Okay I’ve done the free discord nitro a couple of times and i gotta say… It was surprisingly easy to cancel. Billing and subscriptions tab in discord —> nitro subscription cancel service button. Thats it. It’s hardly as bad as the rest of them, and so it is a little surprising seeing them go to court over it.
Not surprised.
They keep offering these “Free Trials” of Nitro, but then they wanted me to put in a credit card in order to claim it?
Last I checked free means I’m not handing over shit.
But hey I know what’s up, they just want me to forget I have Nitro, bill me for a month when I do, and then make it difficult to cancel knowing that I can’t just tell my bank to dispute the charge because then they’d ban my account.
That’s why the second the Free Trial needed a card, I just backed out of it.
When are we switching to Revolt?
it’s not hard, though? I live in Turkey so I don’t get protected by EU
Even then, it’s still a single button press
People are barely literate these days, I’m not surprised.
Reminder for everybody to never install Discord. It functions as a desktop web app, and you can even use it like so on your phone. You shouldn’t even give Discord your phone number, tbh, and you should never pay them money.
I keep trying to remove my phone number from my Discord account, but each time I do “suspicious activity” is found on my account and needs my phone number to verify.
I wonder if you can submit a support ticket? Although, if they’ve already got record of your number it doesn’t really do much good to remove it. Not giving it to them is just something that makes your habbits harder to track and make it harder for them and associated companies to build profiles on for things like advertisement and in some cases mass surveillance and espionage, although I make no statements on the extent of Discord’s particular activities.
Can they sue crunch fitness next?
Any place there is a way to sign up for a service, there should be a way to cancel the service. Make a pop-up that interrupts you every time you open an app asking you to sign up? You need to keep that pop up and ask if you want to cancel every time.
I cancelled my Amazon Prime trial the other day, and in order to dissuade me the site switched to French…
Maybe just a bug (I tried again and it was in English) but the hoops sites make you jump through to cancel a subscription is ridiculous. Constantly asking you if you’re sure, offering discounts, swapping the position and colour of the buttons… The Humble Choice one is particularly bad, and the final screen tells you you’re cancelled and the prominent button signs you right the fuck back up again.
If you can sign up in one click, you should be able to cancel in one click.
You should be able to cancel ALL of this shit from your credit card provider/bank apps. One click, gone, bye-bye.
That was probably just a fluke but Amazon does freak out after you cancel. It asks you to renew with a popup, a prominent shipping option, and embedded windows when you buy things without Prime.
You can cancel Billing Agreements in PayPal. It’s quite convenient
Do be aware that doing it this way will probably lead to your account with that business being terminated.
Fine for somethings that you never want to go back to anyway.
Good! Holy fucking shit is insane at the amount of predatory crap in software these days!
It’s literally become a fucking science on how to manipulate people by wearing them the fuck down with pop-ups, sign-ups, notifications, and “related” content. Anything besides giving the user the opportunity to do what they fucking want to do in the first place.
Honestly, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air. It’s also insane how straightforward and easy it is to use, especially considering the reputation the fediverse has for being “complicated.”
Open source software seems to be the only way to be free of dark patterns. Why use products that are actively against you?
The Reputation comes from people who have never tried it and are looking for an excuse why they don’t use it.
It’s Not more complicated than E-Mail
This is only a problem if you subscribe to nitro in the first place. Rookie mistake!
I enjoy the higher streaming quality and server boosts. Discord makes it very easy for my ttrpg groups to gather weekly not to mention the many other communities it facilitates. It’s even partly responsible for me and my partner having a successful long distance relationship. The service is worth paying for, imho.
You can fake a Nitro subscription for free higher quality streaming. Look up
Vendord, it hardens Discord for better security, adds themes, and plugins. One such plugin is fake Nitro.Edit: Vencord. Got autocorrected.
Also adding I have only used fake Nitro for streaming quality. So I have no idea if it works for emojis or whatever other Nitro perks there are.
Wait, so for this to work access to the Nitro features it enables must be managed client-side and the client is fully trusted with no validation? That seems… unwise on the part of Discord.
That seems… unwise on the part of Discord.
New here? The company and people behind Discord suck shit and like all tech startups things like security are an afterthought for years on end.
