i don't WANT to stream for 15 minutes to at least one viewer. i don't WANT to unlock the Coruscant's Pride Wrap
why is my messaging application pushing Star Wars assault rifle textures for a video game i don't even have installed? well, it's all thanks to a little thing called
Venture Capital

discord, like most modern "free" online platforms which promise no ads, is funded largely through venture capital investments from people or firms seeking increased returns
i wouldn't say there's anything by default morally dubious about taking money from people to fund your startup aside from the usual capitalism stuff; the problem here specifically, is the incentives created by your platform's core funding being pinned to ROI.
i cannot stress this enough: a platform's exponential growth will inevitably, eventually, fail. by definition.
there are only so many humans on the planet. only a small fraction of them will be in a position to use your platform (people with internet access at all). out of them, only a smaller portion still even needs a messaging app
therefor, once the market of Gamers in need of upgrading from Skype is tapped, to give investors their promised increased returns, discord needs New Features™!! monetizable ones!!

so, here's something worth noting about the VC world: because so much of it is rich techbros, born-wealthy manchildren, and other oxymorons gambling on the next Big Thing with stupid amounts of casino chips; a company being absurd is NOT a deterrent
your coffee startup suddenly pivoting to the metaverse or whatever is not going to be enough to shake investors, especially if they've already convinced themselves 'the metaverse' is going to itself be the next Big Thing
i just made up the above scenario as a joke. like jonny frakes.
but uh-oh! i googled "coffee startup metaverse" like a FOOL:

that last one is about a roblox map made to get kids excited about environmental activism.
when i was in middle school, for a class once our teacher literally just had us all play FreeRice for an entire period. i didn't see any articles about Mr. Nolan bringing rice to the metaverse.
(which, at the time, would have been second life. anyways.)
So, when does Discord stop needing funding?

you'd assume all of this investment is to help discord continue to operate for years to come, i mean $15 billion in projected value¹ could keep the lights on for YEARS on such a low-rent platform, right?
they've already done the prerequisites for this kind of sustainability; you have to pay for nitro to upload big-ass files, bandwidth saving measures to kick people from empty calls and consolidate identical chatrooms, etc. i have no issues with this; websites are not free.
but, again, Venture Capitalists care about growth. not sustainability. being unsustainable is the "breaking things" part of "moving fast", in the eyes of a shareholder
let's look at another example, everyone's most tolerated membership platform, Patreon:

as pointed out by excellent documentarian Dan Olson in an equally excellent thread on some weird blogging site called twitter, Patreon is not an expensive platform to maintain, relatively speaking. at least, it didn't used to be.
a text and image based platform for people to ask for money from fans, and allow a standardized, reputable place for both parties to be okay giving out otherwise very personal information. shipping addresses for IRL merch, mailing addresses for newsletters, whatever kinds of fun things creators do over there. i wouldn't know!
(my Patreon account got suspended at some point and i'm not sure why, but in order to get it back they wanted my social security number, so like, no?)
especially not now. Patreon's insistence on consolidating creators' works onto its own servers, despite mediator being separate from the media being a good thing for nearly everyone involved, now means that it costs even more than ever to run the platform, and therefor they must take on more venture capital, and generate more monetizable features, and so on, and so on
until this once extremely profitable and theoretically massively scalable platform is now laying off employees to cut costs
after all, how else will they continue to invent new problems to solve, right jack?
In response to the changing environment, Patreon needs to change the way
we operate. Here’s what that means for us:
• First, we’re going to continue increasing our investments in our product,
engineering, and design teams, so that we can deliver the updates to our
product that our creators and patrons need.
• We’ll also maintain our commitment to outstanding service and support
for creators.
• We will restructure our marketing efforts under a smaller, consolidated
team in the near-term, focused on updating our brand, developing creator
resources, and launching new products.
• We will restructure our Creator Partnerships efforts to take a more scaled
approach with a smaller, consolidated team in the US.
• We will reduce the size of our operations, recruiting, and other internal
support functions to align with the new scale and priorities of the rest of
the company.
-Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, 2022
that second bullet point means nothing and is total fluff, but exists to muffle how absurd the idea that they need to scale back in order to "launch new products" is
Patreon doesn't need "new products"! Patreon users don't want new products! they want to continue doing their work in peace while taking contributions, and you guys will keep getting a cut! this is all pointless! absolutely without substance!
bringing it back to Discord: why does my messaging app try to sell me guns?
It's not about sending a message, it's about the money.

