I’m curious as to how many here choose to use Discord over Matrix and pay them for the Nitro subscription.

73 points
*

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.

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19 points

Same. I’d rather pay than have advertising.

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10 points

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.

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6 points

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.

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1 point

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

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4 points

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

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2 points

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.

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2 points

Don’t they make money by charging massive servers a fee ?

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3 points

Where did you get this from?

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26 points

I’m not really sure what the point is. I use Discord regularly, but have never seen any ‘must-have’ reason to get Nitro.

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2 points

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.

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1 point

My friends and I like to stream games for each other, and frankly it’s a much easier setup than Twitch (zero setup) and you stream at much nicer quality. You can also do watch parties at full resolution easily.

You have larger file uploads, and higher bitrate for audio. These may not be “must haves”, but they’re all super nice and really convenient.

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18 points

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.

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1 point

It’s currently nitro only. They’re going to make it available to everyone and give nitro users a discount.

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13 points

No, because I hate Discord and only use it because many people refuse to communicate with anything else.

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3 points

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.

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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.

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