord’s enshittification levels start reaching the reddit-esque point of affecting the core user experience in favor of profit
That’s kinda the problem with community-based experiences.