Reddit’s been on a death spiral for over a year. The API changes are a Hail Mary to try and generate money. This valuation is bad.
It very much isn’t a hail Mary to generate money, they’d have bent over backwards if they’d wanted to keep big players like Apollo and RIF on board, if it had been a hail Mary. 20 million bucks a year is nothing to be sneezed at.
The fact that they left Apollo out to dry shows that it never was about making more revenue, but rather to stamp out competition for their own app. As soon as it has accessibility parity with other apps, it’ll turn off API access for unofficial reddit apps alltogether.
By driving out third party apps, it forces users onto their own, which forces users to view ads.
A year ago, Twitter was bought for $44b. That should have increased Reddit’s valuation, but it didn’t. User growth has also been growing for them. The only reason I can think of for the drop in value is if they had a drop in ad spending. Driving users onto their app where they force them to view ads is one way of driving that ad spending back up.
As a reminder, there’s a megathread about all Reddit-related news here - please direct all discussion about Reddit there. Thanks!
Could the megathread be reposted every ~24 hours with the sum of the changes be included in the top of the post or a pinned comment? I would rather have a discussion about a current development than read something from 1 week ago.
Edit: i saw something about 1 day ago. perhaps you started implementing this. Nevermind.
Argh, what I wouldn’t give for Discord to absolutely tank itself.
Unfortunately, while the reddit “migration” was difficult, Discord would be even harder to move people from - while also not being as easy to just drop on a dime, since at least for myself there are plenty of friends on there that I don’t have another way to contact…
Discord would have to be really stupid and do something really egregious though to get everyone to move off it all at once. The dream? Mumble and IRC, give me those back. I don’t see that happening of course, Matrix would still be nice but it doesn’t really do voice channels well.
Could pair Mumble with Discord, but I think the days of people being okay with having a different app for messaging and voice communication is over (when it comes to gaming surely) after a post-Discord world.
I’m not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people’s concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?
I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can’t operate for free forever. But the only news I’ve heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I’ve been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.
I wouldn’t blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn’t subscribe to them… so I’m not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.
Could pair Mumble with Discord, but I think the days of people being okay with having a different app for messaging and voice communication is over (when it comes to gaming surely) after a post-Discord world.
Also, as much as I love Mumble and its voice quality (and low latency), Discord is much more plug and play. Mumble needs microphone specific fine tuning to work well. Which is worth it for me, but is nothing you can quickly get someone else to do.
Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.
Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.
Just curious, why the criticism of discord? Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t heard anything too negative about them - nothing like the controversy surrounding reddit, Twitter, etc.
Just a personal preference?
A combination of personal preference, and just how much I despise what they’ve done in terms of making information hidden away from the internet - anything on Discord cannot be indexed (and there is no way as a server admin to allow indexing as an opt-in capability), they’re just another big platform that is waiting till it hits critical mass to then start turning against its users (in my opinion).
Oh, and the fact that they couldn’t care less about the Linux version of their desktop client (which is riddled with issues due to being on a grossly outdated version of Electron) also doesn’t sit well with me, but god forbid you try to develop or use an alternative client… In a way, just like Reddit now I suppose.
Unfortunately, unless all of your friends are in the FOSS world, it feels useless to even entertain the idea of convincing them to switch to something else. Just another case of the “Network Effect”…
Not OP, but as someone who uses discord every day, I think I can speak to the general criticism. Discord has way more bloat than what is needed by most out of a communications program. They’ve continued to add “features” that a lot of the user base doesn’t really care about, but take up visual space and operating space. Discord Nitro ads are also on the list of criticisms as it’s nearly constant. I love having a place to easily interact with communities I care about, but if somehow a less “noisy” alternative came along and everyone I care about moved (lol), I’d change in a heartbeat and uninstall discord.
I cancelled my sub because as a paying customer I still get spammed with those ads popped up on top of your user panel.
I didn’t know they stuck around if you upgraded. That’s awful lol
Before I (unfortunately) budged, it was due to inferior usability (imo), bloated experience, and most notably, shitty privacy policy compared to the likes of a (self-hosted) TeamSpeak server. Discord is free because you’re the product, as with any other service.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my own biggest concern with Discord is that it seems to me that they’re inching their way towards either an IPO or acquisition. The former would end with Discord exploiting our data as much as possible, and the latter with years of our data being put in the hands of the highest bidder. Microsoft acquiring Skype was rough; something similar occurring with Discord would be downright brutal. The thought of a corporation exploiting conversations with vulnerable friends who were committed to making very final mistakes before being talked down, emerging and/or failed romances, discussions about extremely personal events et al. is frightening.
It’s more the core of how Discord works then anything. The fact that it’s hard for knowledge to persist, leading to channels just being people asking the same questions over and over.
And it’s not really indexable or searchable, so even if people are trying to provide good information, people are going to struggle to find it.
Thanks for your hard work spez!
also fuck spez 🖕
It warms the soul.
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Couldn’t happen to a more deserving company …
Nice to see that spez’s hard work are making a difference
There is the argument that these sites might not be able to be profitable to begin with…
Be it Twitter, Reddit or anyone else, I don’t know how taking drastic, sudden measures to tighten the purse-strings, while giving the middle finget to users would work to increase or maintain its valuation.
Real time video and audio are a different beast to text. The only way forward for these is P2P, not federation.
Maybe some Matrix like protocol for chat rooms (call them Channels, Communities, Club Houses or something trendy if you want) that also setups a P2P audio room, and a P2P video sharing system.
No one can independently host and transfer the insane amounts of data discord moves, but P2P networks resources for serving data grow linearly with the amount of devices consuming data. And audio/video streaming can be ephemeral, no need to save 80tb of a streamer sleeping.
The thing is how are they going to use the piracy bogie man to make all this ilegal hahaha.
Oh dang, if only somebody could have seen this coming! Oh well, nothing can be done.
