One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).
Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.
I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
> Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
This one, mostly. Discord has the "cringe" (or at least, silly/quaint/unprofessional, take your pick) "uwu Gamer" feel because that was its target demographic when it launched and is probably still its "home base". It's broken into more social uses by a wide variety of social groups (especially younger generations who like the silly Discord is for Gamers theming in a weird post-ironic way, because it is just memes all the way down; social groups built around group chats of memes can laugh about the silly gamer memes, too).
> One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).
Yeah, Discord weirdly seems more trustworthy by seeming so unprofessional and silly. Part of that is "yeah, it will be easy to toss if it gets worse", but part of that is how much on the internet "unprofessional" and "silly" is frowned upon. ("You'll sell less ads." "You'll have fewer corporate users." "Complaints" like that.) That also seems as much a feature as a bug: Discord's branding sells less ads, good. Ads seem to be killing the "professional" web.
I also appreciate Discord's weird monetization tools today. Nitro memberships are personal in a weird way that most social media isn't. They mostly just give you more emoji and other memes tools. You don't have to get your whole social network to buy in to the membership, you can just do it for fun for yourself. Same with selling the silly animated name plates and profile cover picks, it's mostly harmless fun that doesn't make the experience worse for everyone and encourages Discord to focus on individual interests on the platform to keep them having fun and buying silly things, rather than the interests of other big corporations or ad buyers or "professional users".
Discord's monetization also makes them come off more trustworthy than other social media companies. Any transaction where I, the user, am also the customer, automatically feels more trustworthy than one where the user is the product.
Hopefully this helps then fend off enshittifying a little longer than most.
One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).
Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.