For some reason I think people are hoping they’ll break the chat app treadmill (gain users and community by giving service away for free, try to monetize these communities, go out of business because chat is a solved problem and you can’t offer anything comparable to your competition who is still in the “give away service” stage). This time will be different, sure…
Their business model is selling premium. But, I’ve never met anybody who’s paid for it.
I bought the server boost once, hoping it would improve the audio quality of my little channel. There was no discernable difference, and as I do not need more dancing blinking emojis, I canceled the subscription again.
Discord's voice codec, which seems to be based on Opus, delivers surprisingly high-quality audio even at lower bitrates. Additionally, its integration with Krisp for noise filtering enhances its performance, making it one of the best voice chat services I regularly use. This observation comes from my experience of frequently using voice chat over connections with high latency, where Discord has consistently presented the fewest issues. Ironically, this efficiency somewhat diminishes the appeal of boosting a server for improved voice quality, which is both unfortunate and amusing in a way.
Everything will succumb to enshittification, yes. It's a matter of jumping ship at the right time and getting the five or so years you can out of the next generation while it's still good, and staying ahead of the wave like that.
For some reason I think people are hoping they’ll break the chat app treadmill (gain users and community by giving service away for free, try to monetize these communities, go out of business because chat is a solved problem and you can’t offer anything comparable to your competition who is still in the “give away service” stage). This time will be different, sure…
Their business model is selling premium. But, I’ve never met anybody who’s paid for it.