A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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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.
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the Discord Nitro subscription has been around for a long while. From what I’ve seen using the platform it seems relatively popular. I’d guess adding ads to the free tier is as much about enticing people onto the subscription (which presumably won’t have ads).
And Nitro isn't exactly inexpensive either, or wasn't last time I used Discord.
Ubtil they go to the Netflix model where users can experience both a subscription and ads at the same time.
I doubt it. Video ads are worth a lot more. Unless they ad them to live streams Twitch style.
That would be absolutely terrible
We need a Federated FOSS Discord alternative built to work with the activity pub protocol. I'm currently setting up an XMPP server, but I hope something like XMPP but works with activitypub gets made some day.
why activity pub? I don't think it is designed to do group chats.
It's not designed for real-time communication at all. ActivityPub is fine for things where it takes a little bit of time to sync everything, but a chat that worked that way would feel very slow. XMPP is a better fit.