Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue

RIP to all those FOSS projects that thought it was good to build their communities solely on proprietary chat. I don’t expect the average folk to understand the ethical, privacy, or ownership issues, but in the software community, I do. Now your members get ads, &amp; those ads are almost certainly expecting to siphon user data (as if Discord isn’t doing enough of that as is &amp; not buying “seem minimally intrusive”).<p>The home base server should be free or otherwise ethical software the community can own, ideally decentralized (in practice, not theoretically decentralized)… &amp; <i>then</i> use bridge&#x2F;gateways if you want to support these proprietary, privacy-sapping platforms.

Maybe, just MAYBE, people will start reconsidering putting their social communities on this awful service and locking their social lives to it.<p>I&#x27;m gonna look into hosting Matrix servers or something.<p>I expect that soon their policy of banning client modifications (for a web app) will be applied to ban users with adblockers.

So far the comments here seem to think they are introducing generic ads in the client, while the ads the article describes is to allow game studios to offer virtual rewards (aka hats) in their games when you livestream your gameplay to other Discord users, and those users (viewers) will then be seeing ads while watching that gameplay. This is somewhat similar to the Twitch Bounty Board for streamers and &quot;drops&quot; for viewers. Discord calls this &quot;Sponsored Quests&quot;, and seems very unobtrusive.

I hate ads, I hope they will limit them to a small amount for free users, but remember the issue Discord has been able to solve: we don’t have to waste hours anymore managing Teamspeak servers. Also it’s much more than a voice-only communication channel, it’s becoming a community, some sort of Facebook group with steroids!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;SPgOM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;SPgOM</a>

Aw man, thought this was an april fool&#x27;s joke with how much they leaned into marketing no ads beforehand.

Does there exist a good, open source Discord alternative yet?

This kills the discord

Are there any laws against enshittification &#x2F; unsustainable business practices?<p>Sounds like an overreaction on my part, given the news is about something as small as ads.<p>At the same time it’s an intentional worsening of the UX to increase profits. It’s possible because the provider has control over user data&#x2F;community. And it’s likely not the last time this is happening.<p>Perhaps we need more laws like in EU, so that the users could seamlessly switch between apps and communicate across platforms.

The enshittification progresses... you hate to see it

&quot;Discord “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” she said. &quot;<p>..For now. Eventually they have to figure out how to get paid.

April fools