Patreon and Twitch already handle Discord roles though.

Sure there’s loads of ICO groups, NFT groups, cook groups for shoe/ps5 drops, meme stock option traders, etc. Oh wait you already covered “scammer”.

I'm in a fan community on discord, paying via a YouTube subscription (urgh). I wouldn't call it "real business" in the sense that it's probably less than minimum wage for the host, but it's something I'm legitimately happy to pay for. It's a much better community hangout than patreon or onlyfans.

It seems like it; I have stumbled upon traders that are willing to help each other. Some traders sell membership for the members to receive "trade signals." They won't bother making a business model like this if you can monetize on discord.

A lot of legit Patreons use Discord as a perk, so it exists. But it's small potatoes.

It depends on your niche. I'm a part of some optionally-paid Discord servers where I've never encountered a bot DM. But these aren't in niches where botting is rampant, like crypto and gaming.

I Patreon a podcast that has a private Discord for subscribers, and it is a great community. It seems like folks who like this particular podcast have a lot of things in common, and the paywall prevents toxic behavior.

I also know a professional* dungeon master who uses Discord to keep customers organized. I'm sure he could accomplish this coordination with e-mail and a spreadsheet, but Discord seems to cultivate community as a side-benefit.

*No, this isn't his fulltime job, but it seems to justify the amount of time/brainpower spent on Game Design/RP Writing efforts. And, yet again, charging folks a bit of money for membership puts them on their best behavior.

Gamemakerstoolkit is a good one. I hate to pay, to be in a Discord server.

some mechanical keyboard companies run discord servers to offer order / tech support and various loyalty programs.

They already have: https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/pull/3846

Wouldn't tiered matrix spaces be a good solution for this problem?

Plus one

We’re in an awkward spot with our pricing right now for sure - we only had the 5% option for the longest time but introduced the flat rate recently for a number of reasons. In the next few weeks we’ll be fully switching over to a freemium model with Shopify-like tiers.

Needless to say if you’re making $6k+ per month it’s worth paying for Scale, but many users also pay for the advanced features even at $1-2k of MRR.

Care to elaborate? Are you also against the notion of paying to enter a concert or sporting event? If no, could you expand on what you believe the difference between these two things to be?

ad-surveillance supported free websites is ok, but paid membership access is late stage capitalism?

Paywalls are great at stopping spammers. And membership for groups is hardly an internet only thing.

Haven't tried Hyper, but the nft gated discords I use are much nicer places to hang out and chat and make things together. In the past year ive gone from using discord maybe once a month to it being my main internet social-space. Even better is that most of the memberships feed back into the group accounts.

I'm curious why you have such a strong reaction against this though, I much prefer it to adverts.