The real question is how do you enshittify a product that is already shit?

And so many things using it instead of a forum for information or questions

A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.

If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.

This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.

The basic maths of it just doesn't work for any sort of bottom up action.

It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.

You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.

There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn't be enough as there are thousands more issues.

It is a unicorn. I dread the day Gaben dies and Valve ends up going public. It feels like the last bastion of decent online services.

Valve’s margins are almost criminal as-is. They make cash hand over fist, and they’re basically a monopoly already.

…So not much might actually change, at least at first?

But this why they don’t need to go public. They have plenty of cash. And it’d just shrink the slice of profit Valve’s owners get.

Still, even private, I’m afraid of what Steam might look like if big competitors like EGS and Microsoft footgun themselves out of the market, and GoG fades away due to their DRM-free policy.

Is discord not enshitty?

I open it and it updates 6 times, then I get a full page ad for nitro. Then all the settings push nitro. And all the “servers” push nitro. 

Slack! 😱

ICQ

Pretty much immediately after yeah

I ran one off a raspberry pi for years before we switched to discord. It just worked for voice chat.

Have you not seen the world? Everything, no matter how horrific, can always get infinitely worse.

The PIF could buy it and ban gay people. Israel could buy it and persecute people against genocide. A rich right wing billionaire could buy it and force even more nazi memes upon the youth. They could make a monetized limit to how many servers one can join that is purposefully below any sane reasonable or normal level. They could make PMs pay per message.

There are infinite ways it can get worse. Infinite.

Until they lock it up where you can't. Or they'll decide on selling data and injecting ads into your convos or streams.

In other words this hasn't been enshittified to the max yet at all. There are new and horrible depths to explore.

They can lock more features behind nitro. They can charge to run a server. They can add servers you have to pay to join. There is a ton of stuff they can do that would just make things suckier for users on the platform.

Oh, sweet summer child.

You just wait.

The best case i can think of is that most of the big tech that IPOd probally helped more users even if they over all quality didnt go up. Kind of hard to measure though. IPO give the company cash but at the trade of stakeholders.

Update: I was wrong you do not need to create an account for each server

Original with misinformation stricken out: I don't think stoat is federated... People need to make a new account for every server, so I can't see this catching on.

I wouldn't personally care, but it's a problem for a lot of people.

If I'm wrong let me know though. I'd love to get away from discord and my attempts to get friends on mumble or TS6 have been unsuccessful.

just like reddit it goes public just after it becomes irrelevant.

This just pointedly isn't true. There are good alternatives, there's just not a single drop-in replacement for the role that Discord fills.

For the most obvious drop-in replacement, you have Stoat, previously called Revolt. It's basically Discord but self-hosted. For text and voice chat you have things like Matrix or Signal, both having the added bonus of being end-to-end encrypted so your shit is private. There's also the old-school options like Mumble and IRC.

For forums there's Discourse, or if you want to go traditional phpbb is still around.

The big problem is that not all your friends are gathered on a single platform. This was always the case before Discord, and will be the case again after Discord. Be the change. Encourage people to switch away, and move your communities. Prune those that you don't need any more.

Matrix (basically federated Discord), which is already used by a lot of open source projects, but due to the Network Effect, is not as popular as Discord. It is possible to bridge Discord and Matrix, but the server admin has to implement that, and isn't the cleanest solution.

Basically all non-corporate social media platforms suffer from the same problem, that being the chicken and the egg.

Stoat.chat is good

Not at all. But even if it was, an IPO always means shareholders want infinite double digit growth, and post IPO companies will do ANYTHING for the shareholders and they all hate the users.

No.