Adblockers had existed for 15 years or more by the time YouTube finally started cracking down on them. I think it would probably take similarly as long before enough people were actually exploiting that loophole before Discord did anything about it.
Adblockers had existed for 15 years or more by the time YouTube finally started cracking down on them
And I STILL manage to beat them by, literally not even knowing about the crackdown in the first place and just telling Ublock Origin to do its thing
No, the commenter ommited a lot of information, it’s not full Nitro, it’s just the features that can be enabled/worked around client-side, see my comment under the parent one.
I did say “the features it enables”, not every Nitro feature.
I don’t fully understand how Discord works, but apparently certain Nitro perks are just client side toggles. I only use it for streaming 1080@60fps, so I’m not sure about things like emojis, and after that I don’t even know what other Nitro perks exist.
The downside is it’s against their ToS, and you could have your account banned or similar if they do decide to take action.
Oh no, not my free account.
Thanks for the heads up, though!
Eh I mean there are lots of connections I’ve made with people only on discord that would suck to lose.
Apparently it’s very easy to make a new account
Vendord
Just wanted to correct that is Vencord, with a C. I couldn’t find it the other way and when I added “discord” as an additional parameter I noticed the spelling was off.
Sorry autocorrect!
All good! Just wanted to make sure people could find it
I literally ended my comment with saying the service was worth the price, and you pitch a way to pirate it to me. Wild.
It’s your opinion that the service is worth the price; I know nobody who shares that opinion. Sharing an alternative shouldn’t be seen as hostile or “wild”. If it was like a buck a month, I’d pay that. But at checks notes $3/month for increased upload size (I have a nas with public file sharing, so…) and… emoji? or $10/month for the above + “super reactions” (wat), not-ass streaming res, “server boosts” (???) and “custom profiles” (what does that even mean? a background?)… You’re kidding me, right? I pay less for my web hosting, or my vps, my security/AV software… Even Bitwarden, or NextDNS, is pennies compared to nitro. Ten bucks a month is actually insane from my perspective. $120 a year for bigger uploads and decent streaming resolution is highway robbery.
To use your term: wild.
Yes, I said it was my opinion.
Well, this “pirate” option also fixed issues that plagued the Linux desktop client for years. Discord only got screen share working about a month ago, that feature has been around since 2017 (I think). Meanwhile the “pirate” option had fixed that (even on wayland) while people were waiting for the basic features to function.
Yep, people have had to use alternative Discord clients on Linux for quite some time.
For anyone curious: Vesktop, ripcord, webcord, and armcord are the ones I tried at some point.
Doesn’t Linux Discord still not have audio streaming unless you use Vesktop?
No, that’s what was fixed a month ago. It does still have its bugs though, I found that if the audio doesn’t show I have to close the app and reopen it before it will work, but that happened from time to time with the workarounds as well so I’m thinking maybe it’s just an issue on the Linux side
To be clear, a pirated copy of something may well be improved over the original but that doesn’t make it not a pirated copy, so you can lose the quotes. It sounds like Discord is not in a good place on Linux and I’m sure I’d agree it’s not worth the cost of the sub if I were on Linux.
Hah, I just like spreading the good word of piracy. Especially Discord since their app is a piece of shit.
To clarify about the fake nitro plugin of Vencord/Vesktop:
It’s not Nitro, it just enables some features you get with nitro, mainly better streaming quality and being able to “send” emojis from any server (this is all it does, cant use any emoji reacts nor send bigger files or server boost).
Also
About the emojis, the custom/other server emojis are sent as image links which discord will render but it is not a native discord emoji and will format differently when used inline.
It also does nothing for custom emoji reacts.About streaming, Discord uses webrtc, that usually means P2P streaming which in turn means that the streaming client can send whatever they want (as long as the receiving clients understand it) and discord servers can’t say no. It’s not server authoritative communication, discord without nitro just hides the UI options, vencord gives them back.
I still have no idea what boosting a server does.
If a server gets enough boosts they can add largely useless extra stuff like more custom stickers and emojis. There’s a few legit benefits like higher quality audio / video and being able to create a custom server invite link but it’s mostly fluff.
Gotcha. Thanks!
The only reason I would pay is for the higher quality streaming, but I think the price is too steep for that, if they had a cheaper plan with just the streaming perk, then I would really consider subscribing.
