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Comment by Algent | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy.

They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.

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I use slack for work and discord for friends. One feels like a labor of love and the other is a chore to use that I'd discard immediately if I could.

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.

They could be dominant for lightly regulated businesses as-is and more so with a good add-on strategy (ie task managers / workflow as the author emphasized). I generally agree going the enterprise route, as it exists today, would be a bad move for the product.

I just hate the "fun" jokes in Discord at start-up. I'm in 4 servers and none of them are about video gaming. It is a great chat application fit for many more purposes. Discord is great for business!

Anytime an application is "tweaking the flux capacitor" I roll my eyes. I can't stand jokey loading screens in anything other than indie video games.

Most of the people using discord love it's playfulness.

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.

> They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices

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.

Also in Europe but I have the complete opposite experience. I'm constantly impressed of how great voice in Discord works compared to other options.

Also in Europe, I've been using Discord almost daily for 5 years now, and always impressed by the voice quality.

I'm not sure how you've been using it for 5 years, when it's only been out for 4 (May 13th 2015)[0].

[0]https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is...

I'm just one example, but I've been using it since launch day. So 5 years is getting close.

Rounding 4.7 years to 5 seems like a perfectly acceptable estimate for a comment.

I'm sure there are many unaffected, but it's a well-known and not uncommon issue. It has persisted for years.

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...

Perhaps, but it's still better than a lot of the other options (especially for the price). It's particularly better the first party voice "solutions" in games that are utter crap.

My friends and I were looking for a free solution. We tried WhatsApp for a bit but eventually stuck with Discord despite the quality because it allows us to just hop on and off arbitrarily. Nobody has to set up calls with the exact participants and do that all over again if someone else joins.

I'm not convinced that there's a significant market there when Microsoft is giving away Teams. Teams sucks bogwater, generally, but A/V and screen-sharing is the one thing that it does better than average.

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.

> I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy.

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.

Discord doesn't sell user data.

"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...

taking is quite easy. the fact is that not only it is proprietary software, it has all the red flags - desktop application mining a shitload of metadata, everything unencrypted, no audits, hostility towards Free Software, and the owner also had a previous project that ended featuring a privacy scandal lawsuit. there is nothing preventing them from using people's information. it is abominable for communications software.

On the other hand they claim copyright on everything you send through it.

>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 am pretty sure that's the standard legalese for most platforms. Reddit and YouTube also effectively have the same wording.

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...

1: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms#a294b3b51f

Just because it is widely used doesn't mean that from user PoV it is very overreaching.

They don't claim copyright, they ask (since this is a EULA and they don't tend to stand up very well in court) for a license to do the things you expect of a chat client with the stuff you post on the chat client (the big distinction being this doesn't restrict what you can do with it at all). It's a symptom of how broken copyright is that it's necessary. A really important part of that clause is "in connection with operating and providing the Service". While there's possibly a wide range of interpretations of exactly what that would mean (for example, could they incorporate any code you post on the platform into the code used for the server or client?), it means they can't do whatever they want with the content.

Why would they spend time implementing e2e encryption to go Enterprise? Slack is not e2e encrypted.

Enterprises don't want that anyway. How could they snoop on their employees otherwise.

I don't even think they need to. If they added message history limits, and maybe capped how many people can use voice at a channel / join a voice channel to Nitro only, they'd likely make a lot of money. Gamers spend good money on good products, but as long as it's all free, they have no incentive to do so.

If they make voice chat require nitro, it would most likely kill the product extremely fast (my guess would be that people move to Steam, but there are other options as well). For things that voice chat is generally used (usually some kind of team based game), vast majority of people definitely don't want to limit their team mate pool to people with Nitro subscription.

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).

Nitro is worth it just for the increased file size limit.

... and emoji's! (Seriously though, pretty great for bots)

My office365 subscription is cheaper, and I get a entire terrabyte of storage. If you're willing to pay for for convenience I guess

Absolutely a convenience thing. If we're going to cost efficiency, making new Google accounts whenever you run out of free storage wins.

How do I do that these days? Every Google account appears to need a hard (non voip) phone number attached to it.

Huh. Just created an account to test it out, and I wasn't required to fill in the phone number field.

I think there is probably room for discord to sell 'premium' voice channels. Currently their stuff works /most/ of the time but is unreliable enough that a lot of people still use stuff like mumble/teamspeak.

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