Gestrid

To a degree, yes. But a non-public company doesn't usually have that "obligation" for ever-growing profit. Unfortunately, Discord's goal does seem to be to eventually get an IPO.

It is, but it's not exactly a good subscription service for the average Discord user. In the past, they kept adding and removing features, trying to find stuff that stuck. While I think they've got a decent feature set right now, it's still not great, and I don't think the average Discord user would be very impressed by it.

"Pay $10/ month for increased upload size, custom emojis shared everywhere (and not tied to being used in only one server), and animated profile pics/ banners/ backgrounds!" There are other features, but I don't think most people would use them.

The biggest feature, custom emojis being able to be used in any server, is also part of their $5/ month tier, so most subscribers don't even have a need for the more expensive tier.

I still use it occasionally. It's primarily used for smaller, more private communities, but Wikipedia also hosts official IRC rooms, too. I don't know of any other major companies that use IRC in an official capacity, though.

They tried to do that, but it's difficult to make a decent subscription service for what's essentially a chat app.

If I'm not mistaken, they are a private company.

Granted, they're a private company with a goal of getting an IPO soon, though.

They tried their best to make Nitro succeed first before turning to other methods of making money.

but yet keep buying it.

Probably because they'll keep repairing it themselves anyway. Making it legal would just make it easier for them to repair it without triggering the tractor's version of DRM (can't remember what it's called).

My guess: they'll go the lawsuit route.

In the US, most TV commercials are so obviously TV commercials that they don't label them. Some TV stations do have bumpers they air when the TV show goes to break and comes back from break.

They're in the middle of trying to get their users to create accounts with E-Trade, their Directed Share Program (DSP) administrator. They'll start selling shares to their users as part of their DSP late next week. After that is the IPO.

Fortunately, at least in my experience, the adblockers usually win. Even if a company changes something to avoid an adblocker or force someone to turn off their adblocker (Hi, Twitch!), it's usually fixed within just a few hours at most.

Weren't they also caught using AI bots to drive up engagement in some subreddits, too? (I think it was supposed to be some of their subreddits in foreign languages or something.)