Discord is testing a new feature that allows server owners to gate channels behind premium subscriptions

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Popular game-centric chatting app Discord is testing out a new feature designed to allow fans to support creators directly on Discord. Called Premium Memberships, this function lets Discord server owners lock certain group channels or even the entire server behind a paywall. According to the announcement post, this has been a highly requested addition to Discord from content creators, and adds upon previous perk-related updates, such as being able to "boost" servers by buying separate server-related perks for $4.99 a month. These paid tiers would be customizable by the server owners, adding bonuses for subscribing users that include custom roles with a specific color, access to channels, and other perks that people can come up with, at variously priced tiers. Right now, the feature is in private testing, as a "closed experiment".

Today, we’re excited to announce a brand-new feature that we’re currently testing with a small group of communities: Premium Memberships. Yep, you read that right! With Premium Memberships, creators and community owners will have the ability to gate part or all of their server behind a paid subscription. This is one of the most requested features from creators and we’re already seeing many of our communities offering this type of experience through third parties. We’re excited to now allow a select handful to test this experience natively on Discord.

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RichardTheKing

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actually, you can set invites to never expire(for example the one in my sig), it's not the default setting, because *shrugs* fuck you, i guess
Oh so those guys are arseholes then; thanks for the info.
Whether it's intentional limiting, or just negligence, those guys who provide links that expire are arseholes.
 

Julie_Pilgrim

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How about famous people with Nitro? Double the care?
i know youre like half-joking, but yeah, pretty much
Oh so those guys are arseholes then; thanks for the info.
Whether it's intentional limiting, or just negligence, those guys who provide links that expire are arseholes.
friendly reminder to not be THAT guy by making sure that all your invite links arent the type that expire
(and if you dont have discord, uhhh want a cookie? idk)
 
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Tomato123

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I'm all for people monotizing their products and such... But this just seems like it will cause trouble with scams. Is Discord prepared to deal with those dating servers people sometimes have bots advertise in their DMs start monotizing the hell out of themselves and just banning anyone who pays the money? Because that's all I see happening from this.

Most creators already are on patreon. Why would they make their fans pay twice other than greed? Any decent content creator I know would still keep stuff linked in with patreon to avoid charging fans multiple times for what they should have gotten when paying the first time. And if they don't do that, I would question their morals.
 

Deleted member 194275

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Hypothetical example: I need to trade my carterpie for a weedle, I join the biggest pokemon discord server and ask for it.

If they lock the server, requiring payment or subscription, I'll go to the second biggest, and so on.

If they lock all discord, I'll just use other free communication service, and it is over.

Anyway, my opinion is that Discord has not a long future anyway, so make sense for the owners to try to milk it while is possible.
 

LightBeam

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Always hated some information was basically locked behind Discord.
And I really like Discord, but it's not a good place at all to find good information. It's cool for discussions and seeking help, but for example I wanted to download Mario Wii Deluxe modpack and it's just available on their discord, that's not ergonomic at all, doesn't feel like Discord have been made for things like that
Even Guilded works better for things like that, there are forums that are implemented and stuff, it's seems better for communities but yeah, it's not mainstream and I don't know anybody who uses it so I don't use it either. The fact that it's owned by Roblox Company isn't a huge deal to me either, I mean yeah sure Discord isn't a huge company but eh .... If Discord was open source I would support them 100%, but it's not.

Rocket.chat and element.io are cool tho, but yeah nobody uses that to I don't use that either. I just remember Jack in the Shop using rocket.chat because they discord server would always get nuked and it worked pretty good.


Honestly I think I'll try Guilded a bit more. The free version looks cooler, I like customization so I'll check how can I do that, but no nitro needed to use all the emotes I want + free 4k 60 fps streaming is already a huge plus.
 

Marc_LFD

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I use Discord for a few channels so if even these demand money, they can fuck off. I'll delete my account.

Nothing of value lost.
 
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And Server that can get nuked at anytime and all the information lost with it. Discord is a great place to loose everything. I don't get why people buy in so hard to their ecosystem.
I'm very much so a fan of having a local Teamspeak or Mumble server with local backups instead of Discord, but most people don't think this way anymore because of Discord. :(
 

linuxares

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I'm very much so a fan of having a local Teamspeak or Mumble server with local backups instead of Discord, but most people don't think this way anymore because of Discord. :(
Because people are idiots... they swallowed Discord's advertisement hard. Also "I can make my own server" bullshit is the biggest cause.
 

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Man I sure love how Discord just entirely centralized IRC, TeamSpeak, Mumble, and more into a proprietary protocol. Really great outcome of all this.

Also, I love how many enthusiast groups and communities exclusively use Discord as their repository of knowledge and information. Really great to do that, I think.

This will go very well for niche hobbyists in the coming years.
Believe me bro! I don't like it either. A video game forum that had been up for 15+ years closed its doors last year to move to discord - and all that knowledge and info has almost entirely been lost (save for what archive.org could capture - which was some, but not all content).

