Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon
Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:
why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?
simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:
- garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
- provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
- provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project
forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website
if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project
a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water
I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I'd like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there's a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it's overstating the friction, am i wrong here?
The genie is out of the bottle and discord is unfortunately here to stay for the foreseeable future. What we need are good reliable tools to export all this data to an external service / knowledge base. At least that way they could be picked up by web search and be accessible without a discord account one day down the line when discord goes to shit.
i'm surprised discord has managed to last this long without turning to shit.
seriously, it's 2023 and the service is still free without ads. their entire revenue stream is built on people subscribing to nitro.
i hope it stays like this but enshittification feels inevitable these days.
only if you have a very strict definition of Ad
i’ve never seen ads in discord. they have no advertising program.
no i don’t count those blurbs in the settings menu telling you about features that come with nitro. discord doesn’t get paid for those.
"promotions" telling me to play a certain game on stream in discord (and get some cosmetic item for it) are ads for that game. I don't have a screenshot of it on hand, unfortunately.
I've never seen that before, but I have discord rich presence turned off.
https://www.pcgamer.com/discord-is-doing-reverse-twitch-drops/
They've also done it with Halo and Fortnite that I've seen.
I get ads for nitro since I've moved off of it. It will pop up to try to get me to go back at a cheaper rate and I've had a few times where it was free to start again. Now they've rolled out a server store we'll see more ads.
I became a Nitro subscriber pretty early specifically because I hope it helps them not enshittify their product… :(