1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in).
2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.
This is why protocols are better than walled gardens. The walled gardens have appeal in the honeymoon stage when they're growing, flush with cash, and funding feature development specifically to attract users, way beyond what open source or just benevolently-built software can manage. The money grab and decline that tends to come after is very destructive, not only destroying the business underlying the system, but the things people built on top of it. Network effects mean you have to do significant harm to your users before they're willing to rip the band-aid off, but the monetization always seems to get more desperate until that point is reached. I hope Discord ends up the exception, but excepting that, I hope IRC outlives Discord. It has a good chance at doing so.
Discord are streamlining the process that wasn't particularly complicated to begin with. I'm imagining someone went "wait, why aren't we getting a piece of that pie?", and this is what they arrived at: make fans and communities need to choose where they put their subscription money to, and hope that enough people decide that Discord is the central venue they experience a community.
For Twitch streamers, this might not be as successful as they'd like it to be, if there's more value associated with being a Twitch sub than a Discord sub. Streamers really need to be leaning hard on a Discord-specific product in order to justify a second (or well, primary) subscription, and I don't see a ton of people doing that.
Having to use a fiddly separate system is a pain. I've got more than one membership where the whole community and content is on Discord and the Patreon exists solely to manage subscriptions; having that built into Discord seems like an obviously better alternative.
It's so unbelievably slick and well architected and god so freaking fast. Slack has got to be quaking in the boots at this point, the bots on Discord put Slack to shame and the market is realizing it with services pushing Discord integrations before Slack.
It took me all of four hours to have a bot up and running that could record all my friends' Spotify history and recommend stuff to them, control my lights, respond to gpt prompts, get build notifications from Gitlab, share my friendgroup Wi-Fi passwords, get Prometheus alerts with working buttons to ack/silence/chatops.
This is a relatively trivial amount of engineering work to have feature parity
Edit: "They get 90% of what they charge; Discord takes the other 10% as its fee." https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-member...
> our payment for each purchase will be the price set by you, less ten percent (10%), unless we expressly state otherwise in writing to you. This ten percent will cover transaction costs such as payment processing fees and the cost of providing tools, features, and support described above.
This gives them an edge for cheaper subscription over the alternatives, so you can sell a $1 subscription and get $0.9. Other similar platforms (hyper, upgrade.chat) take a fee on top of the payment processors, so you might get 0.30$ base fee + 3% from the payment processor, and an extra 3-6% from the platform itself.
Launch Blog Post: https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions Server Subscriptions FAQ: https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...
The vibe their docs give off makes it feel similar to how Patreon allows you to get exclusive content and chat direct with creators, but it does feel weird putting a direct price tag on participating on an instant messaging app. Discord is pretty explicit about creators governing their tone so users don't feel a free thing is suddenly not free, but this move does feel like they're just going to encourage more and more of the net to be blocked off behind a paywall. What if I run into financial trouble or simply can't afford to access certain high-value communities like AI/Engineering/etc ones? What if this corrupts the culture and makes it harder to find & create indie, fun communities? What does this look like if they expand it to allow toll meters to be attached to more and more of the Discord experience?
"Sub to my Discord or sub to my Patreon to get exclusive content!" eventually becomes, "Sub to my Discord to get exclusive content!" and cuts out Patreon entirely.
I'm not sure it'll pan out as successfully though, but we will see.
On a personal level I have no problem with this. It's just one way of moderating and curating your community. Not everyone has the time and resources to deal with a free for all.
"The Internet should be free!" that's just not sustainable. I'm sorry but it isn't.
People who think the internet is or should be free, are disconnected from reality. I grew up with what we called farmer vision, but others would know it as rabbit ear or aerial tv. You had 3 to maybe 5 basic channels in your area if you were lucky; and they were all paid for by ads... er... commercials. The idea was that the content was technically free, since you didn't really need to watch the commercials. (You could just go to the bathroom, make a snack, get a drink, etc.) But the paid advertisement was paying for that broadcast, and so you ultimately had to put up with your shows being interrupted.
YouTube does nothing different, really. Yet look at all the flak they get for their usage of the same methodology.
The internet was never free, has never been free, and never will be free. You will always be paying for it somehow; whether it be out of pocket, via attention, or your data. TV was no different, up to the data part; and set-top boxes changed that too. Once those could phone home and report usage, especially to thwart piracy; your data became another potential sales figure for even the tv stations.
I personally would much rather we have an internet culture where we don't mind paying for the things we like, and want to see continue to exist. This would essentially democratize the internet; though it may also induce a segregation of the unwealthy from being able to participate... but those people tend to be children and the poor. Children don't pay for anything, their parents do. And if the poor or their parents don't have enough money to pay for 1-10$ subscriptions on a monthly basis; then they have much more serious things to consider. Like getting a job, or a better paying one. Not their usage of the internet.
Besides, if they already are paying for a basic connection, they shouldn't have much trouble paying for the few things they enjoy to use. Alternatively, they could opt-in to be a data source for free access or something like that. Or see more ads per hour. Keep it more open for everyone.
But that still goes to prove the point. The net is not free. Never has been, never will be. So we would be wise to setup a good culture around it while we still can, before the greediest of us start to make it terrible for everyone, and not just the poor.
I like the concept that Brave browser uses for this reason. It's just too bad that with the way things are going with crypto right now, that it's going to get some bad rep from it likely. Also doesn't help that the devs behind it are... less than stellar. But that's another can of worms aside from this giant one.
Who wants to create Discord? Or be a Discord creator?
0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-...
