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Comment by aboutruby | Hacker News Reader

I'm continuously impressed at the quality of the software coming from Discord. By far the best messaging user experience on desktop there is.

Discord already uses Cloudflare, I'm curious what they think of Workers.

edit: I'm on macOS, not an heavy user, I used Slack / Skype / Hangouts / WhatsApp / Messenger / etc. before

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Unfortunately I have the opposite experience

- Abusive trust and safety team - Constant outages for both users and bots - Frontend is heavily bloated - UI designed for money grab instead for the users

By judging all the strings in the client frontend, their help website, and my interactions with the support team, Discord is being run by some rather immature people.

Don't forget the wierd dependency hell when it comes to writing Discord bots in Python. They require you use an older version of Python that is "fun" to work with.

All the Diacord API libraries are community built and maintained.

Why do you have to use Python?

Discord's trust and safety team has come under fire lately for their (until a week ago) lax policy on "cub content" (for those unfamiliar, it's the furry equivalent of child porn). Apparently some of the people on the team may have been participants in sharing it; there are number of furries on that team (at least: Tinyfeex, Allthefoxes).

While I appreciate their technical accomplishments, this is one of those things that gives me chills about the company.

As much as I want to support Discord, their goal from when they initially started as a company has shifted in an entirely new direction. I feel betrayed as a 2015 user.

Honestly I don't know what you expected. There's no other way it could've ended. Voice, file uploads, etc are expensive.

Don't fall in love with services. (Or with people ;P)

I have the opposite experience. Frequent outages/voice connectivity degradation. Font rendering was broken on many linux distros for months. And now there has been some kind of crash for about a month and still ongoing where discord becomes sluggish and eventually closes over time. (If you have a game open it can crash within one hour)

Not to mention where an update randomly the noise suppression would completely mute your mic.

>I'm curious what they think of Workers.

We are a very heavy user of cloudflare workers. Our marketing/developer/web app are entirely served from the edge using workers - and we use workers for request authentication for downloading game chunks on our store.

Thanks a lot, I should have googled it, I would have seen your previous comment mentioning it which has complementary information[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447355

I fully agree, compared to other widely used software in the gaming space (Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo). Experience to join new servers, create new content on existing one and chat+voice is amazing!

I can definitely agree that Discord is a fantastic chat experience. I use both IRC and Discord, and I think Discord (if only slightly) takes the cake.

Discord has actually been using workers since before they were available to the general public. They've been using them mainly for edge caching games for the store, A/B, and promotion of clients to different testing environments.

Discord lets me pick sound output and input devices... Slack doesn't even do that!

Never in the world would I have thought a gaming chat client had more robust features than the pricey enterprise chat client

If you're on windows, the 'App Volume device preferences' settings pane has you covered

It's the replacement for the vintage volume control, while a little sub-par by any modern standard, you can pick the input/output device per application

Having gone through some of their Elixir libraries, I concluded the opposite. They have some very inefficient and ugly code in a lot of places.

Not self-hostable.

>By far the best messaging user experience on desktop there is.

No offence but that's like your opinion.

Coming from IRC and TeamSpeak, to me Discord is unnecessarily bloated and full of analytics.

>I used Slack / Skype / Hangouts / WhatsApp / Messenger / etc. before

Yeah, explains it. :P

I'm still on IRC. It is much quicker and it is much easier to be connected and active in multiple servers/channels, whereas the overview in Discord is terrible unless you use third party clients, which can get you banned from the service.

The voice service isn't very high quality and there are frequent server outages.

I use Telegram, Facebook, whatever except Discord for instant messaging, and wish Discord wasn't the default for non-professional groups.

People my age (upper 20s) praising it are always those who used Skype for gaming and never touched Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Mumble.

I used Teamspeak and Ventrilo for gaming back in the day and much prefer Discord.

