Dark Horse Discord
mule.substack.com
mule.substack.com
The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots.
You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...
No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result. They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full chat content, including all DMs.
I have stopped using it for these reasons.
I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.
I did it about a year ago and got a huge trove of messages back as JSON.
That suddenly might come sooner rather than later, as the Chinese Tencent has invested an undisclosed amount into Discord: https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-...
The same Tencent that owns WeChat, used as a surveillance tool for results such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vspukvqxTSg
They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.
IME Discord voice quality has been awful, and that's just direct voice between two people; multiple times every session the call disintegrates, sometimes falling out entirely. 'Robotic sounding' is a description often used. I think region (mine's Europe) and server capacity in that region, might be an important factor in the perceived quality of Discord voice. Several times it's been so bad we have fallen back to other options, e.g., Teams.
[0]https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is...
3 years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/46dnse/robot_vo...
2 years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u4uw6/voice_qu...
2 years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u55vj/robotic_...
11 months https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/apmkja/big_incr...
9 months https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bd6o7v/robotic_...
8 months https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bk63nd/low_ping...
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/search?q=robot+voice&res...
Becoming an enterprise product would cause discord to grow its organization a certain way, hire certain kinds of people, cause their product to be built by certain kinds of processes. And the qualities that make me enjoy using it would absolutely go away. It would become Slack. I think it's impossible to firewall the enterprise-ness from the rest of the org/product. When you have a great culture you have to fiercely protect it because it's fragile.
Of course that's my selfish reason for it not to go enterprise. Not a business reason.
Requiring certain number of nitro boosts might not be as serious, but that would likely just make people consolidate servers more (possibly split text and voice servers, but at that point they might as well consider other options for voice).
Probably because they make more money on scraping the data of consumers than they would on (1) building e2e encryption into the platform and (2) hiring support to give white glove treatment to enterprise accounts.
"Aside from being a freeware VoIP application, the company is firm with their stand on not using advertisements on the chat platform (similar to Whatsapp).
Discord is also strongly against selling its users’ data because this would mean breaching the relationship between the two parties involved (sigh, Facebook). With that said, you’re probably wondering how this company stays afloat." https://alejandrorioja.com/blog/how-does-discord-make-money/
"The company is against advertisements and selling of user data" https://www.feedough.com/how-does-discord-make-money-discord...
>By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service.
It protects them from technicalities, but it is very broad sweeping. This section of ToS is basically what keeps me away from it.
I would struggle to find a major platform without it.
Reddit [0]
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed.
YouTube [1]
> By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and Affiliates’) business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service.
0: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement#text-conte...
Enterprises don't want that anyway. How could they snoop on their employees otherwise.
For the most part, enterprises are already using Office 365 for their email, or if not that then at least for the Office suite, and Teams is bundled in for free.
Be mindful that it's ethos may not be for you. For every silly feature or targeting you've appreciated that has disappeared, there are comments like yours that are the reason.
Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.
And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst
May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?
It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.
Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC.
I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.
Do you know of any official/unofficial videos that would help getting traction?
I'm afraid I don't know of any videos, but I tell people "Zulip is exactly like Slack, but everything is a thread, and you can zoom in and out of threads" and find that that's basically enough for them to get it. Maybe try that with a few people and see?
Also helps that we have a full email coupling, so if someone in your team doesn’t like or want to use the app, everything will stream to them just as regular email threads they can respond. This is useful for older folks who prefer email, or higher up people who don’t want to deal with an app but still be able to follow what’s happening.
Here’s a comparison of how that works in one image: https://i.imgur.com/wLFnIyn.png
If you’d like to try it I can throw in a discount code, just reach out - my email is in my profile.
Slack has been pretty solid for large groups though. We'd normally hit the message limit in 3 days, sometimes even 1 day during a large raid. It didn't really matter because nobody really wants to scroll that far back.
IRC seems to have a chance with IRCCloud and the like, but it's just hard to get people into. But we are starting to see channels with 500-1000 people again, so maybe this appeals to some communities.
http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs
That's alone is my biggest wish out of Discord.
I also have everything I want hotkeyed, so I still think that "far behind" is a huge stretch at best.
You mean an open source alternative, because TS is already self hosted.
In my experience, this improves the quality of every conversation. They just flow more naturally.
I wish other solutions would prioritize latency. Skype went very noticeably backward after they switched away from P2P.
God I hate Gitter. I'm forced to use it because some communities (such as Mithril.js) hang there but it's slow, riddled with UX problems, and search is completely useless.
I've had a personal experience recently where I had to report a situation involving older people and a minor to Discord. (Discord banned the minor, which I guess is one way of dealing with the situation, but it leaves something to be desired.)
Not every call for "think of the children" is a baseless call made by a strawman that just loves censorship or something. "Think of the children" is a silly phrase when it's about rock music. It's not silly when it's about a dark creepy alleyway that people keep complaining about running into pedophiles in.
I love using Discord, but I hope they focus enough on keeping it safe and take their position seriously.
Legally required to if they're under 13.
Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?
Basically, no AAA partners really care, they've all been burned before, so they do the old standby when you need to rejuvenate a platform (like the Xbox 360 and PS3), and turn to the indie market, in hopes that would showcase a more cooperative community desperate to get any press or attention they can. But the indie market already has itch.io, and Steam, and Discord didn't seem strictly better than either of those, so it was already a bit underwhelming of a launch.
Around the same time, the Epic Games Store launched, offering much better royalty deals than Steam/Discord, and Epic offered large grants to developers in exchange for limited-term exclusivity. This got a lot of developer/gamer attention, so quickly all the renewed "storefront war" was seen as Steam vs. Epic, with maybe GoG/itch.io as a very distant third.
