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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

The company was only really able to do this because it was a significantly better platform than what was there before. It was amazing to be able to open Discord for the first time and everything just worked! After struggling with voice chat in Skype, ventrilo, teamspeak, and mumble for years prior, that was a huge breath of fresh air. And the easy way it handled invites and text chat was the cherry on top.

It's easy to hate on Discord's practices but it's worth remembering that they're on top because their project is legitimately good.

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You struggle with audio settings in discord just like you do in Skype, ventrilo, and teamspeak. Most of the struggles with audio are not with individual programs, but rather your audio hardware, the OS, and its settings. (Windows updates love to screw those up.)

When discord released it didn't even have a Ctrl+f function for a long time. It still doesn't have chat logs on the user end, the permissions system is bad and audio quality is mediocre. On top of all of that, because they don't allow self-hosting it means that discord ultimately controls your conversations.

It caught on because it went viral. The service they offer is good, but the lack of privacy and no self-hosting make it disappointing.

From experience I can say Vent was (is?) pretty horrible. You had to run your own or pay for a server too, which was a huge deterrent to adoption. Skype is fine, but not focused around rooms / channels.

Basically it was a ripe market with extremely bad products. I don't think Discord is anything amazing (seems fine for the most part), but they're clearly significantly better than what existed when they launched.

And their stability is questionable. While it's not that bad, I experienced their server crash more than once. Never had server crash on my own hosted ventrillo server, not once in a 5 years.

I use Discord every day. I would say that there are issues about once a week or few weeks where text messages are delayed by 10-30 seconds. Some of them don't arrive either. Using it for text communication at those times is challenging. I'm unsure what happens to voice chat at those times, but the text part is infuriating.

I disagree on the ease of use of the other tools. I ran a mumble server for a guild for almost 10 years and it was quit easy and awesome to use... for voice. Then due to reasons I turned it off for a while and by the time I came back everyone was on discord...

The main thing that discord did was combine voice with the chat side of things, and with per user chats and history. A lot of people don't know that mumble has a pretty decent html capable chat, but it's the history searching, dynamic rooms etc that set discord apart. Mumble still has the superior voice capabilities (simultaneous multiroom, easy permission, hierarchical, etc)

I have put most of my hope in mattermost to do murmur integration to solve this problem.

In the meantime I find myself considering trying to get everyone back on irc+mumble.

edit: Also, just have to say I bet the gov loves having a single place to send all those NSL's... cough hint cough

Nobody's going to embrace IRC again until multi-device gets solved.

But the default answer to the question "how do I have seamless transition between my desktop and my phone" for IRC remains "pay for a shell/bnc, run irssi in screen, etc" which is of course a UX nightmare.

Discord has a buttery smooth onboarding process.

Maybe The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) could help ?

That still means running your own server, and having a machine running 24/7 to host that server. For many, many people nowadays a laptop is their primary and often only machine.

Why not have a little box plugged into your router with an app for your phone or web interface on your desktop with an app store like interface where you pick out the services that you want to run instead of paying $5 a month.

Because iPhones only deliver notifications through Apple's Notification Services which costs money. (Good for battery life though.)

Similarly for Android, the most reliable notification method is using the Google Play Services servers.

Make a Kickstarter for it?

Saying is easy. But for some reason, it still doesn't exist.

Because I don't have static ip.

Most people keep the same IP address for months. Your machine can update the address a public domain or subdomain points to on the rare occasion it reboots. If content is cached by hosts that have previously viewed it then this wont even cause an interruption.

With IPv6 one would suppose that it would be easy to keep the same address given that there is virtually no chance that anyone could accidentally be assigned it.

What I'm describing can't be achieved without server-side changes. The lounge is great but from what I can see it relies on having a persistent connection from the user's desktop.

Doesn't really solve the problem.

> But the default answer to the question "how do I have seamless transition between my desktop and my phone"

The "modern" answer is "don't do that". There is a time to play social games, there is a time to do what you are doing, and you should spend some time talking to yourself too.

