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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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