It's so unbelievably slick and well architected and god so freaking fast. Slack has got to be quaking in the boots at this point, the bots on Discord put Slack to shame and the market is realizing it with services pushing Discord integrations before Slack.
It took me all of four hours to have a bot up and running that could record all my friends' Spotify history and recommend stuff to them, control my lights, respond to gpt prompts, get build notifications from Gitlab, share my friendgroup Wi-Fi passwords, get Prometheus alerts with working buttons to ack/silence/chatops.
Edit: "They get 90% of what they charge; Discord takes the other 10% as its fee." https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-member...
Launch Blog Post: https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions Server Subscriptions FAQ: https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...
The vibe their docs give off makes it feel similar to how Patreon allows you to get exclusive content and chat direct with creators, but it does feel weird putting a direct price tag on participating on an instant messaging app. Discord is pretty explicit about creators governing their tone so users don't feel a free thing is suddenly not free, but this move does feel like they're just going to encourage more and more of the net to be blocked off behind a paywall. What if I run into financial trouble or simply can't afford to access certain high-value communities like AI/Engineering/etc ones? What if this corrupts the culture and makes it harder to find & create indie, fun communities? What does this look like if they expand it to allow toll meters to be attached to more and more of the Discord experience?
Who wants to create Discord? Or be a Discord creator?
0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-...
1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in).
2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.