dunno about you, but i'm not a fan of typing words, in my word typing program, and having the program overlay the part of the screen where words go with suggestions i instead replace those words with paid symbology.
venture capitalists don't care what the product they're investing in does; they care about how many people are using it, and of those people, how much revenue can be extracted?
so let's think like a VC firm for a second. ew.
Can you sell the user data?
this is a very profitable business, but Discord has, for the time being, been very very insistent they do not sell user data. in researching, i have seen absolutely no credible proof that Discord is lying and doing it anyways. so, at least for the time being, let's be nice and assume they're telling the truth here. after all, data brokering is profitable, but so are a lot of other things
Okay, so then Discord Nitro, how do we make that more profitable?
first of all, get as many people to buy it as possible. so, create a slew of new features to potentially incentivize people who are on the fence, and then offer the original model at a cut rate to catch the poors. what's "great" about this is inflation will cover the difference, given enough time

wait, what was that about youtube bots disappearing? eh, i'm sure its fine.
How dead set are you on that 'no ads' thing?
discord likes to brag about how they don't have ads, which to be fair is a massive plus. ads are terrible.
however... do they not have ads? like, does discord really not have advertisements?

like... is a popup about getting a fortnite skin, or asking me to play halo- are these not ads? are you not advertising a product in exchange for main-stage legitimacy, or is this just called a "collab" or some other euphemism of a sort?
like, a requirement of earning these skins or whatever is that you stream to at least one viewer; you're making your users do the advertising to each other, and, you know, hoping they'll buy nitro for a higher quality stream while they're at it
besides, doesn't this actively work against Discord's rebrand away from being "Gamer Chat"?
then again, that was probably just because selling games was a bad idea. remember that? so, they needed to branch out further, rather than remonetize the already exhausted gamer market they had
now remind me, how dead set is Discord on not selling user data, again?
So what about the usernames thing?

if you're on co-host, i can almost promise you've heard about this, but just in case: discord is changing from having usernames end in a poorly-named 'discriminator' (a series of 4 numbers, especial to the appended handle), to having a core identifying username necessitate uniqueness, with rate-limited change, and an independent nickname tag separately
think of the way old shitty blogs like Twitter do it, your @ isn't the same as your Name, but your @ also cannot be the same as anyone else's @
As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular,
more problems have emerged. The technical and product debt we
incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed
to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people.
The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too
complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.
-Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO of Discord, May 3rd 2023
as it turns out, many considered this a feature, not a bug.
discord is purportedly a messaging app. i don't want people searching for my @ to talk to me on the platform i use to hang out with my partners, and call my sister to talk about k-pop. i do not want to be easily discoverable there.
this is like saying the problem with phone numbers is they're unique and hard to attribute to the owner, unless said owner writes it down for you. why is this a bad thing?
i'm a niche internet personality, enough to the point of having been recognized a handful of times in real life. i don't want people to easily reverse engineer my personal online messenger handle from my name alone.
the old system incentivized sending fans a link to a server, not a handle. if you wanted to talk to someone one on one, then you could write down your handle like you would a phone number; the more interpersonal the medium, the harder it should be to find it without permission
you know what this new system does do, though?
incentivize people to name-squat, thus increasing your userbase on paper. i'm sure that'll be great news to the VCs next shareholder's meeting
even if a creator online has decided to not use Discord, which they have every right to do, if in the future they are left without a choice as it becomes many users only social media by necessity, if that creator didn't become an "early adopter", their handle will most likely have been taken. by an innocent coincidence, or an active scammer, who knows?
and either way, the idea of discord serving as defacto social media isn't anything new; so if there's a massive shift happening in the """socmede""" world, then who is Discord not to shore themselves up to potentially be the next overbloated, dead platform destroyed by its own needless growth?
Discord is a black hole. It's destroying itself & taking us with it.