Discord's Store had no chance out of the gate. They tried to pivot to "buy a Nitro subscription, get some free games", but between their awkward Store interface and nothing really that great on offer, they eventually shuttered it. [0]
[0] https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-nitro-a732ddc4b...
Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.
For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#fair-billing-poli...
It looks like if I wanted to invite 10 friends to my room on Modular.im, I'd have to pay $17.50, compared to $0 for Discord.
- Open source. Self-explanatory.
- Federated. Sure, you can probably redundant-ify your IRC server with Apache Something and Amazon AWS/ Cloudflare whatever if you really wanted to, but I regularly see Matrix rooms with 10+ addresses because the protocol's designed around that redundancy, not the other way around. And of course with Discord none of this even applies...good luck if Intern Greg elbows the Big Red Button, or they pull a yahoo groups/google+/etc.
- The protocol leaves a lot of room for experimentation that Discord isn't nearly open enough for. [1][2][3]
- There's bridges to other discord, irc, and dozens of other platforms, sidestepping the adoption problem (note that there's been even more added since this graphic was made). [4]
They aren't exactly languishing in obscurity either: the government of France is one of their userbases [5]. Yeah, I'd say Discord-style VC would be nice, but the lack if it isn't exactly holding them back.
[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-live/ [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/freebird/ [3]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/lightrix/ [4]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... [5]: https://vector.im/#case-studies
The only thing this doesn't let you do is install bridges to other services (such as Discord). For that you'll need your own server.
While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.
Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly. And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.
I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.
I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.
Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.
Also the protocol is open so it should be doable: https://mumble-protocol.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
For those curious about the switch from murmur to mumble in our conversation, murmur is the server side, while mumble is the client side.
we can push open source alternatives all you want but the truth is that these alternatives don't do a good enough job with the most valuable part of social networks: building the network. yes, word of mouth is a big part of growth, but the developers also need to put in work. discord didn't simply blow up because early adopters told their friends and so on, as much as we want to think that to be the case.
Most people came because a)others were there and had chosen it as a platform. b) It's just really nice in every way (other than the bottomline control an privacy part) c) There's no competitors that completely match it's functionality and profit model or if they tried to get close they came too late.
You have your voice chats, video chat and of course text chats. No trouble hosting servers. Easily and extensively customisable modding, structure, permissions, etc. Pins, pings, etc Almost all functionality one might need is there and if it isn't there's bots for it. Sharing and inviting is easy. No time limit on how long stuff is saved or needing to be online to see messages. Linked images, articles, videos what have you show up nicely. Theming is consistent. It works on every OS (except maybe bsd idk) and the browsers consistently so you won't have one group being left out and crusading against it. Everything is in a single place unlike the various irc networks. Want to show a pic you took? a webm? No need to host it somewhere else first.
If there was an open source alternative that got close hell yes of course I'd use it. I'd consider it a big bonus that i'd drop a bit of functionality for. But as it stands there's no comparable private alternatives either.
where do you see this kind of effort from open source alternatives? i believe this is the biggest issue with the "alternatives". my perception is that they think they built an amazing product and that people should just start using it. but that's not how that works.
I did. I put a lot of effort into staying as FOSS as possible. Discord is the thing that got me to compromise this, by being so incredibly good.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.
Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check "Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still don't know if I should.
I hate them.
Stackexchange chat has a proper reply feature. You can reply to a message in the same channel. Your message still goes on the bottom of the current channel, but it pings(highlights) the user and contains a link icon to the original message. Hovering on a reply also highlights the message it responds to (if it's on the screen). This is mainly used when responding to older messages, where it otherwise wouldn't be easy to see what you're responding to.
If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in your reply. No need to send to channel.
Do you genuinely mean this or are you being hyperbolic?
I agree that that the loading messages are silly, and that could be forgiven, but for the fact that when Discord has trouble updating (which happens when Discord feels like it, not you), you just keep seeing them happen over and over, with no sense of progress or ability to debug.
Discord isn't too bad in that sense.
Other critiques about their administration and overall culture aggravate the UI issues in a way that has a similar non-serious tone. It's Bastard Operator From Hell run through I Can Haz Cheeseburger; I have witnessed people banned on the basis of frivolous complaints with messaging that has a tone of "lolz ur acct bann't" that has left some of the Discord servers I am on without some solid admins until things magically straighten out with the same "guess how this works on the inside" attitude.
The thing is just the incredible ease of use. The easy with which you can join a server and then drop into any text or voice chat you feel like.
There are probably programms that technically replicate the feature set, but I haven't used anything that feels as effortless as discord does. And I can't even pinpoint why exactly that is.
Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.
- you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along?
- I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application?
- Does it exist on mobile?
I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people.
*edited for formatting
To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1]
The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2]
(I'm not affiliated with Spectrum)
[1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum
[2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum
I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around.
At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_.
One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point.
As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now.
Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.
I've certainly seen plenty of other forum software that has live updates as well, so it's not unique in that regard.
(Note that I'm not bashing Spectrum here, just saying that I don't feel it's as revolutionary as I've seen it pitched to be.)
The article mentions it's invite-only so you're not going to find a public link to join.
I have more thoughts here if anyone is interested, including alternatives, "Why tech groups can use Slack for free but open source projects and businesses of any size shouldn’t": https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-a...
Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.
I think the greatest thing Discord did for gaming communities was make it so easy to get people together in a voice channel that everyone stopped using Skype. I tried for years to move people to Mumble/Vent/TS but it never stuck. But Discord managed to do it. I'd say voice is still the main feature that draws me and friends to the platform.
0: https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd...
That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes blindness.