Bad. It’s always bad for the user. It’s good for the people at the top, but the reason for going public is never ever for the benefit of the consumer.
The reason is that even if the initial buy-in helps fund innovation, that will inevitably be replaced by enshittification as the board of investors demand “line must go up.” You can’t be consumer focused and chase profits; they are mutually exclusive.
You’re welcome
I don’t think stoat is federated… People need to make a new account for every server, so I can’t see this catching on.
I wouldn’t personally care, but it’s a problem for a lot of people.
If I’m wrong let me know though. I’d love to get away from discord and my attempts to get friends on mumble or TS6 have been unsuccessful.
just like reddit it goes public just after it becomes irrelevant.
Legit question: when has any company’s IPO led to improved anything for end users?
The best case i can think of is that most of the big tech that IPOd probally helped more users even if they over all quality didnt go up. Kind of hard to measure though. IPO give the company cash but at the trade of stakeholders.
If nitro was $10-15 a year I’d have signed up ages ago. $10 a month is more expensive than my mobile phone plan.
Bad
Discprd sucks, but there is no good alternative.
This just pointedly isn’t true. There are good alternatives, there’s just not a single drop-in replacement for the role that Discord fills.
For the most obvious drop-in replacement, you have Stoat, previously called Revolt. It’s basically Discord but self-hosted. For text and voice chat you have things like Matrix or Signal, both having the added bonus of being end-to-end encrypted so your shit is private. There’s also the old-school options like Mumble and IRC.
For forums there’s Discourse, or if you want to go traditional phpbb is still around.
The big problem is that not all your friends are gathered on a single platform. This was always the case before Discord, and will be the case again after Discord. Be the change. Encourage people to switch away, and move your communities. Prune those that you don’t need any more.
There is no alternative because the software is irrelevant. The communities are what’s good about it, and the alternatives don’t have that.
Sure, if you want to start a chatroom wuth sone friends, you can do a lot better than discord, but if you want what used to be discussion boards on specific topics, you’re sruck with discord as that’s where everyone went.
Isn’t discord already profitable?
