Lupi

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

1. Further clarification on the absurdity of valuation versus true capital.

I feel like there's a lot of money to be made by just not having shareholders and investors.