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Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform (archive.is)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

384 comments fedilink hide all child comments

They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won't last. They're going full Microsoft Skype mode and it's only a matter of time.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (3 children)

In 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/

[–] Dark_Arc 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I haven't given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.

The entire premise of Discord's free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide "free service" based on venture capital like that.

TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they're a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).

Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it's received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

If I'm not mistaken, they are a private company.

Granted, they're a private company with a goal of getting an IPO soon, though.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Revenue is not the same as income. Maintaining cross-platform apps and hosting nearly a decade of messages and media attachments is gonna eat into that. Also, Discord is in fact a private company.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Correct. I did not locate a source for their expenses or profit margin. If someone can provide, I would be happy to update.

[–] Desistance 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Google says storage is cheap. This is solely for profit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

That's not how hosting a platform works. The storage might be cheap per GB, but the database management for something on Discord's scale is a complicated and expensive feat of engineering: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages