Technology

The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.

Yeah, di$cord has definitely been speedrunning the deterioration of their platform.

It's a shame because they started as a darling of the gaming community with a lot of loyalty when people were switching to micro$hit like $lack and team$.

I guess capitalism and endless growth don't actual translate to improved products for the rest of us. Go figure.

It'll be nice when our species moves to decentralized platforms like Matrix, but every day we wait is another day I don't get to enjoy it.

Well they changed CEOs a month ago

Mark my words, any free service that hosts images is on the cycle. I saw it happen to Reddit and Imgur

Promising to host everyone's data for free forever is a promise that only a devil at a crossroads can make

I warned my friends that Discord is looking to go public. Just wait, it's going to get a lot worse.

No need, use discord canary.

You know, I've seen this image at least 15 years ago and thought it was a joke.

Now that I'm older now, I'm guessing this is an actual diagram for implementing and perhaps patenting interactive commercials?

We literally reward people in our society for being as shitty as possible. Can we stop doing that?

🤢🤮

If you're after text, there are a number of options. If you're after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but "where everyone else is" will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.

If you want both together, then there's probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren't centralised, where you're the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that's another topic).

I've prepared for Discord's inevitable "final straw" moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It's worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element...

Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won't fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.

I hope the transition is towards matrix, or something like it.

Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you're doing.

Not great. It's missing discord features like screen sharing and voice rooms (only sort of has them through a third party app, Jitsi, but that experience is... not great).

It also has moderation issues, lacking tools needed to keep spam out and easily control it when it does get in.

I recently deleted my account because there was a spam wave sending out room invites to anti-trans named rooms, and there's no way to mass ignore, you have to click on every invite, click 'ignore' and wait like 15-30 seconds for the server to process.

Related to the above it has performance issues, a lot of UI actions wait for the server to respond, so just have a long delay to them making the user experience feel really crummy.

There are also a bunch of different client apps all with their own features, one will support X but not support Y and the other way around for another app, and there's no guide on what app to use so that's confusing.

Overall it feels like alpha or very early beta software, it works if you're willing to deal with a lot of headache.

Matrix suffers from some pretty poor design decisions and implementations.

I expect its flaws to get ironed-out over the years, but right now people switching from discord to matrix will find their experience severely lacking.

To give some examples, video chatting is not as inuititive in matrix. You can't even test it on your own without being in a server with specific permissions that allow you to use your camera when nobody else is around. Really fucking stupid design decision.

Another example is the lack of channels. It's mind-boggling to me how they're not implemented yet. Matrix will never be competitive with discord until that changes.

Not as feature rich, quite buggy, inherently more private but also less usable.

The above compounds when trying to get the non-techies to use it, because sometimes it doesn’t just work

You couldn't be more wrong.

People actually use the shop. they are spending $10-20 on a profile picture border. Now you are telling them that they can get them for "free"? You bet people will do it. Paid cosmetics have poisoned minds.

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.