I'm also frustrated by how horribly volatile discord is! Someone could simply delete the server and poof it's gone with no archive available. This has happened to a couple of discord I follow - as someone who makes great use of the search function, this really sucked.
I can say nothing except that we deserve it. No one's forced to use discord, folks choose to because it's such a convenient and useful bit of software. The downsides are unfortunately niche and that's that.
 

OkazakiTheOtaku

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Believe me bro! I don't like it either. A video game forum that had been up for 15+ years closed its doors last year to move to discord - and all that knowledge and info has almost entirely been lost (save for what archive.org could capture - which was some, but not all content).

I'm also frustrated by how horribly volatile discord is! Someone could simply delete the server and poof it's gone with no archive available. This has happened to a couple of discord I follow - as someone who makes great use of the search function, this really sucked.
I can say nothing except that we deserve it. No one's forced to use discord, folks choose to because it's such a convenient and useful bit of software. The downsides are unfortunately niche and that's that.
Yeah, this problem has reared its ugly head a few times for me personally. The worst was when I was building my homemade arcade cabinet, and I bought a ¥50,000 controller for a specific game. All of the reviews on YouTube were like "oh you should get this community-made firmware from this one guy, it makes it 10x better" so I set out on an hours-long hunt to find out that it's only available in an obscure Discord server. So I finally join, and I can't find it. I ask around and they're like "what, are you dumb? It's a pinned comment in [this] channel." But it's not. So finally we all find out that the original poster just deleted his account and it no longer exists. No one online at the time had a backup.

This has happened in some form or another several times to me.

The volatility of Discord is ridiculous. People complain about Reddit and other sites, but at least those are easily backed up and snapshotted. What happens when pinned discord comments go away? What happens when Discord decides they don't want to be a free-for-all CDN for random downloads all over the web? So many sites die.

Hell, the official Yuzu mods page almost exclusively uses Discord as their host for all the downloads.

You literally have a robust GitHub presence; why are you doing this?
 
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SkyPioneer

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Yeah, this problem has reared its ugly head a few times for me personally. The worst was when I was building my homemade arcade cabinet, and I bought a ¥50,000 controller for a specific game. All of the reviews on YouTube were like "oh you should get this community-made firmware from this one guy, it makes it 10x better" so I set out on an hours-long hunt to find out that it's only available in an obscure Discord server. So I finally join, and I can't find it. I ask around and they're like "what, are you dumb? It's a pinned comment in [this] channel." But it's not. So finally we all find out that the original poster just deleted his account and it no longer exists. No one online at the time had a backup.

This has happened in some form or another several times to me.

The volatility of Discord is ridiculous. People complain about Reddit and other sites, but at least those are easily backed up and snapshotted. What happens when pinned discord comments go away? What happens when Discord decides they don't want to be a free-for-all CDN for random downloads all over the web? So many sites die.

Hell, the official Yuzu mods page almost exclusively uses Discord as their host for all the downloads.

You literally have a robust GitHub presence; why are you doing this?
Dude!! I had a discord with YEARS of info and history etc suddenly deleted because the admins had a tiff or some other drama.
Entire discord, years of chat history, gone! The community migrated but the info is never coming back.
I mean if the discord client would at least locally retain all the chat history, data etc on your pc, that would at least be something. But it all completely vanishes!
I'm preaching to the choir at this point. Still, I can't take away that Discord is a very solid app and service in other regards.
 

OkazakiTheOtaku

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Still, I can't take away that Discord is a very solid app and service in other regards.
Discord is a good tool for its original purpose-- chatting between gamers. Voice chat, game integration, and group chats. Those are all great usages that it excels at. But Discord as a forum or community hub is an awful idea.
 

LightBeam

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Discord is a good tool for its original purpose-- chatting between gamers. Voice chat, game integration, and group chats. Those are all great usages that it excels at. But Discord as a forum or community hub is an awful idea.
Exactly that. I genuinely don't understand why people would use it as a forum or something. It's really nothing more than a chat app. There are bots that allows you to do a bit more but that's it, it doesn't make Discord more than a chatting app.

Again, Guilded seem to work so much better as forums or community hubs + it doesn't seem like servers could be deleted as easily as they are in Discord, but the problem of having archives is still there. But there are proper announcements and forum functionnalities unlike Discord so that's already a bit better. If you really want an alternative with something more targeted towards communities then I think it would work pretty good.

Or, if you want a forum, then you can just make a good old forum. Maybe a bit oldschool but eh, can you imagine gbatemp working as a discord server ? No way. It wouldn't even work as a reddit sub (I also find it pretty hard to get precise informations on Reddit, sometimes it's pretty good because mods did the job behind but most of the time it's not and that's because Reddit isn't really made with that in mind first)
 
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Wolfy

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Perhaps this is good for some server owners who post bonus content or releasing early access builds. I usually just use Patreon for certain creators and that's good enough, don't need more Discord channels clutter T-T
 

Jacklack3

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i don't see that big of a problem with it. the people who might abuse it wouldn't be discord but server owners, and then people could just make their own competitive server or protest, assuming the server owners wouldn't care about their users, lol. really it just provides a nice way for servers to benefit the people who use their real money to help boost the server.
 

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