Enshittification is not single step. It's more a "boiling a frog"-kinda process.

It probably also says something of the ones that stay: they can keep getting further exploited. And these are the ones they want.

I agree, but, I see some parallels, a Reddit competitor that solved some of those issues, was hardly functional when they killed APIs. There was no competition. Look at us now baby! Still not competition, but, at least there’s an alternative.

I hope I can say the same about discord in a bit. There’s really nowhere for anyone to go, without losing a lot of features. Well, hopefully, talented people are going to migrate to these platforms to bring an alternative to discord.

Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts

I very much doubt whoever thought about doing the math did so, and if they did, that said math made it out of their department. This kind of decision is much more likely to have been a C-suite darling that no one dared speak against or the equivalent thereof.

I’m saying thoughtful organizational decisions are less common than we’d like.

Are there any viable alternatives? Last I looked they all kinda sucked

I think they're already too big to fail. They captured the entire market. There's no real competitor with any kind of noticeable fraction of the market share.

The closest thing to a competitor are business products similar to slack or teams. None of those have anything close to feature parity like high quality streaming at no cost.

I would gladly host something myself, but I can't do it all. IMO this needs a lemmy equivalent with decentralized hosting or something.

Reddits stock performance since that decision isn't likely anything that anyone would want to emulate.

Also, IPO incoming, expect it to get worse.

Is it? Ah, well that would explain it.

I will go onto discord servers looking for answers that a searchable forum or wiki is better suited for. First thing I do is use discord's shitty search tool, and if it works I type my question and the found answer again in the relevant chat for future searchers and get the fuck out of there.

No, you do not need real time chat, you need searchable, permanent presence

why not both? Discourse is really nice but it's a forum, not IRC or Matrix

Yeah, I agree. I hope Discord both fails as a company and as a concept.

Information siloed inside a non-easily searchable interface? No thank you.

Anyone with sense saw this coming when they did the same thing in Australia and the UK but I otherwise agree with your point. I think this is a very calculated move.

When the deadline gets here in a month, 80% of the group that would’ve migrated out of disgust won’t be affected because they just use Discord for group voice chats anyway, and the competition isn’t ready. The rest have been trained to put their personal info out there to anyone who asks for it. And, when (not if) they eventually roll out “IDs for Everyone”, the outrage won’t be nearly as detrimental to their bottom line because it’s already happened before.

I agree, convenience wins in this case, this is why twitter is still "bulletproof".

Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it's not as easily said as done.

Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.

It's doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it's probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.

I miss the days of forums and hate having tobfo to discord for support on stuff

Exactly what I was thinking

Wait, what are people using it for? I use discord for shooting the shit with people about video games and politics.

If its an age-restricted project, sure.

I'm with you.

Considering that age verification will only be mandatory to browse NSFW content, and that without it you can still join servers and keep calling during gameplay as per usual, my bet is that exodus won't happen. There is going to be part of people who will verify, and the unverified half either gonna leave or keep using discord just without NSFW.

Reddit exodus, unfortunately, barely had any impact. Bluesky had a good influx of new users, but it didnt kill xitter. Doubt that there anything going to happen with discord.

Yeah I think people will just strive to keep their servers sfw

There's no way in hell I'd upload my ID. Especially since discord recently had a data breach.

Though, threatening to delete (and maybe actually doing so) might make them reconsider.

I mentioned dropping discord in my gaming group chat. Five non political normies and myself. Literally nobody is fighting to stay on discord. We'll try a few alternatives and even if I've gotta fork over a few bucks a month, I will. Any site that requires id is dead to me.

That's like when people say that this time we won't pre-order games anymore, and the new call of duty is the steam bestseller a month before release.

Yeah I think these articles are trying to push people to leave discord and not actually reporting a real trend. Even on lemmy where people are far more likely to be halfway out the door or wanting to leave discord its still a low amount saying they left.

Across the 20 servers im in i've seen 0 movement. People arent even talking about it.

I assume it's UK/EU's expanding social media laws that are driving this, in addition to Discord's imminent Initial Public Offering coming in March. They're trying to clean house to show how profitable they can be, the same way Reddit created their walled garden by restricting third-party connections prior to their IPO.

It's bog-standard enshittification to please the shareholders.

potentially. it's going to become more of the norm as more nations enforce stuff like this to "protect the kids" coughget your id and know what you're doing onlinecough

Also keep in mind Discord is just about to launch their IPO in March so the timing lines up.

The EU is going to pass a law to enforce this, discord is just getting ahead of the imposition. That's why France and Spain have been on the news regarding social network regulation for under 16.

So when you have to setup a system for 27 countries plus some members of the eurosphere you just do it for everyone and be done with it.