Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica
Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June
On one hand I think people shouldn't use Discord anyway, but also, we need to figure out how to make the services we use sustainable.
make the services we use sustainable
we can start by not relying on startups and corporations at all.
federated solutions like lemmy or matrix have the advantage of not being a capitalist scam with conmen at the top. i'm sure better decisions will be made here when we need more money.
You're right, but even Lemmy is reliant on donations
reddit was relying on donations and banner ads for the longest time too. i honestly don't think a text-based forum will be that expensive to run until its very full of people, i guess well see how instances react over time to an increasing userbase.
Can't seem to catch a break, huh? Why can't we just have nice things?
discord was never "nice".
Discord’s mobile app will have video ads starting in June, the company announced today. The initial pilot for the video ads, which Discord calls Video Quests on Mobile, will offer advertisers the ability to “showcase trailers, make impactful announcements, and highlight premium content” to users, Discord said.
"Impactful." A word that no human outside of marketing uses.
I would never engage in marketing.. except for my own indie projects.
The enshitification continues.
Discord comes with other issues, but I would be fine with services offering an ad-supported free tier and an ad-free paid tier. That's been a thing for a while. If Nitro gets rid of these ads, then that seems like a possibly sustainable approach to me.
Of course, this is ignoring Discord's other issues, like their handling of user data. I'd love a service like Discord that was fully e2ee, even if it had an ad-supported free tier (without tracking) and a paid ad-free tier. Existing alternatives often lack some Discord features, like screen sharing and voice chats.
Their problem is probably that they actually took too long to monetise it.
Before Discord, groups were often paying for hosted team speak, ventrilo or mumble servers. Then along came discord with it's VC money and did what they did and more for free. Now most people probably are not willing to pay for what used to be a paid service.
That's the silicon valley way though, get people hooked, then monetize.
Where are most people going to go, back to teamspeak? Nope, most are going nowhere, just like most users didn't leave reddit.
Edit: God damn autocorrect needs to chill
Maybe I'm just too old (or not enough of a gamer), but I've never used Discord for screen sharing or voice chat. It's basically my current ICQ.
If I want to voice chat, I have this weird thing called a phone.
Discord's call quality is 100x better than a phone call, btw.
The last thing I want to do with complete strangers is give them my phone number lol. Aside from obvious privacy concerns and call quality concerns, Discord is internet-based, so I don't need cell service or international calling to talk to people.
Screen sharing during voice calls is super helpful as well. It's a pretty major feature of Discord, Teams, and I believe Skype (RIP), but Teams is not really any better than Discord and a lot more bloated.
or not enough of a gamer
Yeah, Discord's easy/free voice chat was the reason it got so popular. It was so much easier to use than any of the alternatives, and in-game VC was a mixture of piss-poor quality and full of toxic 14 year olds.
Sooo, where will people go next? What alternatives are available?
For "voice chats with text", Mumble. Hopefully Jabber or in the worst case scenario Matrix for the general use case.
Matrix, Revolt
Gimme push to talk.
I personally use Matrix for text and Mumble for voice, but most probably won't go anywhere. Discord is convenient, and most users won't care enough about some extra ads to put in the effort to migrate.
Yeah. I mean ill probably stop using the mobile app but unless others migrate I'll still use the desktop version
Is there an alternative app that offers a centralised account service but with user hosted servers?
Matrix/Element allows for mixing different servers for each part of the stack:
I mean Matrix works across providers, so don't think you need a centralized account service - just like there's no central account service for email.
