man, as someone who used to be so into foss/privacy i refused to use anything that i couldn’t compile/host & giving out my gpg key to friends, & someone who used to always make charged, sweeping generalizations like the title of this article, reading this just made me remember why people didn’t like to talk tech with me. i was so focused on always spouting why every app/software/os everyone used was “evil” (with poorly thought out & overcharged arguments, because i was coming from a place of anger & “justice” rather than logic) that i became insufferable to have a conversation with. i’m not gonna knock the author too much because i know it comes from a place of passion & morals, but this person has really fallen into the trap of radical black & white thinking that plagues the field of foss so much.
op, if you are the author of the post (or if the author happens to be reading), my advice to you if you want to reach people better would be to avoid generalizing/judging (& any non-logical statements at all) when advocating for foss/against propietary services. always blame the companies, not the users, because most users are just uninformed. remember that software is not a political or moral issue to most people, it’s just a tool & they don’t research or know anything about it beyond that. all that headline is doing is losing the target audience - no one likes to be told they’re “morally lazy” for simply texting their friends & not knowing about issues in an app. if you are going to post sweeping judgements like this, then at least make sure the article is at least finished before you throw it out there, or else it’s gonna leave a really bad taste in people’s mouth.
on a positive note, the rest of the site is really cool; reminds me of the site i used to have up in high school. i really liked the “places” & “strong women” sections on the abyss page.
The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.
I use Lemmy to talk to strangers, but I use discord to talk to specific people. Unless I can convince the vast majority of them to switch to matrix it doesn’t matter how much I prefer the foss service, it’s useless to me. I still have an account, sure, but I don’t use discord out of laziness. I use it because matrix literally can’t provide that service.
People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?
These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It’s like people that were mad at “any mods not privating their subreddits” during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it’s almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it’s also engaging with the people there
I use a discord bridge to connect to communities while using matrix. When new communities pop up, I try to convince people to switch to matrix. It’s not perfect because I still need to run discord to connect to video calls on the platform, but I don’t need it running on my phone or in the background on my computer all the time, which is really nice.
My biggest gripe with Discord is with people using it for FAQs or help for their communities. Search engines cannot index it and you have to sign up to see anything there. It’s very annoying to join a server, ask a question only for someone to just type “!faq” and have a bot reply with an FAQ post. Why not just have that somewhere else?
It’s not really Discord’s fault but I also don’t see them trying to do anything to alleviate the problem (why would they, more users is good for them). Are “forum-like” tools that difficult to set up? Even Reddit allows people to create subreddits easily. That is a much better solution in my opinion. Is it just that they’re already familiar with Discord so they use that? That’s my gut feeling.
100% my biggest gripe as well. It’s honestly a huge issue that needs to be addressed. I will never understand why the people that continuously put their stuff behind Discord’s walls can’t see that, and I don’t know why Discord is their first choice for dumping information.
Moral and ethical implications aside, I really want Discord to die specifically for this reason. Discord servers are increasingly becoming home to things that belong on forums and/or wikis, and it’s ridiculously frustrating. Literally 90% of the servers I’m in are designed for support for some piece of software or hardware. Just make a forum, I beg.
The author of this post seems to not be super aware of what he is talking about.
As of 2021 discord has received a TOTAL of $980 million in VC money. Ok that seems like a lot until you look at their year over year revenue:
From ONLY nitro subscriptions: Year Revenue ($mm) 2016 5 2017 10 2018 30 2019 45 2020 130 2021 200+
So as of 2021 discord has created $420 million in revenue.
This isn’t counting anything from 2022 or 2023, because now server boosts are a thing and also discords version of Patreon rewards that server owners can implement (discord takes 30%).
So while discord isn’t out of the VC hole yet, it’s on a meteoric rise and making more and more money every year.
Data retention: I never have seen a discord official policy that they don’t delete data ever. I specifically remember a blog post where they outlined deleting data from servers when it reaches a certain age. This was the blog post where they were detailing a database move. I cannot remember specifics. I did some searching about discord policies on deleting attachments and came up with nothing. To my knowledge discord has no policy stating that your attachments will live forever. That said, storage is cheap. Storage is very cheap.
Morally lazy: Honestly easily when someone says something like this I tend to think that they are probably a blithering idiot who has no idea what they are talking about (in a lot of cases this is true, and usually someone with a chip on their shoulder). In this case after reading the post I have come to some conclusions…
The author does not use discord much The author does not nor has he ever paid for nitro The author does not nor has ever run a server with actual people on it The author is someone who thinks that matrix is in any way feature comparable with discord (it’s not, not even remotely close)
The author is weirdly offended by discord referring to servers as “servers”. Because ackshully “a server is, generally speaking, a piece of compute that operates some software that serves users in some way. Each server is isolated from each other server, and they may run a mariad of difference pieces of software. They may be based in different countries.”
This is the dumbest and most pretentious point possible, and the fact that it’s passed off as a supporting point to the post makes it impossible for me to take the author seriously.
And then there’s this gem: "Discord is not a financially feasible company. Let us examine some very conservative projected operating costs:
- 500 SF employees * $150,000/year
- 50000sqft SF office space
- 15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average"
So all employees of discord make 150k a year? I’d love to see some supporting evidence there.
50000sqft office space Do we know how much rent discord is paying? Not to my knowledge
15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average" Storage is cheap.
A company making upwards of 200 million a year. "Not financially feasible“? In my mind this points to the contrary.
Just one particular thing, I’d honestly be shocked if any IT-focused employees at Discord who are based in SF are not making $150k. I started at a much smaller startup in SF back in 2017 making that, as a junior-level position. Every other company I’d interviewed with before being hired there was offering around that for my role as well. It’s anecdotal for sure, but it doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable salary to use as an average. Especially since the execs’ pay would easily drag that up in reality.