Answering a valid usability question with unsolicited suggestions on how someone should structure their social life isn't very helpful.

"The grapes are sour anyway" is the standard open source answer for decades..

Just because it is not the answer you were expecting doesn't mean it is useless. People that give you what you ask for are not always your best friends.

Not fulfilling user requirements however, just means that your product is bad.

Thus the success of discord.

Actually, the modern answer is "use something other than IRC", which is partly why Discord became so popular with gamers.

The answers to changing user tastes is not to proclaim their tastes are wrong. That's the attitude displayed by a lot of IRC server operators and prolific IRC users, and it's that refusal to adapt that's driving IRC into obsolescence.

Maybe those people are ok with an ever-dwindling userbase, and if so that's great. But I'd like to see a Renaissance of IRC to the detriment of proprietary walled gardens like slack and Discord.

I agree with the sentiment of this answer.

While I think it could have been said better, we all need to quit feeling the need to have everything so perfectly connected all the time and feeling frustration when our tech gets in the way.

What made it good was free server creation that didn't require a client download. Just send people a link, and they can join your raid even if they dont have the client. Any actual quality of the provided audio link past that point doesn't matter.

> It's easy to hate on Discord's practices but it's worth remembering that they're on top because their project is legitimately good.

You mean it's easy to forget about Discord's practices because their product is good.

Seriously, you're arguing that they get to do whatever because "their product is good"??

Do I have to spell out how egotistical this attitude is?

Yes. Because that's what matters if you actually want to win. There are a thousand Foss software packages or there that are philosophically superior and have better practices than their commercial brethren. But they lost, and in the end that's what matters.

But only because there are a hundred times more "commercial brethren", some of whom "won" and apparently get to do whatever. It's still a choice that people make, except it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation. Which is what I wanted to point out in my probably somewhat too harshly worded comment.

That's not what I said, but don't let that get in the way of a good rant.

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> Discord audio settings can be as annoying as the others apps.

Discord has been by far the best of any app I've ever used, because I give someone a link, they click on it, they immediately join the channel, and it immediately works. They're now in the voice chat. They have great defaults.

I don't care how annoying the individual settings are, or if other apps do that better. What they have are defaults that work out-of-the-box better than everyone else.

I never had an issue with TeamSpeak's audio settings...

I have had more issues with Discord than any other VOIP.

Two things: 1) paragraphs help organize ideas without looking like a giant wall of text, 2) don't joke about rape

> don't joke about rape

Where do you draw the line? Are jokes involving death also out of the question?

I’m not a big fan of rape jokes, but is there some specific list of things which are unacceptable to joke about in 2020?

I think "don't be an asshole" is a pretty good rule of thumb.

It’s a tough world where “ear rape” strictly falls into the “being an asshole” category.

Given that there are 470,000 words in the Webster's English dictionary, there are plenty of alternatives to show magnitude without using a word that invokes trauma in many. The 'git gud' is learning to be funny without relying on this sort of shock value. It's an asshole thing to say so, like, don't.

I really doubt that there exist many people whose traumas are invoked by “ear rape”.

I don’t doubt that there are heaps of virtue signalers who’ll pretend to be utterly shocked though, fuck those people.

It’s okay to joke about death, even if the world is full of people who have had traumatic experiences with death. It’s okay to joke about traumatic experiences, that’s just a perfectly normal coping mechanism. (Although I have a hard time reading “ear rape” as a joke about rape)

Your perspective and analogies are all wrong (which is why you have downvotes). You must not be close enough to many women who have shared the reasons why rape and rape culture are a non-joking manner. Just don't say the word "rape" unless it's serious or medical.

What’s so special about women here? I’ve spent a decent amount of time in prison where men raping men is very much a thing, rape jokes were common even among those who found it absolutely awful. (Actual rape jokes, not expressions like “ear rape”)

Is there a reason why you think that women would be especially susceptible to this besides some bizarre sexist fantasies of yours?

What you’re suggesting here is far more offensive than any rape jokes could ever be.

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