You don’t understand I NEED to spam my blushies emote everywhere.
I’ve thankfully never given discord a dime!
I know apps don’t like having subscriptions through Apple/Google where they take 15-30%, but it does make it easier to cancel sometimes
It also makes it easy to find all your subscriptions in one place. When every provider tries to get you to subscribe, hunting them all down becomes a pain.
I know what you mean but saying this on a decentralised federated social network which encourages separate instances is very ironic
Eh, your account is still tied to an instance. That instance stores your subscriptions, as well as the vast majority of your preferences. If you want to get way into the weeds, that’s why Jerboa won’t persist comment sort order, but other clients will - there is a server side prefer for all/local/subscribed and new/hot/best at a post level, but not at a comment level.
Will it lead to the exodus towards Matrix/Element? If I have to pay for messaging, I’d rather cut the middleman.
Not yet. It’s just not ready yet and people are picky about what chat features they now need.
I wish tho.
What keeps your posse on discord?
Organization scheme, ease of use of the voice channels, cross platform compatibility.
We briefly looked into discord alternatives. Element x isn’t mature enough, schildi chat could be viable. Revolt seemed to be the front runner, but the voice chat was awkward to use since it didn’t show when people were in channels, and the noise cancelling of discord was sorely missed.
how is it too difficult to cancel? you literally just go to manage subscription and click cancel and it ends at the end of the current term…
Is it the same in every country though?
All subscriptions should automatically cancel if you stop paying.
That’s a bit circular though because they just keep billing your credit card.
In Europe, we have debit cards and some banks allow you to create them on the go. I’ve stopped bothering canceling stuff, I just create a new card for each recurrent payment and I cancel it when I don’t want to use the service any longer.
What Service do you use? I’d like to do the same, because it’s not always clear by the charge on my statement who I’m paying. I would imaging having named CCs, like email aliases, would help me keep an eye on things.
i user privacy.com. it hits my account with unique names per card. so easy to line up.
I use the Revolut free tier. And I only wire on my revolut account the amounts I want to be paying (my usual bank has free instant wire tranfers) so I don’t have any bad surprise.
They also offer single-use/disposable virtual cards, which I’ve used on websites that I didn’t trust fully (Steam keys grey market), these are automatically cancelled after one use.I don’t want to sound like I’m advertising this brand though: they’ve been a pain during the registration process (I’ve had to take selfies and videos of myself), they seem to be a shitty employer and to have bad customer support service, see the wikipedia page for more details.
That sucks. I’d rather just pay it manually every month, or with a script running on my end.
That sounds fun and convenient to manage for the average person…
/s
our fanatical obsession with convenience (and corporations exploiting that) is what created this mess.
Autopay is so expected now that many subscriptions simply don’t offer options to pay per month.
It should be as implement any “recurrent payment” as a banking procedure. Viewable in their apps or in the office. And being able to just cancel them at any time with your bank.
“Having to use this app or website is too hard. It would be more fun and convenient to jump through whatever hoops the gym decides.”
App or website? They’re talking about rolling their own code to interface with the public API of whatever service is being talked about. That’s a boatload of effort to fix something that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with.
I mentioned rolling my own code because we weren’t yet discussing the average user. Iff the time has come to make it easy for the average user, then I’d want to create an app or website instead.
Which would in turn require revenue for hosting and development. Meaning either ads, or monthly payments.
I’d rather not pay you for a service which shouldn’t need to exist. And it could be done away with by requiring an easy “cancel subscription” button which requires no hoops to go through.
The process described and shown by the screenshots does seem a bit much for a cancellation. Suing feels disproportionate when I first hear it, but are there many other recourses to force it to become more user friendly?
Based on what I’m reading in the post (since I don’t use Discord), it’s still obstructing the cancelation flow and making the user go through more steps, which is illegal in California.
offtopic but related: android privacy settings are scattered across many hidden menus.
Google is just such a bunch of pricks.
Eh. There’s parts of that in Android. The real culprit is that they do not fund the AOSP project enough. It’s just incompetence and stupidity combined with an inability to change that.
and a lot of the permissions you can only disable one by one, 3-4 taps for each of the dozens of apps, with needing 2 taps even just to see if the permission is granted for the app
and sadly, calyx and such forks don’t fix it either
