While it requires having a service worth staying on once you're familiarized to be successful, paying users is a valid strategy when a network effect is important.

PayPal, as an example, is the result of a merger between Confinity (Thiel's) and X (Musk's) competing services. While I believe Confinity had started earlier, X caught up through literally giving people $20 towards eBay purchases if they sign up.

Hi zajd, I want to upvote your comment but I don't think I can do that while it calls HN downvoters "bootlickers". Would you consider removing that part?

Do you think he's going to sell his ideas for an upvote?

I thought the big "idea" part of the comment was that investors are distorting markets with huge subsidies. Another idea is that parts of the HN community itself have a disturbing relationship with this practice. But someone can still get those ideas across without calling downvoters "bootlickers"!

Good point.

I'm a big fan of the federation of different IRC servers, but also like have rich media embeds and drag+drop image uploading, even if that currently means being tied into the discord servers.

(kiwiirc IRC client dev here) This type of thing is down to the clients to put into place and we actually do this now. Drag/drop files, pasting images directly into the client, 1GB files supported, right out of the box. Give it a try! https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/

I believe other clients are starting to integrate this type of thing too - it's greatly needed

Yup, irccloud does media embeds and file uploads.

I'll take a look at this over the weekend thanks!

But I think this is only a problem from a UX standpoint. IRC has DCC, for instance, but it's a matter of building a client which e.g. inlines DCC "attachments" or displays images beneath messages with links. If IRC is truly "revived" there's a chance IRC clients grow or new ones emerge to keep up with "modern" IM systems, and IRC will still have more benefits than these (openness, ubiquity...)

Forcing content upon others is something I view as an anti-feature. Linking to content that they MAY choose to display (or pre-cache in selective instances) CAN be a feature.

For example, I might allow specific rooms that I know are moderated or specific individuals that I trust to push arbitrary data in to my storage. However I definitely do not want that to happen in a random room of strangers.

DCC has been broken in practice for decades due to NAT. If you use a bouncer and have workarounds for the NAT problem in place, your files will still end up on the wrong machine, and then there is the multi client distribution problem. That's a bunch of problems you need to solve beyond just showing an image "inline".

Matrix attempts to be a solution to this

Are there any open source Discord clients?

So far, I've refused to try it because the only client Gentoo has is a binary blob.

There is a libpurple/Pidgin plugin for Discord. As you might expect, however, it only exposes text chat and not any of the "rich" features such as voice chat or emote reactions.

I don't know of any free software full reimplementation of the Discord client, and I suspect such would be against their terms of service.

No, but there are client + server alternatives that are free. Mumble / Murmur is one. Rock solid and scales to large numbers of users even when running on a tiny VM. They are kindof slow to release new features, so you would want to try their latest snapshot of the server and client.

I haven't used Discord in a while, but when I did I just ended up logging in via a browser. (The binary blob client had some major cpu/memory issues when I tried it.)

It's essentially a browser binary.

Why convince? People use IRC because they want to. There is no need to appeal to the masses.