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Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you're not in one of these servers, this probably won't affect you.

Even if you are, it's still barely a change

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - "Enshittification". They're now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yep, we've seen that before