a platform can only be so dense. you can only feature creep for so long before you are no longer recognizable for your key functionality.
denser and denser, more and more pointless additions which cost money to develop, cost money to maintain, and thus require further investment. and those investors want their returns to increase every fiscal year, not stagnate. it doesn't matter if the platform has successfully found its audience, if it serves its purpose and will continue to make passive returns for the foreseeable future
what's better than money, to a venture capitalist, than more money?
the closer we get to the centre of this absence of light, the more time stretches and warps. you start to wonder, "has Discord always been like this?", you have trouble even reaching out to people because the app keeps crashing, under the weight of a fifth reinvention of the wheel that is emoji 🎡
the justification for layoffs, for pay cuts and benefit reduction and pivots to so-called "AI", is to facilitate this pointlessness, this growth unwanted and unwarranted. to create new ways to show VCs how you're making their money back for them in a cycle of masqueraded investment debt
Yesterday we made an active shift in the talent needs of our marketing
department to better serve our growing business and future ambitions.
As part of this, some difficult personnel decisions had to be made to
meet these goals.
-Discord Rep to GamesIndustry.biz in 2019
you could just let us send messages. but where's the money in that?
PART 2: Preemptive-Passive Writing & Discord's Username Update
- Further clarification on the absurdity of valuation versus true capital.
it's only going to become more evident over time that they should never have been trusted.
i have been warning people against keeping their communities on discord for years. nobody listens, of course, and they're often right not to -- there's no alternatives that adequately fill the niche of "save me from the labor of thinking about it, just give me a chatroom full of people please"
people use discord for a lot of very sensitive communications. this is all in plaintext on discord's servers, and venture capital is going to continue to demand that they do evil things with the trust you gave them to turn a quick buck. they have no reason not to.
I am the sort of psychopath who would actually do this, because I routinely use Discord to stream Fortnite matches in the server me and my friends hang out in anyway.
Tying a bow on all of this: Discord lets you opt out of their data sharing (the thing that feeds their new AI chat bot) but after a friend and I spent nearly an hour and a half streaming Fortnite to each other last night, we got nothing.
Because I opted out of Discord's data sharing.
That shuts the drops off. I didn't get anything for streaming, and my friend did not get anything from me watching his stream, either. He has the data sharing enabled. But I don't, so I don't count as a "real" viewer, apparently.
You HAVE to feed their venture capitalist data harvester in order to get your dumbass Star Wars "freebie", and you have to do it from both ends. I've decided it isn't worth it.
I've been thinking deeply about this for the past few days, and... seriously why? We've had problems like this with Skype, with MSN Messenger, with AIM, etc etc. Why don't we have something that can't be controlled by a singular entity that will pull shit like this?
Uh, turns out we do, it's called XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, formerly called Jabber) and it's an open standard. Mainly used for regular user-to-user instant messaging, there are extensions to add things like chat rooms and voice calling/video streaming. It uses a federated model kind of like Mastodon but running your own server isn't a chaotic nightmare. More deets on the wikipedias
There is a means to share files but it's more Direct Connect-y, rather than Discord's system of being a file and image host on top of being all the other things it does. And there's no way (afaik) to set up a chat room like a Discord guild, with roles and channels and various integrations like Discord has with stuff like Patreon. BUT, the protocol is open and extensible, soo... maybe some bright people could leverage all this to make a client with these missing features? It'd sure as hell be smarter and easier than reinventing the wheel, and hopefully result in something that can't be fucked up.
and most of them aren't tech people and they are on the centralized platform du jour because all their friends are. you fundamentally can't sell migrating to even an objectively better platform without a clear, easily explainable incentive for people who aren't tech enthusiasts to migrate there.
last time i looked into XMPP, there wasn't even a clear answer to what the best server software was for it. I am a VPS haver who keeps node.js up to date and runs multiple instances of ghost and sometimes servers for UT2004, foundry virtual tabletop, and my from-scratch homebrew quiplash clone, and the answer to "what is step 1 to setting this up" was muddy enough I didn't bother.1
it's entirely possible that there is a good xmpp server app and good clients for web and desktop and mobile, but if it's not crystal clear then it will be impossible to convince anyone to start using them.
i'm sure that like me, bright people have limited time and energy, and i don't know what i can offer them that's a good enough incentive to compete with discord, so for now i just kinda will settle.
-
admittedly i had recently been burned pretty badly at the time by how much of an abject nightmare the official server software for matrix was, and i ended up going back to unrealircd/thelounge from that, so my threshold for effort was not what it often is.
I came from XMPP to Discord, funnily enough. It wasn't me who threw my whole friend group in but someone who was sort of an outsider. I can tell you that I've been on Discord for a while, 2016, to be exact. I've watched it grow and grow, from its mistakes and its new features. I personally enjoy the soundboard, because my entire friend group is full of neurodivergents who can get overwhelmed, so ironically, we have a quick little "ploop" sound that we can play that lets everyone know "shut the FUCK up I am overstimmed."
I've had my fair share of looking around for alternatives, and, my little friend group has had no luck finding anything that can be suitable alternatively to Discord.
- Element, previously Riot, we solid, but it was difficult to get people in, but when people did come in, we were greeted with a strange voice chat UI and screenshare without audio. This could have changed.
- Revolt is a promising, early bird alternative that focuses on privacy, but it's still too early to say whether or not it's worth going to, right now, if you just want chat and nothing else, it's great, but for me, they still need to work on the VC communication aspect.
- Guilded is an interesting contender, kind of is trying to compete directly with Discord, it's promising, but feels like it might go the same way as Discord, but hey, at least you get a lot of features Discord offers for free? Screenshare there works fine, just a bit quirky. Can't find music bots at all to satisfy the need of
lounging with the fellas - TeamSpeak 5???? Could self host??? idk???????? no screenshare YET???
My group has a niche I admit, we want low latency screen sharing to go with our chat app, I'd be almost entirely willing on self hosting something that could fill that need, separate from the chat app. Discord has been falling apart around us and it's becoming increasingly uncomfortable, for me at least, to chat with this friend group I've known for more years thatn I have been on Discord, even on XMPP... I just wanna feel safe, while keeping the perks of emotes and working VC...
This is, of course, the entire problem with fighting against capitalism writ small. The capitalist class controls all the resources, they control the media, they can throw infinite amounts of money and person-power at building the Perfect Frictionless Skinner Box. The fact that many of Discord's "features" are incredible misfeatures - I don't actually want to know when the other person is typing or vice versa! I don't want an AI chatbot! I want logs that I can search locally with free-text search rather than unsearchable, unnavigable logs stored server-side! - doesn't matter, the condition has been created and unless people are willing to take a hit by moving away from these platforms to ones without billions of dollars behind them - which means accepting some amount of friction and lack of polish - the only way this changes is when the next big dollar Platform shows up and takes stuff over again. Look at Cohost, how many people have gone back to Twitter mainly out of inertia now that Muskrat's horrible bullshit has just settled in and it's no longer new horrors?
i don't really post here much, and i feel like the 'why' is kind of relevant to the topic:
i don't post here much because while i love the vibes, and i love the "assume good faith first" nature of cohost, i struggle to find people to follow. i struggle to find groups and topics to take part in. i struggle to interact with the site in a way that isn't just venting my spleen about how my ADHD is fucking me over this week. for all i know, there could be millions of fascinating conversations going on simultaneously that i'd love to take part in, but i don't see any of it. i don't know what tags they're in. i don't know what users post cool shit. i don't know where i'm supposed to post, what the etiquette under tags are, and just from passively using the site for a little over half a year, i'm still no closer to figuring it out.
i couldn't use tumblr either for this exact reason.
i did take the hit. a lot of my friends took the hit. we didn't go back to posting on the birdsite because we weren't willing to bear the jank, or because muskrat's bullshit became mundane, but because we don't know how to use the bloody website. we don't know how to discover people, we don't know how to be discovered by people, and the website sure isn't offering any assistance in that regard. learning through social osmosis only works if there's a social to be osmosed from in the first place. how is a new user even supposed to figure out that there's a global feed tag?
always an ex kay cee dee, etc etc

