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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior.

Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable.

If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.

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Relaying some text is cheap. If I had to pay 3x the actual server cost to run one (so the rest can go toward development and staff), it would still be minuscule.

My friend circles on discord have enough people with nitro that it's almost certainly cash-positive by a lot.

Yep; it’s important to note that the signaling required to coordinate P2P voice and video is no more expensive than “relaying some text” with modern protocols. The question is whether Discord can remain sufficiently innovative to be ahead of the next thing that tries to disrupt its model. I think it is sufficiently irreverent, and sufficiently independent from B2B stability needs, to be that innovative.

But even if you gave me a free mumble service, it still wouldn't be comparable to Discord - at least when i was using Discord.

The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.

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