I was a user of all three of the gaming-centric chat / voice services and the issue always has been about centralizing different communities together rather than quality of service / technology itself. One group plays on a random guy’s Teamspeak server that’s been running in a VPS or colo for 6 years, another splinter group moved to Vent, etc. Then there were the fun times dealing with various authentication and rotating certificates (if you practiced decent security at all you had to have one) for each of these disparate communities.

As gaming itself got broader reach a lot of casual folks were left to their own devices and underserved, so that’s the big gap being seen. I know plenty of 20-somethings that know about and used the predecessors to Discord but they’re all hardcore gamers compared to even the folks closer to mid/late 30s that may have been hardcore before but don’t have the time to fiddle with these systems anymore.

It seems with Discord quality was tough to maintain at scale and we’ve got the inverse problem set.

Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Mumble could get some inspiration from some ergonomics aspects of Discord. Quickly sharable unique urls for invitations for instance, instead of server:port-username-(password)

Teamspeak has something like this.

The mumble URI lets you embed a password: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Mumble_URL#Username_and_Passwo...

In on both Discord on IRC but like Discord better. Discord comes with multiple servers (not that easy in IRC, you must have a bouncer), formatting, logs, in an easy package and relatively "low" footpring when compared to the competition.

IRC clients have had those features for at least 15-20 years now.

No if you are not connected you loose the logs.

Discord has low footprint? It's usually the application that consumes most RAM of my system (if we ignore the browser) and consumes an steady 1-2% of CPU even when in the systray.

And it is, of course, closed source, so no way to use an alternative client. I wish I could use an IRC gateway for it, that would be cool (I very, very rarely use the voice chat)

>no way to use an alternative client These exist, but some are not open source. You can run discord on a vita if you wanted to.

Just because something is closed source, doesn't mean it's impossible to reverse engineer. The entire system is compiled into a javascript webpack, alongside just reading web requests/their documentation, doing some basic functionality in an alternative implementation is really easy.

This apparently breaks the terms of service, but they are only enforce this if you're an outlier for the number of API requests you send.

The most well known 3rd party client would be Ripcord, which I use for it's Slack features

> but they are only enforce this if you're an outlier for the number of API requests you send

This thing usually goes: Until the better client threatens the proprietary one with is better monetized.

Low footprint compared to the competition, Discord is way better than IRC practically so IRC is no competition. I'd better spend that RAM to have features.

You do not need a bouncer to connect to multiple servers on IRC. Any client will do that and have server lists ready for you to just check and join.

Now, you might want a bouncer to store messaged and logs when offline, but not to be able to connect to multiple servers. Logging is a basic feature in IRC.

I'm precisely speaking about seeing the logs when not connected. The sense of community on IRC is lower because you need to connect all the time and otherwise loose what everyone said.

IRC lacks history (unless you have access to an always-on server, which you'll pay for one way or another) and has a userbase that is hostile to standardizing anything like user auth or rich-text formatting. I'll put up with a bit of "bloat" for the sake of not having to worry about where my bouncer is running.

No history is a feature. I like knowing that, like in real life, only people who are present can read what I'm saying.

That's not the case either though - many users have bouncers that will sit in the channel the whole time, and you have no idea who might be saving logs or where they might be publishing them. It's the worst of both worlds.

>many users have bouncers that will sit in the channel the whole time

Then I know they're reading.

>and you have no idea who might be saving logs or where they might be publishing them

If I'm in a room with you nothing stops you from telling others what I've told you.

> If I'm in a room with you nothing stops you from telling others what I've told you.

Sure, but I won't have a complete written record like an IRC log, and won't be able to credibly quote.

how would one credibly quote on IRC? Isn't the chat log enough for you?

My point is that chat logs make IRC a lot more "on the record" than in-person discussions in practice (even if not in theory). Anyone who's keeping a log can quote directly from it, and those quotes are credible (if nothing else, because the person posting them doesn't know who else was keeping a log and can call out inaccurate quotes).

I haven't been on IRC in years but auth has been standardized no? Msg the auth bot with your authentication phrase or you get your nick changed

Some servers do that. It's not standardised, not integrated with any other systems, and usually inherently subject to a race condition that renders it low security.

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