this isn't just friction from lack of polish, it's the lack of a manual, or a tutorial, or anything to help new users who don't have certain assumed backgrounds and prior, applicable knowledge. most alternatives for social media sites or messaging software just fail miserably at this, cohost included. (frankly, it's a problem with most FOSS in general but that's a different rant) cohost's design seems to assume you're on the older side, and you're already familiar with how tumblr operates, and i'm.. well, i'm not. my friends aren't. we have no clue what we're doing, and we can't find the resources to find out, either.
so we just quietly stop posting, and go back to something we did understand, even if we hated it.
And fwiw, this is something that BlueSky intentionally got right almost immediately. You've got your following feed like normal, but right next to it is the "literally anyone on the network that gets more than N likes on their post" feed, for discovery. Plus whenever someone you follow replies to someone they show up in your following feed.
Both of these are temporary, but they're essential discovery mechanisms for bootstrapping each person's network.
Forums had discovery reasonably handled by just being fully open - you had to find the forum itself, but once there all the threads and posts were Right There. Following-based social networks have to provide alternate mechanisms to achieve similar; they can't just rely on things to work out.
A lot's been written (including by me) on how bad discoverability is here. I get it: the lack of such is a safety mechanism, so you can't just search for people, or see who's following who, or whatever else. Probably some of my frustration comes from a place of safety: I'm a straight cis male who generally doesn't have to deal with harassment online. Not to say I never have - but like, on a given day, I'm overwhelmingly likely to be good.
So I get it, but it also breaks my heart, because cohost's vibe is overwhelmingly good and it's so unbelievably hostile to onboarding new people. All the poets I left Twitter with bounced off this place right away. I had one other poet stick around till about week three. I've kept up here mostly out of tenacity, as well due to a few followers who post regularly, and give me something to look forward to in my feed. But sometimes something fascinating gets rechosted and it's only by the serendipity of already following the person who did that that I get to see it. And sometimes, that's fine. I don't expect or want to see everything. But I do want ways of finding people that go beyond searching hashtags and hoping for the best.
Hashtags suck. Maybe not on their own, as a per-post classification thing, but as essentially the only means to find things, they absolutely blow. Even creaky old LiveJournal had an entirely reasonable way of discovering other people, via interests listed in your profile. Something like this (or just a general "tags", a la NeoCities) would be an easy way of improving the discoverability here. By default, no interests, and you get the same protection as you do now. But add some interests and you can find similar people.
Reading the above chain all the way through: I absolutely feel it. All of it. And I'm a little ashamed to say, I've also gone back to Twitter, though in a lesser capacity. I kind of wish I hadn't. I hate using it. But it's literally the only place a lot of my mutuals are, and while I've made every effort to leave and provide trail markers for others, a lot of people just...won't leave. And this place is so quiet. The global feed is mostly just shitposting. I was drawn in by the potential to get back into long-form stuff, and there have absolutely been incredible such posts I've seen over the months, but they're so rare.
There's probably a post to be made about initiative. About how a subset of users will make their home anywhere (see my migration here, to Mastodon, to the small web, etc, all while still keeping up on Twitter), and how there's another slice of users that won't even try. Who in their inertia, or just laziness, keep the worst parts of the web going. Who hold the rest of us hostage. Because the web of 2023 isn't nearly the web of 2003. The set of all users is remarkably less curious. How many people make a homepage these days? How many people interact with the online world beyond the context of taps and swipes, gestures designed to keep people as consumers rather than empower them as creators?
This isn't that post. But I'm thinking about that a lot lately at the same time I'm thinking about how much better this site could be if it provided some other additional and opt-in mechanisms to actually find other interesting people in this corner of the web. I don't want cohost to be Twitter. I just want it to be easier to find interesting people, and to be able to put out additional markers so that others can maybe find me.