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Comment by cflewis | Hacker News Reader

I think Discord is a clear buy for someone like Microsoft. It gives them a big leg up, and doesn't really compete with Skype in the demographics.

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Please god don't say that. M$'s acquisition of Skype is a lot of the reason we use Discord now.

After over six months of being harrased with “upgrade your skype for better experience”, I finally buckled up and clicked “ok”. When Skype came back in less than five minutes I felt that Microsoft read my mind, pickup all the features I loved and used daily, and deleted them off their new version! it simply blew my mind! In addition everything worked different! New Skype is entirely new messanger, not Skype upgrade. Thank God I was able to find previous version and still install it although I am sure eventually they will cut off old versions.

In addition, whatever shitty new version they dumped on my tablet has significant UI latency, which was not a problem before.

React Native.

Yeah, but GIFs and emojis!

The new UI is the most anti-user-friendly thing I have ever seen. They took something so simple and made it absolutely hard to use. I work with many non-tech people and they hate it. Skype is done.

Would be funny to change their motto to "Microsoft Discord: Ditch Microsoft Skype"

Microsoft would rebrand it Skype for Gamers

Then they'll rebrand Lync^H^H^H^H Skype for Business to "Discord for Business"

Isn't that what they have now?

Yeah, MS teams which is like discord. Only worse and slow.

Teams is better than Skype or Lync, but that is a very, very low bar to clear.

Not sure if I agree considering it indirectly competes with both Xbox Live and Teams. In another world maybe they could buy it just for the tech and make something more synergistic with it, but they already did that with Skype. So ultimately I just don't see how Microsoft would monetize it and integrate it with their existing products without competing against themselves.

I think Amazon is a more likely acquirer considering they already have Twitch and Discord could vertically integrate with their cloud + it will make their ecosystem better for eventually launching a Steam competitor which I am 100% sure they plan to do at some point

I think it would be an even better buy for Epic Games. It would give their Epic Games Store immediate credibility, and add all of the communication and community features that they are currently lacking.

A Microsoft buyout would kill the thing just like Skype.

Completely agree. Skype was the gamer go-to for a while, in fact.

as a gamer I have to ask "when was that?"

At the end of MoP and during WoD, everyone was all of a sudden using Skype for everything in WoW (raiding, PvP, dungeons, etc.). I remember it vividly because it was so annoying.

As a gamer, I'd have to agree with him - we used Skype up until the Xbox Live (360) era.

Different portions of gamers exist, and all that.

So for like 2 years from 2003 to 2005?

When I played CS:Source in a clan, we had Teamspeak that we rented a server for. When I played WoW and Guild Wars with a small group of friends, we used Skype because it was free. Early-to-mid 2000s.

I must be a mammoth, as I still use Skype for gaming. What does Discord offer, that Skype doesn't, and Steam is running anyway too?

Lately Skype became too buggy to use as IM, but sound is still solid.

To reverse it, I can't really think of anything skype does better than discord in a mildly gaming context honestly.

Discord isn't owned by Microsoft, everyone uses it, and it runs in my browser.

That's more than enough reason to never touch the flaming pile of shit that Skype is today, thanks to corporate development strategies and bloat.

Skype also runs in the browser...

Does it use 4gb ram like it does on desktop? Does it remind me that Edge(TM) provides the best browsing experience?

Isn't Discord free model based on selling data to 3rd parties? What is their business model?

> What does Discord offer, that Skype doesn't

How about "Not being too buggy to use as IM"?

That is the shenanigan of this summer or so.

My high school friends and I used it up until we switch to Discord last year (so ~2013-2017). We all had Mumble and TeamSpeak installed for when we needed it, but all through high school we had a Skype group chat that we always used. It was a admittedly a bit of a hog, but it was free, looked nicer, and had a few more useful features then Mumble or Teamspeak.

There surely was a time. We had ventrilo and TeamSpeak but mostly used Skype for a small group from a clan.

I am speaking of roughly a decade ago, around CoD4 and L4D we often used Skype.

Also, xfire to chat. Which was an awesome program at the time!

I can't be the only one out here who remembers RogerWilco

Never.

I think mostly for small groups. For groups of friends Skype was usable, for guilds it was terrible.

There was a period when I went back to a WoW expansion that everyone was trying to go everyone onto Skype for pickup groups which was a horrible experience.

For the entire time that I've been (PC) gaming, that is starting in the early 2000s, people have been using Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo and recently entirely transitioned to Discord. Everybody either had their own VoIP server or hopped on a friend's. I've never seen Skype used consistently. The assumption being that Skype has just too much overhead. Which is comical when you think about what Discord is.

But maybe that's just an EU tropism.

I think it's more about scale. Mumble and co. have good enough noise cancelling and management options that it's reasonable to have 30+ people in the same channel. Skype becomes a mess around 4-5 people. Discord is still much worse than Mumble, but apparently still close enough that people can't be bothered to set anything else up.

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