I've been using discord since mid 2018, and got Nitro shortly after. Loved longer messages, bigger file uploads, and HD screensharing, especially after Mixer went down (FTL streaming was the only service that let me share my gameplay to friends fast enough for them to react).
That moved to Discord Classic, I kept those things that I use daily, and its worth it to me. It took a lot of convincing to get my friends to migrate from my self hosted Mumble server to Discord for voice chat... Before Steam revamped it's friends interface, there weren't a lot of good options. What were you gonna use, Skype? Teamspeak?! Discord isn't nearly as valuable today, in 2023, but at the time it was worth it. Till it starts to come apart at the seams, not sure why to switch.
Yes, though just nitro basic. Discord doesn't show ads and claims to not sell my data. While I can afford to do so, I'd much rather pay a few bucks a month to keep it that way.
The number of people in this thread aggressively against a free-to-use service having any kind of way to pay employees and server bills makes me fucking depressed, and helps to explain why most free services I enjoy never seem to stay afloat with just an optional payment-based membership thing.
Edit: To people suggesting less corporate-based (whether FOSS or not) alternatives, that's totally cool! Just remember that the people behind these projects need some way to pay the bills the same way the corporate ones do, so I encourage you to contribute to them, whether that's through e.g., code improvements (which doesn't pay bills but is still helpful!) or plain old donations.
Exactly this. Every one demands everything to be free to use and then wonders why everything gets crammed with ads and micro transactions and data gathering. You want quality software? You have to pay for it somewhere. Even FOSS. Developers have to eat too. Either pay upfront or be enshittified. I’d rather pay up front.
I don’t wonder about it. I expect the ads to show up on free things, but I do not care. I will just move to the next shite free software, and be happy. The only program I would consider paying a subscription for would be a drawing program. You get to make money from a drawing program, so it levels out the subscription cost
I dislike the way discord promotes their paid subscription which is nitro. Not to say, discord went the regular way of all of the social apps from the very niche tool for one exact thing to becoming all in one app and trying to justify it as a reason for pressuring users into buying subscriptions.
While discord tries to be something for new generation of users it is still deeply rooted in partly old - partly new management view of what success is. And i, honestly dislike it. And disliking something doesn’t make me feel better about paying for it
Likewise, pay for full Nitro, I can afford it and it's a platform I use frequently and enjoy, I'm glad they let others who can't pay for Nitro have a pretty much equivalent service for free.
It's not free to run a platform, and it's unreasonable to demand everything for free. It could be more reasonably priced (basic is not too bad), but honestly I'm okay with subsidising others for something like this.
I sometimes gift it to friends I run a discord server with around 150ish people, so discord tends to be a platform I spend a lot of time on. As it stands now, I don’t have major qualms with the developers of Discord, so for now, I don’t mind spending money on it.
I did at one point, but it’s ultimately a waste of money, considering Revolt (a much smaller, donation funded chat platform) gives you most of the worthwhile features for free. I’ve been on Discord for almost 7 years and I could never justify buying nitro again. But, if Revolt isn’t your thing, or is just too small, Matrix is a very good alternative.
I’ve been paying for Nitro for about a year, I use the features frequently. Gif Display Picture, Banner, large upload size (500mb), high quality streaming. I’m pretty much streaming my games to my mates any time on my machine and they do the same, so better quality stream really increases our quality of enjoyment. I boost several friends large servers with the boosts we get. I like my profile to be flashy and care about it, and discord is on 99% of the time while my machine is on, on my second monitor along with YouTube. I use most of the features Nitro advertises, so I don’t mind paying 20m of work a month for it.
Lmao imagine typing up paragraphs just to boast about your fucking salary 💀
Do you really like to feel superior to poor people that much with your 10k a month? And then acting surprised that the disgusting poors can’t afford to pay a monthly fee for fucking hi-res GIFs or whatever
Usually I bought it when it was buy one get one free ever since they cancelled the $5/month Nitro Classic most people had (and replaced it with that pointless "oh please buy the more expensive nitro!" $3/month Nitro Basic).
This month, I accidentally forgot to cancel my Nitro and canceled it the day I was charged but didn't get my money back and had to keep Nitro for the month. Lesson learned, I likely won't be paying again. Maybe my memory is hazy, but I swore it was supposed to give your money back if you cancel quickly after being charged again.
I use Discord heavily, so I didn't mind paying the $5/month for Nitro Classic back when it was a thing. Discord was quite good at the time and wasn't in the process of enshittification like it is now. I can't wrap my head around paying $10/month for Nitro though.
Matrix sounds great and all and I'd love if the communities and people I know were on it but that just isn't the case, and this isn't a part of my internet usage where I can use FOSS unfortunately.
I currently do because it’s not much of my current budget. Now that I’m not running any server actively I have considered cancelling. I would reactivate if I need the server boosts though.
I used to be fine with Nitro because I didn't mind supporting a service I liked being free for everybody else. These last few months I have been seeing big red flags of enshittification with the introduction of a layer of cosmetic microtransactions you can only microtransact if you're a Nitro subscriber
It's probably time to start planning my exit, but I haven't dug into the details of what next steps are gonna look like for me.
I use discord to do a few text channels and chat with friends. Every nitro popup gets dismissed because I don't know what it is and have no interest in spending time figuring out some new thing I probably don't need.
I had free Nitro for a few years because I was a partner. Only ever used it for making my username end in #0001. Nothing else it offers is really that useful, imo. Especially for the price.
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