Discord to start showing ads in-app this week - Dexerto
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Popular messaging app Discord is reportedly set to launch in-app ads to help promote game developers, and its coming soon.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13807777

Discord to start showing ads in-app this week - Dexerto

In early March 2024, Discord revealed that “sponsored quests”, or ads would be added to the platform to help “support game developers” through the popular chat app.

Discord didn’t initially share a release date, or even how they’re going to implement ads into Discord’s overall design, other than mentioning that the sponsored quests would “tastefully” be integrated.

A report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Discord’s sponsored quests will be landing on the platform this week, and will be displayed at the bottom left of the app.

  • hollyberries@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I’m all for jumping ship and going elsewhere but Matrix isn’t ready as far as the user experience is concerned. It has a serious issue with simultaneously having too many and not enough cooks in the kitchen. There are too many apps and none of them work perfectly or near-perfectly. All of the apps for it that I’ve tried have breaking issues in one way or another.

    Desktop:

    • Element doesnt have good enough support for sticker packs - some dont appear in Element but do in other apps
    • Fluffychat would crash when typing a colon, almost every time
    • Selecting a sticker in Fluffychat would cause crashes at random
    • Cinny would crash at random when typing slash commands
    • Cinny wouldnt verify my sessions even when using a backup key
    • Neko would crash at random when typing a normal message without emoji or stickers

    Mobile

    • Fluffychat would crash at random, not show notifications, scrolling up to read back messages would lag my phone or lock up the app
    • Element sometimes wouldn’t display my keyboard when trying to type a message until app restart
    • Element lags when selecting a photo to share in chat, 50/50 chance whether it crashes on pressing send with an attachment

    A lot of thise bugs were rage-inducing (especially when writing long messages and crashing out) and as an end-user I’m tired of half functional software. As a developer, I’m tired of feeling like I have to make patches on someone else’s project just to have basic functionality.

    I deleted my account over the weekend and will likely return once that is sorted. If efforts went into improving the flagship app and standardising the protocol instead of having a bunch of half-baked alternatives with varying implementations, it would be a much more pleasant experience and easily supplant Discord.

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comOPMEnglish
      61·
      8 months ago

      The issues you are describing are definitely not fun but your experience is far different from a lot of others experiences and its not representative either.

      Matrix works „perfectly“ for my usecase and like 50 people I chat with regularly. Its the only service I use and I have bridged all old messaging apps so I dont have to use more than one app.

      As always, its luck, usecase, skill and platform that makes or breaks the experience. I wrote perfectly in quotes because asking for perfection in mostly unpaid open source development is looking a gift horse in the mouth.

      Either start helping by providing fixes, donate or show some patience because what you‘re getting is a lot more than you paid for.

      As always, this is just my opinion, not proven fact.

      • hollyberries@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        The issues you are describing are definitely not fun but your experience is far different from a lot of others experiences and its not representative either

        You’re right in that my experience is not representative. What made me go ahead with account deletion was the fact that 2 out of the 6 people in the channel I was in deleted their accounts last week over the same issue - “too many bugs”. One of them is the sole reason that Nheko has support for deleting entire sticker packs instead of one-by-one. In the end, the bugs got to them also. As a result of that, my brain (whether I want it to or not) quantifies this as ‘50% functional’ since 3/6 (including myself) of the people that I chat with on Matrix bowed out due to the exact same issues.

        A few days before those people deleted their accounts, I complained about some bugs and mentioned that if it weren’t for that channel I would delete my account, so that group is on Signal now. I couldn’t get anyone on Discord to leave for any reason, and the one channel has been together for over 20 years and has been all over the place - we started on IRC in '03.

        I wrote perfectly in quotes because asking for perfection in mostly unpaid open source development is looking a gift horse in the mouth.

        For what its worth, I understand this well - to clarify my usage of “perfectly”, I only have two hard requirements on a messaging app:

        • Does not crash at all ever when typing a message. Long or short messages, filled with emoji or stickers, or pressing a colon multiple times should not crash anything when entering text input.
        • Scrolling up to read back the chat log doesn’t freeze or crash the app, and scrolling doesn’t jump to the bottom when a message is received, doubly so if theres a big shiny button that lets me jump back to the top and resets the unread status when clicked.

        In my opinion, this is bare minimum functionality. (Somewhat related): I think I’ve earned the right to say that because I wrote a short-lived competitor to Trillian back when Pidgin was known as Gaim and sending plaintext messages across protocols was one of the first things implemented.

        Either start helping by providing fixes, donate or show some patience because what you‘re getting is a lot more than you paid for.

        I’m sorry but I’m not going to learn yet another codebase, framework, or protocol in order to provide fixes. As I said in my comment:

        As a developer, I’m tired of feeling like I have to make patches on someone else’s project just to have basic functionality.

        For donating, the Matrix foundation’s accountants are dodgy when it comes to their financials so I’m wary of donating. A quick glance at their projected 2024 financials on the blog post reads like they are paying 4 developers £137,500 a year. That seems a bit high for the UK, and especially if Element is the primary maintainer of the server software which is no longer under the stewardship of the Matrix foundation. To an outsider, there’s a lot of alarm bells ringing in the financials department.

        Patience is all thats left, so waiting for Matrix to be up to par with other software is the plan and I’ll make a new account then.

        This whole post reads like I’m putting down the project. I’m honestly not, and only want to highlight the issues with the project as a whole thats (in my opinion of course) slowing down mass-adoption. Getting open source software out to the masses is not an easy undertaking, and that takes time - more than the 9 years they’ve already had. The varying degrees of implementation and inconsistent user experience from all directions is slowing down that progress.