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.

Source

 

[ShadowOne333]

Get ready, boys.
For now, OnlyFans will have a proper contender!

 

[brickmii82]

OMFG This is gonna be... great

 

[The Real Jdbye]

They're doing this because they want a piece of the pie as Patreon already allows this and obviously none of that money goes to Discord. But I guess it's nice to have it as a built in feature so people don't have to go to a separate platform for it. As long as the fees aren't absurd.

 

[raxadian]

Yet another reason to ditch Discord.

 

[SS4]

Discord now p2w!!!
lol, nah but honestly not a fan of this new paywall thingy . . .

 

[Crazynoob458]

discock come bite my big fiery ass

 

[Bladexdsl]

RIP discord

 

[TomRiddle]

Oh joy.

Nitro and server boosting was pretty bad enough but this takes the cake for discord. Still never judge how low a corporation can go

 

[MochaMilk]

Nitro and server boosting was pretty bad enough but this takes the cake for discord. Still never judge how low a corporation can go

I00 bucks for a year of stickers, custom emotes and an animated profile pics was definitely already a major turn off for me. Now I hate Discord even more lol

Went from being pretty good to being a sellout money making scheme, in my opinion. You have to purchase Nitro to do basically anything worthwhile on the platform, aside from sending messages or anything under 8MB
Skype can handle 300MB for free. I think I've sent even larger before. Not only that, but Telegram not only has free sharable stickers, but you can also make your own, also entirely for free, unless the sticker pack is paid.

I can use GIF profile pics for free on almost all the websites I visit as well, ranging all the way back to freaking 2012.
Anyone who pays for Nitro is getting borderline robbed.

It's funny. I feel like the majority of people would flock to Discord as their primary source of everything social, if not for all of the paid bullcrap. Maybe make 1080p screen sharing, games, and server boosting paid. But I feel like everything else is excessive and only discourages people from staying.

 

[TomRiddle]

I00 bucks for a year of stickers, custom emotes and an animated profile pics was definitely already a major turn off for me. Now I hate Discord even more lol

Went from being pretty good to being a sellout money making scheme, in my opinion. You have to purchase Nitro to do basically anything worthwhile on the platform, aside from sending messages or anything under 8MB
Skype can handle 300MB for free. I think I've sent even larger before. Not only that, but Telegram not only has free sharable stickers, but you can also make your own, also entirely for free, unless the sticker pack is paid.

I can use GIF profile pics for free on almost all the websites I visit as well, ranging all the way back to freaking 2012.
Anyone who pays for Nitro is getting borderline robbed.

It's funny. I feel like the majority of people would flock to Discord as their primary source of everything social, if not for all of the paid bullcrap. Maybe make 1080p screen sharing, games, and server boosting paid. But I feel like everything else is excessive and only discourages people from staying.

I mean I still do think that Discord is better then Skype for being more then just video calls but yeah, I do agree about the paid services being BS.

One thing I will say though is that I disagree about maybe still having a paywall between 1080p screen sharing and server boosting stuff.

I just think that 1080p is kind of getting to the bare minimum for a lot of people (after all it's 2021) and locking that away is kinda crappy but I digress.

Also I really don't like server boosting because it hinders how much nice or good features a server can have and it's especially shitty if it's just you and a couple of school friends that don't have the money but to each their own I guess.

Overall we as consumers need to recognize that the best solution is to call out greedy practices and just not support them at all.
I wish there was a better way (like companies listening to the voice of their users more rather then the money) but unfortunately it's the best that we can do.

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

Get ready, boys.
For now, OnlyFans will have a proper contender!

but this is essentially just patreon-discord integration, minus the patreon

 

[Crazynoob458]

but this is essentially just patreon-discord integration, minus the patreon

aka discock wanting more money

 

[tammyglan]

It seems to me quite natural that the owners of discord have decided to profit from their business. I don't want to support the Russian who created the telegram and is its owner.

 

[Deleted member 585564]

I don't really get what's the big deal?

Server owners having the option to gate certain things behind a paywall doesn't mean the death of the entire service lol. If a server owner misuses this, very few will pay and the server dies. Everyone just moves on to another server and nothing of value was lost.

It's the same as Twitch giving streamers the option of making their stream sub-only... misusing it kills your channel, therefore there's no reason for anyone to misuse it. Instead, it gives streamers the option to offer special subscriber-only streams every so often, as a reward to their subscribers, while still doing open streams most of the time.

Same with discord, you can make one or two subscriber-exclusive channels on your server as an extra perk for people who want to support. For instance content creators can release content early on a subscriber-only channel, which is nice for those who dont want to use Patreon.

This particular functionality was already a thing via Twitch integration anyway... and this was literally one of the most requested features. There are a lot of reasons why Discord is shit, but "implementing one of the most requested features" is not one of those reasons.

Is there a chance that the owners of servers that contain important information might decide to lock it behind a paywall for no reason? Sure, just like there's already a chance they might decide to purge or delete the server overnight without a warning. Discord's a bad place to host information in but I don't think subscriber-only channels and servers is the reason for that.

 

[ChiefReginod]

Discord has just about run its course anyway. Thankfully, it's not like youtube where bandwidth is a major hurdle for upstart competitors. It can be replaced.

 

[NinStar]

I don't really get what's the big deal?

You're late on the discussion, but the deal is what I mentioned months ago, their priorities don't make sense, there are so many basic things missing (which I believe are more requested than this one in particular), and to this day they didn't even manage to finnish the membership screen... something that would be essential even for this paywall thing.