Discord now has a store
blog.discordapp.com
blog.discordapp.com
I like it, but it's not reliable, the interface kind of sucks balls, search function could be a little bit better and why does markdown not work on the mobile application? Why don't we have threads like in Slack for more business oriented stuffs?
Just know I'm saying all this as someone who uses Discord every day. I do like it, but I'm not going to sit here singing it's praises when in reality, it would be so much better if someone really took time to polish the damn thing.
Also, more to the point, the store sucks. It's annoying, it adds to the clutter, go buy games off of GOG or Steam if you have to, I don't get why we need to have another middleman, one that already harvests our data.
Side Note: I will say, Discord's keybindings are absolutely amazing, 10/10. Could not be happier, now if the rest of the app was like that, I wouldn't care about the store.
Basically my point is let's wait and see and give them the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective its an incredible piece of software, front end and back. It's stunning. We get 100% of the product for free, and those that pay get 105%.
Also it is still quite young. With time some of your issues will likely be ironed out, or it may turn into a mess.
I do agree with it feeling a bit cluttered now.
Saying this is a little unfair to Visual Studio, but it’s just so bad when you’re in an enterprise setup where you don’t really have a local drive. Visual Studio code on the other hand doesn’t care if your windows profile is on one network drive and your code is on another. Which is a little ironic because I think you’ll see code more in small setups and regular studio more in enterprise.
Anyway, I think electron apps work fairly well. I don’t like discord, the company, but discord itself works and feels a lot better than Skype, teams peak or ventrilo.
We at least know that decent apps can be built with it, but for some reason, they aren't. There is a pit of failure somewhere. Maybe the JavaScript eco-system? Sludge hammers for thumbtacks?
Slow electron apps come from a culture of not caring about performance. It's not a technical problem but a values problem. C++ developers _tend_ to care more about resource usage. Any GUI will be slow if the developers stop caring about repaints, even one written in C++.
C++ GUIs are fast because people sit in front of profilers and make them fast. Not because C++ is a magical language where every operation takes less than 16ms. Chromium has great profiling tools available. The chromium team has put a lot of effort into making performance tools available and then people ignore them and say that it sucks.
I also think slack and simple note work really well, and I already mentioned Discord.
So I’m not really sure where it got it’s bad rep. Maybe because it’s JavaScript and people hate that?
Atleast about a year back when I used it, Atom quickly filled up about 8GB of RAM for a moderately sized project in Go plus all necessary plugins.
VSC is fast but no lightweight either and hogs some resources.
It's not inherently a problem with Javascript, usually it's some framework like React being misused as usual inducing a lot of GC activity on top of unnecessary memory bloat.
There are a lot of great electron apps, that frankly don’t have non-electron equals, so it obviously works. Yet it somehow always gets hit with these “well c++ could have done it better”.
Maybe it’s true, but if the biggest problem with electron is people using a framework wrong. Then what makes you think they’d do a better job in c++?
I'm curious, can you expand on that? I hear a lot about how much people love Discord, but haven't heard much (good or bad) about the company itself. They seem to be in the best position to compete with Steam though, which is hard to say the least.
I don't want yet another Steam or Netflix competitor. I just want to use Steam and Netflix solely. Or to be more precise: I want interoperability between these platforms.
The beauty of an open protocol such as IRC meant they anyone could use any IRC compatible client. XMPP had the same advantage.
Because Discord's not for business oriented stuff? It's IRC. Two paths diverged in a yellow wood; Slack went corporate and Discord went for entertainment.
Agree on the Electron front, though: I don't need a chat client hogging my resources when I'm trying to run games at maximum fidelity.
Its great for voice conversation and chat. Much better than Skype.
The store is overkill. It will further bloat the client, and had none of the features that customers want (which is basically all the features of Steam) or devs want (which is basically DRM, global reach and localisation, patch management, and a lower cut than 30%).
The way the store is setup now is basically only suitable for games at the end of their lifecycle. There is no way to patch the games, as far as I can see.
The -one- good thing I will acknowledge is its curation. It was remarkable logging into the store and seeing a good-looking list of great games. Its become a bit of a tire logging into Steam and seeing loads of Hentai, porn, and Chinese games (Steam doesn't support title localisation) not to mention all the junk uploaded as part of Steam Direct $100 fee.
I don't see Discord threatening Steam anytime soon, but it's nice to have some competition.
Because you use it everyday. Probably for free and without ads. Every day. It works really well and provides value to a lot of people.
It's rightfully praised I'd say.
Because it is free as in beer. History teaches us free as in beer whilst paying with privacy/ads wins from paid. Example: Android.
