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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

But that's kinda my point: CS servers weren't really independent. If Valve/Steam/VAC/etc. stopped working, CS servers were all down effectively.

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And yet I'm convinced Discord chose this naming because it implies independence. It sounds a lot cooler to say "We got our own server" than "We started our own guild".

Discord replaced ventrillo and teamspeak for gaming communities. For those you actually ran a "server". Whether or not the company started out calling these accounts "servers" initially, that customer base sure did. It was the terminology customers were used to. They neither knew nor cared what the technical aspects were of having a separate server; it just what you called that thing that the team used to communicate.

> For those you actually ran a "server".

Exactly - something difficult to do that not everyone could just do (or rent from a service, or have permanently running). Which is cool.

I'm saying this is an important element to Discord's early success precisely because it understood the gamer audience it was engaging, how it communicated and thought and the tools they were using. Discord allowed people who previously couldn't to "have a server". Which lead to a period of everyone "making" one, and then better ones survived. Not the only factor, but it contributed. I clearly remember how proud people were of their "servers".

I'm sure they knowingly made use of this fact and picked a term that implied more than it does in technical reality because it had social currency. If you play to an audience, understanding what it values and what generates status within it helps a lot.

Eh, I think they chose it because of the history of Minecraft, CS:GO, WOW, etc servers. Remember that Discord is intended for gaming.

I never used Discord, and I assumed that a "server" meant a server. Now I'm definitely not interested.

That's only half true. While it's true that the in-game server browser would cease to function, you could absolutely still connect and play with people on independent servers. And this isn't a hypothetical; there were (probably still are) many independent server trackers and aggregators allowing you to find servers without Valve's servers being up. And I know that this all works because I'd host offline LAN parties with friends were we'd run all sorts of offline-compatible games like TF2, CS, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Sourceforts, Gmod, etc.

Again, not really what some of us grew up with.

Back when I _did_ play CS, servers didn't rely on any online component. Many gaming places had their own local servers, and continued to run just fine when the internet was down.

Counter-Strike predates Steam by at least a few years. There was a time that game servers were fully independent and you could use third-party game browsers or even just go port scanning to find 'em.

You'll have to forgive me. I keyed in on your line about servers and glossed over your "I get what you're seeing" agreement with OP.

The comments this elicited below harkened back to some great memories of spinning up Half Life and then Counterstrike servers in the pre-Steam days.

Then even more memories from the Steam/Ventrillo/CS days.

Good memories in bad times. Thanks for that and best of luck with midgame!

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