I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.
Tricking is 100% the right word for it. They are putting those Nitro buttons there with the clear intent that a user will click it by accident while attempting to access a different feature that used to be there.
> You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it. I'm not claiming that they're outright scamming people out of money, but that they're using actively hostile UI/UX to profit by serving advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo. That's absolutely worthy of criticism.
> advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo
The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking. Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
> The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking.
Perhaps you don't remember what that UI used to look like. For most of Discord's existence, there were two buttons to the left of the chatbox in the mobile app. The leftmost of these was a camera icon (for taking a photo and immediately uploading it), and the rightmost was the gallery icon, for uploading an existing image. For the vast majority of users, the gallery icon would have been the most commonly used.
In 2020 they got rid of the camera icon entirely (now requiring an additional menu to get to it), moved the gallery icon, and then where the gallery icon used to be they added the Gift Nitro icon. Instead of using the empty space vacated by the camera icon they moved a feature used >10,000x more so that the Nitro button could benefit from everyone's muscle memory.
At the time it happened misclicks and feeling tricked was an extremely common complaint [1], to the extent that I do not believe for a second that a team of people competent enough to build such an otherwise excellent piece of software could possibly have not foreseen it occurring. That this is not an isolated incident but rather part of a pattern helps cement that judgment.
> Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
I do have a problem with it, because they're trying to make money by tricking their users. I'm perfectly happy to go back to IRC if the only way they can think of to keep their company afloat is to deliberately make their product worse to use.
