this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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I’m shocked they’re moving to ads when I’ve been paying them $4/month for Discord Nitro for several years now. Surely, that revenue is enough for their upkeep???
It's never enough. Growth must be un-ending. Also gotta pump them numbers up for an IPO so they can bail with a pocket full of cash.
It's like how Netflix ended the basic no-ads plan to force people to either pay way more or pay a little less but be bombarded with ads. Serving ads is more profitable than letting people pay a little bit to skip them, apparently.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
I assume that's sarcasm, but no, they almost certainly aren't anywhere near probably from nitro subscriptions. I don't know how many employees they have, but they surely have a lot of developers working on all their features. And that cloud server time isn't cheap either, especially when you're handling video.
They could have stopped adding features years ago.
There's some weird corporate obsession with always constantly "innovating" and "improving". Adding complexity for the sake of complexity. Completely blind and oblivious to the fact that most consumers actually want something consistent that just does what they ask it to without much fuss, not just additional complexity.
Discord has added probably a hundred features since I started using it- ultimately, the only things I ever touch in the app are the same set of 5 that existed back in 2015 when I switched. Text, voice, basic file and image sharing, group servers, and (after they added it) video+screen sharing. Literally everything else is total fluff.
Yup, it's sometimes called box-checking. "Look boss, I did a thing."
Often a thing nobody wanted or asked for.
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord's video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
$4 is probably way more than enough to cover the cost of your account, but the problem is what percentage of people are paying. If it's 1 in 100 or 1,000 and $4 covers 75 average accounts they might be in a bind.