All the alternatives (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Skype, Mumble) are much worse than Discord. They're either not gratis or they are not portable or they're more difficult to set up, or their interface or features sucks, or they're centralised (while Discord uses anycast and multiple servers behind the scenes). Discord is also a voice chat and chat server in one with the latter having resume support when you're AFK. This lead to entire (gaming) communities residing on Discord.
I dislike Electron as much as anyone else but it isn't a dealbreaker for most people; just a memory hog and a minus. If the plus outweigh it, it gets chosen. Even though Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Skype/Mumble use much less resources.
As for Discord the company, they're a startup still, who are trying out business models. Who knows what their next one is going to be.
I think between Nitro & the Store they're going to do well with generating income. Tieing free games to Nitro was a smart idea IMO, but they still have an option to use them seperate.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's essentially the modern IRC - fast and easy to spin up a server for any community, decent moderation tools, scripting via bots, rich media support, and continuity across different platforms.
I definitely wish they exposed client apis and sanctioned 3rd party clients, but this is likely at odds with their ultimate business model.
> I definitely wish they exposed client apis and sanctioned 3rd party clients, but this is likely at odds with their ultimate business model.
So, kind of the antithesis of IRC then.
The product itself is fantastic, and other than valid security and privacy concerns, it's a lot better than any other chat application I've used in the past.
Discord is actually quite nice for communities other than gaming. I'm a member of a number of language learning and programming servers that I enjoy.
Skype looks more and more like a massive mistake after the Microsoft acquisition. You have a product with an abysmal user experience, no improvements, an awful group chat feature, unreliable voice calls, and so much more that was wrong. I'd wager that they were over-confident of their dominant position. Slack and Discord will hopefully completely replace it with time.
For reasons that I struggle to put my finger on.. Discord beats out all of the Enterprise chat apps for chat. Most of the groups I am in (that are non gaming related) now use Discord for their chats.
The client support across iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac is fantastic and consistent. And the mobile notifications are super smart - if your desktop is not idle they go there, if you haven't read them yet once you've been idle or lock your screen they are now sent to your phone - including any you haven't yet read. It's great.
Edit: I found this: https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231, and this: https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stabi....
Skype, on the other hand, has never once given me a problem. Calls are fine, such as I need them. The text chats for both group and private work well. The client is decent enough on my computer that I can at least run a YouTube video at the same time, or play a game. Heck, I've even done screen-sharing. Trying that with Discord caused my computer to just freeze up and then eventually crash when it figured out how to even do that.
I have tried using Miranda to connect to Discord as well as IRC, but the connection is unreliable and there's no way to tell Miranda "download messages from x time ago".
So you can say it's very much on track to its namesake. All that Discord has done is create just that amongst the groups of friends I have online - chaos and discord.
And on that same note, where's the Pastafarian response to these SubGenius and Erisian derived communication methods?
Seriously though, if Slack and Discord replace Skype and IRC, that will be the end of the age of IM for me.
- You cannot prevent anyone in a group chat from inviting anyone to a group chat. Routinely, people will add their full list of hundreds of contacts to group chats. This is awful.
- Anyone that's a member of a group chat can change the topic of the chat.
- No audit log of actions for group communication owners to look at.
- Awful role permission system for group chats.
- No separate community mechanism from group chats to messages in the same way that Discord separates servers from DMs.
- Skype has a poor history of account security. DDoSing from Skype's API was very prominent. Social engineering Skype to lock user accounts was also common.
- No guarantees of whether or not your messages on Skype will be synced across devices, or when they will disappear.
- Inferior bot ecosystem to that of Discord or Slack.
- Inferior notification system, can't listen to mentions alone.
- No channels in group chats.
- Enjoy being spammed by scam bots adding you in your private messages.
Skype is a terrible piece of software.
Edit: I'm not saying that what you claim didn't happen to you, but I've never heard of anyone with such terrible performance problems before. As far as RAM goes at least, Discord uses similar amounts to what Skype did for me.
Perhaps it's possible you were infected by some form of malware, I can't imagine not being able to run Discord and watch a YouTube video on any computer from the past half-decade.
You're right, there are no channels in group chats - why would someone need a channel within a channel? If I want a group chat with a specific group of individuals, it's trivial to create one and add people from either another chat or my friends list. What you're asking for seems somewhat silly to me. I also don't understand what you mean about a 'separate community mechanism', the group chat is a subcommunity within the Skype community. If I want to contact someone, I just find them in my friends list and send them a message. They'll get it the next time they're online.
I'll agree with you, the permissions controls aren't there - the solution is: don't add people you don't trust to a group chat with people you care about. If you want permissions controls and bots galore, go to IRC.
