Personally, I'm really excited about this. For two reasons:<p>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).<p>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.
Good lord Discord is gonna eat the world without anyone ever noticing. They somehow managed to make a service that was social network, app delivery platform, group chat, community forums, Tumblr, Reddit, Vent/Mumble, internet radio, customer support channel, Twitch, Spotify group sessions, IRC, and now Patreon.<p>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 <i>shame</i> and the market is realizing it with services pushing Discord integrations before Slack.<p>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.
What's their cut relative to using Patreon?<p>Edit: "They get 90% of what they charge; Discord takes the other 10% as its fee." <a href="https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-membership-automod-rollout/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-member...</a>
This is a new resource that Discord launched alongside Server Subscriptions today. Here are some other relevant links.<p>Launch Blog Post: <a href="https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions</a>
Server Subscriptions FAQ: <a href="https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/10423011974551-Server-Subscriptions-for-Creators" rel="nofollow">https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...</a>
A word problem: If it's 90%-10% revenue share, but they have a blogpost (<a href="https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subscription" rel="nofollow">https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subs...</a>) explaining that you need to shoot to make 110% in revenue of the amount you need to take home before taxes, what percent confidence should one have in their ability to manage creators' funds?
And here come the perverse incentives to make channel discovery via ads or creator content feeds. Pay out 90% but keep creators paying for advertising is a similar model to the app stores.
tl;dr it looks like Discord is working to introduce paid servers, channels, etc intended for content creators to monetize fan interaction.<p>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?
I'm betting we're going to see subscription-only Activities[0] here shortly<p>0: <a href="https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-Activities-on-Discord" rel="nofollow">https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-...</a>