cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17617609
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
I’m so tired man. I just want it to stop. It feels like everything nice is slowly being squeezed in all aspects of life.
Anything that capitalism touches or influences has begun to choke us out. It just seems to continue and doesn’t seem to ease up or improve. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but the past 4 years felt like things accelerated quickly
This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.
But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.
I like how you highlighted the main problem.
Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.
I’ve been using Discord almost since launch, and in that time, not a single feature did I find as an important addition to the program. It is now much more bloated with unnecessary stuff, stuff for which they paid those talented devs you mention.
I would have been perfectly content with a one-time payment to use it and it would have worked perfectly well for them with that model if they didn’t get greedy and want to stuff it with random junk to justify a subscription.
I don’t mind paying as long as it’s not a subscription scam for no reason at all.
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I’ve never really used it.
It does mean I’m excluded from some FOSS projects’ support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P
ideally such changes to advertising and the ToS arbitration clause removing consumer rights will help give a lot of the open-source communities a gentle push to get off of discord. It’s become far too central to too many communities and is impossible to search for knowledge.
deleted by creator
I’ve only ever used it in browser to limit what it can see on my machine. I was told by one of my coding professors that one of the signs of a virus is if it monitors what apps you’re running, I’ve been cautious ever since of anything that does that (obviously it isn’t the only sign and isn’t instant virus bin, like I have an app that monitors GPU usage and throttles apps to keep from cooking my machine)
Hopefully those FOSS projects will gain some sense as discord becomes more shit and will leave. One can hope.
I never understood how a chatroom took off as a tool to document stuff. Who seriously thinks this is a good idea? 😵
If a project only has Discord for support (no docs, no bug tracker), I’m not using it. Don’t want to deal with trying to find anything in Discord.
Most projects still haven’t left GitHub…
xkcd 743 moment
Did you memorize that number? 😮
“Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings.”
For now. I’m quite sure that option will disappear at some point in the not too distant future.
Sure, but you really expect that option to stay available for very long after 90% of users turn it off and ruin it’s profitability?
deleted by creator
this will always happen unless we move to FOSS
It’s often not the cost of the software, but the hosting costs, especially on a growing platform.
platforms can be peer to peer too, with maybe a cheaper to host tracker. i think its viable for a chat app, like matrix, for example.
overall yes though, i wonder when lemmy is gonna start having these issues, its still mostly run by unpaid volunteers…
I think it’s why many decentralised platforms don’t want very big instances, and prefer them to split off into smaller federated sites.
Hope we get some comparable options yet, I only know of matrix and that one allegedly has tons of security and performance issues.
Can you list some security/performance/feature comparison between matrix and discord? I don’t have the need for these class of product, but I am trying to get the hype behind discord.
I don’t know about discord issues, the hype behind is it mostly that it’s free, very convenient, feature rich and can easily integrate bots. Its the go-to place to build communities nowadays.
Matrix issues that I read about can be seen here https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07 . I haven’t done my own research tho so I don’t know if all of this is (still) true
Almost all of those issues are due to federation. Lemmy shares most of them. Considering that we’re on Lemmy, I’d say it’s mostly a non-issue for us. Maybe use something else for encryption-required communications, but other than that it sounds fine to me.
Lemmy is a public forum, discord servers are usually for invite-only, more closed-off communities, and we’re not talking about a lemmy replacement but rather how this is inadequate as a discord replacement.
deleted by creator
TeamSpeak has always been better tbh. For actual gaming voice chat discord actually sucks, it’s low bitrate and very high latency. It’s benefit was just easy coordination in larger servers without the need to constantly self-host and self-manage your own server like TS.
If only it had screen sharing
I believe teamspeak 4 is more similar to discord than ts3. No idea if it supports screen sharing though
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Sure does, and I hate it. If they add more ads, I’m going to cancel nitro and move elsewhere.
removed
IRC still rules. No ads in my irssi.
Does IRC do voice nowadays? I think that is the main reason people use Discord
deleted by creator
If you mean that in some channels only some people can actually “talk”, I think it depends on the configuration of the channel, but it’s a possibility.
I thought people used Discord because you could have video / audio chats (not sure about this, I’ve used it very sparsely.)
And then there are Open Source projects that use Discord as the documentation repository. Hell is a place on the Internet, apparently.
Discord became popular because it’s a more convenient integration of audio chat for gaming, with text chat: no need to set up a server (like TeamSpeak or Mumble).
People using Discord for official documentation, or bug reporting, are in a circle of hell just slightly below the ones doing the same on Reddit. Community support… they may get a pass.