I disagree about the notification system; I've got two groups set up that only pop up unread if my name is said. It's not a "mention" filter, it's a word filter which I typed my name and my nickname within the group into. I also don't care one iota about cross-device syncing, it's not my use-case. I have one computer. That's all I use when it comes to chatting. I don't use a device (i.e. anything that's not a PC) to do a great deal of Internet things.
Social engineering is going to happen no matter what the platform is; that's the whole point of it being social. Heck, the first 'hackers' were arguably social engineers. You can't really defend against it as a platform, all you can do is educate. I'll grant that Skype doesn't do that well, but neither does IRC or Slack.
Also, my computer is not from the last half-decade. It is an x86 machine with 1GB of RAM and will remain such for the foreseeable future. I am not planning on upgrading, ever, because I don't see anything on the market that looks to me like a clear upgrade with no downsides to the software and peripherals I wish to run.
Discord servers allow you to build communities, and can and do scale up to tens of thousands of members. This is something Skype simply can't be used for. Maybe it's not your use-case.
You may want channels in a community because there may be different topics you want to split apart. For example, in a programming server, Ruby and JavaScript channels, but both in the same server. Much like subforums on a traditional forum.
Bots are separate from user accounts on Discord, and you have total control over their permissions. Bots using user accounts are strictly prohibited.
I don't think not adding people you don't trust is a solution to proper access control. Even if you do, their accounts being breached is always an issue.
You caught me on the computer issue! I can't say much about it, other than that you might not be the intended target of developers anymore, so for that reason I can understand your choice of Skype Classic.
Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me.
As a final note, I believe the privacy situation on Skype to be much worse than Discord (though I can't act like Discord is Signal or something).
Also, user-reliant privacy is stronger, to me, than computer-reliant privacy. Educating users, showing them and letting them see why they should have good security practices, etc., seems like a better deal in the long run than trying to keep track of accounts and outwit the next person to exploit some weakness in the code.
But I think your one comment sums everything up: "Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me." Modern IRC, for me, is just, well, IRC. I have Miranda-NG on my computer because ChatZilla's not that good anymore. I don't need it centralized, because that's not how it works. As I said, the most bearable Discord ever was for me, was when I ran it through Miranda alongside my logins to FreeNode, EFNet, and Undernet. And even that only lasted a week before I got too frustrated with the annoyances.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/95wzu6/discord_is_...
Looks like they may have just removed this restriction?
I hope Discord opens up to more developers soon.
Oh, and another thought, I run a Discord for people interested in the game I'm currently developing. You can imagine the effectiveness of putting a Buy button so close to an engaged community.
They're still in stores though and lots of people buy 'em yet. Especially on consoles.
https://www.techspot.com/news/75220-most-console-players-pre...
Digital is only recently starting to beat out physical, but changing fast now: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/11/for-console-games-dow...
Paying for something on Valve's platform means that at any time, Valve or some other group can revoke your access. The same goes for Netflix. Things get added and removed from their catalog so often that I could never bother keeping it straight, even when I had a free account for a few months. All I knew was one day, I wanted to watch something that they'd had and it was gone. That was the day I made absolutely certain that they had no payment information and would end the free trial gracefully and without trying to take my money.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on Xbox Store, $85 (cheapest edition). Physical copy, $66 (prices converted from NOK to USD).
EDIT: Apparently RDR2 Xbox One X download size will "only" be 88.57GB. Still, a bit heavy. Forza 7 was 95GB.
And I'd be pretty amazed if any physical apps still sell PC games on disc. Do publishers even make boxes and CDs now?
It's not 2005. GameStop et al just sell console games.
Build a tangentially related service, build up your own community and then slowly pivot into their space once you've got your userbase.
Anecdotally everyone I know who uses Steam is also on Discord for chat now because it works so well.
I doubt continuing to be a game store on Windows will be profitable indefinitely, considering Microsoft is trying to push their own store and close down Windows gaming for themselves.
Now we have the Microsoft Store, whille substantially better, Windows hasn't even attempted to close down the system and yet again everyone is claiming they will. They aren't, and they won't, the Microsoft Store still hasn't urserped Azure or regular Windows keys in sales or profit. So why would any company close off their system potentially losing more sales on Windows keys, it just makes no sense.
Can we please stop touting this bullshit?
"Someone opposed the thing and it never happened."
We don't have an alternative reality to actually verify why it never happened.
Valve has been pushing for Linux support in case they need it as fallback (see: Proton, Steam Machines, etc.)
Atleast at Valve there is a certain amount of fear this might happen.
People™ usually include much more swear words and other non political correct terms (or memes). When a company does that, it always feels forced.
"gamer" language is more like stuff you read on 4chan, where most memes originate.
In the replies, they said they are planning a blog post to talk about the tech in-depth. Looking forward to that! Apparently they’re also deploying Rust + Elixir via a NIF.