hot take - it’s a good thing discord can monetise without turning to adverts or “curated” feeds.
Good for them, make some money without shoving ads up our asses and still delivering a useful product. This sounds like good news to me if you like discord free without ads
I’m inclined to agree. They have to make money somehow. Selling entirely optional stuff is about as unobtrusive as it gets.
Admittedly, I’m not sure how successful that’s gonna be. I don’t really get the appeal of buying some of those things. But it doesn’t hurt me.
I can at least see it working as a Patreon replacement. Lots of people using Patreon already use discord, so why not do it all in one place? Doesn’t change things for consumers one bit.
How will this be any different from how current servers are run? Rather than getting a special role after donating that unlocks hidden channels, they’re making it more obvious by saying which channels are subscriber-only.
It seems more of a competition against Patreon than anything else. Nobody is going to use this to hide discussion and share subscriber-only secrets, it’s definitely for content creators that want to sell early access and such.
So this is adding subscriptions to servers, and allowing server owners to sell exclusive content. I don’t see this as a negative if the server owners get some of the profits. To me, it seems they are trying to take market shares from services such as Patreon with the move. It might indicate the beginning of trying to close their ecosystem and forcing users to go through their channels for anything related to subscriptions/income. This would be a negative in my opinion, further closing off and fragmenting social communities on the internet. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen, but at least there are alternatives available if things get out of hand.
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