I’m curious as to how many here choose to use Discord over Matrix and pay them for the Nitro subscription.
Yes, though just nitro basic. Discord doesn’t show ads and claims to not sell my data. While I can afford to do so, I’d much rather pay a few bucks a month to keep it that way.
The number of people in this thread aggressively against a free-to-use service having any kind of way to pay employees and server bills makes me fucking depressed, and helps to explain why most free services I enjoy never seem to stay afloat with just an optional payment-based membership thing.
Edit: To people suggesting less corporate-based (whether FOSS or not) alternatives, that’s totally cool! Just remember that the people behind these projects need some way to pay the bills the same way the corporate ones do, so I encourage you to contribute to them, whether that’s through e.g., code improvements (which doesn’t pay bills but is still helpful!) or plain old donations.
Same. I’d rather pay than have advertising.
Likewise, pay for full Nitro, I can afford it and it’s a platform I use frequently and enjoy, I’m glad they let others who can’t pay for Nitro have a pretty much equivalent service for free.
It’s not free to run a platform, and it’s unreasonable to demand everything for free. It could be more reasonably priced (basic is not too bad), but honestly I’m okay with subsidising others for something like this.
Exactly this. Every one demands everything to be free to use and then wonders why everything gets crammed with ads and micro transactions and data gathering. You want quality software? You have to pay for it somewhere. Even FOSS. Developers have to eat too. Either pay upfront or be enshittified. I’d rather pay up front.
I don’t wonder about it. I expect the ads to show up on free things, but I do not care. I will just move to the next shite free software, and be happy. The only program I would consider paying a subscription for would be a drawing program. You get to make money from a drawing program, so it levels out the subscription cost
I dislike the way discord promotes their paid subscription which is nitro. Not to say, discord went the regular way of all of the social apps from the very niche tool for one exact thing to becoming all in one app and trying to justify it as a reason for pressuring users into buying subscriptions.
While discord tries to be something for new generation of users it is still deeply rooted in partly old - partly new management view of what success is. And i, honestly dislike it. And disliking something doesn’t make me feel better about paying for it
For me personally, while Discord doesn’t outright state that it sells my data, its monetization model is not as transparent as I’d like.
I highly doubt that Nitro subscriptions cover all of Discord’s expenses.
Don’t they make money by charging massive servers a fee ?
Where did you get this from?
Maybe they are thinking about server boosts?
I’m not really sure what the point is. I use Discord regularly, but have never seen any ‘must-have’ reason to get Nitro.
Same here, couldn’t care less about cosmetics on an app that I use to chat with friends while playing games. Non-cosmetic advantages aren’t really that great either, there are always better ways of file sharing when you get caught onto that 25mb limit. I guess it may differ for people frequenting on public servers though.
I used to be fine with Nitro because I didn’t mind supporting a service I liked being free for everybody else. These last few months I have been seeing big red flags of enshittification with the introduction of a layer of cosmetic microtransactions you can only microtransact if you’re a Nitro subscriber
It’s probably time to start planning my exit, but I haven’t dug into the details of what next steps are gonna look like for me.
It’s currently nitro only. They’re going to make it available to everyone and give nitro users a discount.
Lmao no
It’s a chat room app. So long as I can chat in the rooms, I don’t need anything else. All the stickers and doodads they offer with the subscription are completely meaningless to me.
No, because I hate Discord and only use it because many people refuse to communicate with anything else.
Yeah. It replaced message boards of old but it doesn’t fill the same purpose. It’s next to impossible to build a knowledge base there, for instance. It is optimised for an endless stream of shitty memes, though.
No, I dislike discord and only use it because friends use it. Half the time it seems to switch inputs or beg for subscriptions and I can’t even upload a screenshot because “your files are too powerful” lmao.
It’s basically Microsoft Teams for gamers. But teams at least allows full file uploads.
Eagerly awaiting a superior platform to take over.
Remembered the days when you had to pay for a Mumble or Teamspeak server?
Don’t know about Teamspeak, but you never HAD to pay for Mumble. You could just run the server on any machine you wanted, including the same one as your client.
I assume you still can, for that matter.
No. Hell no.
I’ve been using discord since mid 2018, and got Nitro shortly after. Loved longer messages, bigger file uploads, and HD screensharing, especially after Mixer went down (FTL streaming was the only service that let me share my gameplay to friends fast enough for them to react).
That moved to Discord Classic, I kept those things that I use daily, and its worth it to me. It took a lot of convincing to get my friends to migrate from my self hosted Mumble server to Discord for voice chat… Before Steam revamped it’s friends interface, there weren’t a lot of good options. What were you gonna use, Skype? Teamspeak?! Discord isn’t nearly as valuable today, in 2023, but at the time it was worth it. Till it starts to come apart at the seams, not sure why to switch.
Yes, basic for the emotes.
Some interesting attitudes in this thread towards people who pay from people who don’t pay.
Wtf is that?
Nope.
I paid for it for a few months. I did it mostly to throw them a few bucks because I have heavily used their video calling for years.
The only feature I found remotely valuable was 1080p streaming. My friends and I often do movie night on Discord, and being able to watch full-res at higher bandwidth was nice. I also used the feature that let’s you post longer messages, but I consider that bullshit because that’s just an arbitrary restriction they impose on free users to try and drum up cash.
I’ve since cancelled because I’m unhappy with the features they’ve been using my money on. I don’t care about animated profile gimmicks or crappy video call games. And I don’t like the way they shove them in your face when you open the app.
I sometimes gift it to friends I run a discord server with around 150ish people, so discord tends to be a platform I spend a lot of time on. As it stands now, I don’t have major qualms with the developers of Discord, so for now, I don’t mind spending money on it.
Surprised to see the people here not using Nitro.
I’ve been paying for Nitro for about a year, I use the features frequently. Gif Display Picture, Banner, large upload size (500mb), high quality streaming. I’m pretty much streaming my games to my mates any time on my machine and they do the same, so better quality stream really increases our quality of enjoyment. I boost several friends large servers with the boosts we get. I like my profile to be flashy and care about it, and discord is on 99% of the time while my machine is on, on my second monitor along with YouTube. I use most of the features Nitro advertises, so I don’t mind paying 20m of work a month for it.
Lmao imagine typing up paragraphs just to boast about your fucking salary 💀
Do you really like to feel superior to poor people that much with your 10k a month? And then acting surprised that the disgusting poors can’t afford to pay a monthly fee for fucking hi-res GIFs or whatever
The fuck? Nitro is like $10/m or something, 3x that is only $30/h, which is a pretty standard wage for anyone working in Australia.
I’m on Matrix because I want to be, I’m on Discord because I have to for certain communities. I’d never pay for Nitro.