My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards.
Discord's browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text/voice channels (as opposed to Mumble's 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different games in different voice channels but sharing links/images/unrelated messages in text).
How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?
most streamers have a discord channel now and they bring their entire audience. thats why its growing at such a broken rate.
for every even medium sized streamer they convert, they get thousands of active users.
The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persistent communications outside of games and VOIP, and this rolls all of that into one package that's really easy to use.
I had huge issues with Discord's quality when it was first being publicly used because I was on a latent/lossy connection at the time and it just repeatedly disconnected me and forced me to completely rejoin a Discord server over and over, which implied their engineers had no understanding that the internet is inherently unreliable. That seems to have been well remedied, so actually improving their software immediately puts it 10000 feet above Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc from my perspective. I've watched these applications stagnate over the years and it's bothered me pretty deeply.
Happens to me incredibly often after I lose my connection while sending a message on Android 6.0.1
No chat client works _great_ under bad network conditions, but I think overall I tend to try to avoid using Discord more than I try to avoid others when I'm on a bad internet connection.
Discord's rise helped by Microsoft's seeming neglect and confusing platform direction of Skype in recent years, even if Discord still doesn't have video chat. For messaging among people who know each other by name, Facebook's offerings are dominant, but for pseudonymous chat Skype remained strong until Microsoft vacillated between making Skype Windows' native messenger or a strong multiplatform freemium network that isn't plagued by an aging UI and the invasion of advertising. Discord won many users by organic word-of-mouth referrals from people who used to use Skype.
As for gaming voice chat, Discord is not as sophisticated as other offerings (edit: maybe that's the wrong wording; let's go instead with "not as configurable"), but offers a smoother out-of-the-box experience.
The fact that you don't need to install or configure any client (or even have an account) to bring someone in is the biggest single thing.
People come for the easy invites and stay for the (slightly better than) good enough chat, voice, and community features.
I can see it pulling away from pretty much everything except those groups that have spent lots of time on crazy teamspeak setups with lots of ranks, different overlapping groups and so on.
Is TeamSpeak an open API? Shouldn't be difficult at all to write an import tool to import a TeamSpeak server's group structure to equivalent Discord roles.
Ultimately, I don't think this is as much an obstacle to long term success of Discord. These kind of servers tend to come around because running TS/Mumble servers require expertise certain groups don't have, so groups tend to colocate over some overlap in membership, and may still be colocated over inertia even if the overlap goes away.
The example I'm thinking of is a server I'm still on which is nominally owned by a battlefield clan, but also has a ffxiv guild, wildstar guild, eve corp and minecraft server chat on it. Each of these are effectively seperate entities and need to manage their own permissions, and if they were setting up fresh now, they'd all be seperate discord servers. The battlefield guys have some crazy rank structure based on time on the server or some such, the ffxiv group just has admin or not, and the minecraft group is a yes/no access perm.
The colocation is particularly not ideal as the battlefield clan and minecraft server tend to bring occasional DDoS attempts on the server, and there's not really much overlap in membership nowadays.
I'm sure there's plenty of guilds around that are still happy with their existing setup and haven't bothered switching, but my experience is that many have switched, and new guilds are basically only picking Discord.
From the DM point of view he can still send us pictures, it is free and we don't really use maps so don't need Roll20 (or equivalent). Also direct messaging players secret messages is really easy and handy.
Mumble is a solid product but there's a lot more friction. First you need to host a server, and for most people that means paying for it. And then to get people to join they have to install a client, and the website can be confusing, and it's not clear which version they need to install, and it keeps prompting you to update which requires it to restart, and the client's UI is clunky, and the integrated text chat is very poor. And then when I need to join someone else's Mumble they have to tell me the host...and the port, and I've got to copy and paste it and go through Mumble's annoying UI to add another server, etc., etc.
Plus Discord's chat is good enough that it makes sense to start building small communities around it; it's also competing with Twitter group chats, Facebook groups, etc. I play World of Warcraft, and some guilds have started using Discord as their main "hub", instead of forums or whatever. And then there's the bots, and the emoji support, and so on, and so forth. Mumble competes pretty well with the core of Discord, but Discord does more than Mumble.
Ultimately, I think it's the same "why did Slack get so big when it's just IRC with some of the irritations filed off and a slightly better UI" question all over again. If you take a product people need, and make it very slightly better and really easy to adopt, then it's not surprising that it will get huge. Yes, you could technically use IRC instead of Slack, but there's a reason why a ton of companies adopted Slack but never adopted IRC.
It's bad enough that, even disregarding Discord's hilariously incompetent voice chat, Mumble will be a hard requirement the next time I'm looking for a new guild.
My real gripe is with all the small things.
Mumble can text-to-speech the names of people as they join/leave the voice channel.
Mumble includes timestamps on chat messages.
Mumble timestamps messages when users join/leave/mute/unmute.
Mumble has 'advanced' input options for voice-detection.
Discord doesn't currently do any of that. Unless I just can't find the right configuration.
For me, these small "Only notice when they aren't there" things are not outweighed by Discord's general ease-of-use.
Don't get me wrong, Discord is a pretty solid product, but the only reason it has such a huge market share is because it's burning VC money and offering its services for free.
The barrier to entry for a user to join your discord is insanely easy. Don't have the client? They can easily join through the browser.
Great design.
Now it seems most players I encounter have both Curse and Discord installed and will use the URL share feature that both have to share team invites for one or the other.
With them generally being used for gaming and now the acquisition and integrations happening between Twitch and Curse I suspect over time we will see Discord go the way of MySpace if they don't find someone to sell to and soon.
(Disclosure: My experience focuses on the WoW and to a lesser extent Overwatch communities, mostly in the Oceanic Aus/NZ region. But in those communities, Discord is utterly, crushingly dominant.)
Of course, there are plenty of Discord servers not associated with specific streamers or related to Twitch. Those will be harder to touch but I don't think Twitch cares about them anyway.
http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-17936822...
To our knowledge, the only recourse users currently have is to disallow direct messaging
https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14...
By default, Discord allows any two people who share a server to direct message each other. Unfortunately, the baddies can use this behavior to send you stuff that you don’t want to see — everything from Harry Potter spoiler memes (Snape killed who!??) to much worse. To keep the baddies at bay, we’re adding Safe Direct Messaging.
Are there any gaming communities still using IRC? It might still be niche which is why it's not a problem?
Disclaimer: grew up in France during that time so can't speak for other countries
On the other hand, this move makes Discord an attractive acquisition target who's looking to counter Amazon by pursuing the exact same market with a very similar integrated offering, and who thinks they can buy the market- and mindshare without users fleeing afterwards.
Time. Curse has significantly better community integrations. Discord has taken a long time to deliver on its features and lacks even the most basic (text channels per voice channel for instance). Curse already has video calls, its a significanty better replacement of Skype than Discord is.
Many are migrating to Curse because streamers use it, and it makes it easy and lucrative to do so as a streamer.
Unless Discord does something unique, like client side modding support and some cooler things you can do with servers, they're going to get crushed.
We still have a long way to go to deliver that experience and we are actively looking at community feedback on our launch this month.
Hubert, Founder of Curse now working for Twitch
Everyone has a price. The offers were just too low.