How Discord Won
ianvanagas.com
ianvanagas.com
This is kind of missing an elephant in the room.
Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing. Put in an username and you're good to go.
This might look particularly weird to some of the HN community who are fond of optimizing the conversion rate of their pointless landing page -> sign up flow and like to subscribe people to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
I've been doing a similar thing to discord on a site I run where users don't even have to choose a name. They get a randomly assigned name which they can change later if they want. A new user needs to perform 0 clicks to begin using the product.
This was especially helpful in the beginning, because the first few people who stumbled upon the site immediately became users and started interacting with each other. By adding stupid landing pages, sign up flows, analytics (which then requires me to get permission from my users), and whatnot the site probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground half as fast.
> Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
> 1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
> 2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
> 3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
> 4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
It's an app for our wearable (but our wearable is also optional, haha). As said: account is no longer required on iOS, but we are also working on that feature on Android as well.
The process you described sounds super similar to the low friction involved with getting started on IRC!
I assume it's about tracking but now I'm beginning to suspect that it's simply a cargo cult mentality where no body asks why are we doing this.
I don't proceed with anything that requires a form to be filled without having a good reason. I'm actually positive that I have a bank account that doesn't have a login info, when I need to sign in from another device I would simply scan a barcode from the app to let me in.
Yet, there are apps asking me more questions than an immigration officer to let me use it.
I don't know where you are, but in the US it is actually illegal for a bank to offer financial services without collecting a significant amount of personal data from the customer. This exists for a few reasons but I think the most significant one is that the government does not want to give up the ability to block financial transactions for those they deem unacceptable. (Like terrorists.)
It all makes sense, they are required to know me for AML reasons, so the account creation step collects this data.
The bank is mobile first, so the account is activated through the app when my card arrives. Why would I have a username and password for the app that is used to create the account in first place? The app can keep it for me without exposing it to me ever. I can’t be phished for something that I don’t know and it is one less password to remember or take care.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
You then have to record a video selfie saying something like "I am NAME and I want to recover my account" and then send a pic of an ID. Same process (the selfie+ID part) for if you want to display your card PIN reminder.
It might just be a matter of boilerplate. The permissions and usernames are (in code, in legalese, etc) may be tied to the concept of a signup. They might have investors, advisors or whatnot asking about weekly registration trends or somesuch. They may have a regulator, and the regulator assumes that you have info.
Even banks are increasingly getting regulator-ish. You may need to produce a "know-your-customer" policy.
Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
That's an understatement, if I ever saw one.
> Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
When was banking anonymous? In the days of Bonnie and Clyde? :-)
Passive voice alert! By whom? Site/app producers can, with certain exceptions, choose to allow anonymity.
Give me a proper website with a proper email/password/WebAuthN & SSO signup. I don't want the app, I don't want any of it.
Websites are simply apps installed in the browser without asking for permission. Notorious for tracking abilities, data storage tied to the browser, performance lower, capabilities limited to browser api, data consumption unpredictable, identification tied to web technologies.
Some people may want just that, I don’t judge.
Being able to know in what I am getting in and tapping install is much, much better experience than tapping on a link to the unknown then trying to figure out how to reach the thing I am looking for when the website tries to track me, monetize me, make me sign up all at the same time.
A website would usually load about the same size data of a native app without a warning and would report me to facebook, google and others.
That’s not something I am thrilled about.
Why do you think native apps are not like that?
Many apps load SDKs from google and (especially) facebook. They often load a lot of assets from servers.
For websites, this is not an option.
Option A: Only runs on one platform, can only be published on that platform with the blessing of the manufacturer of your device and little-to-no insight into data usage
Option B: Cross platform, can be interfaced with using open standards and block parts of it that you want (not just on a DNS level, but on a resource level)
I really don't see why you would prefer A?
If you’re building a service that’s not suitable for option A then you use option B. It’s not really a discussion at that point.
I’m glad that there’s an option B the way that I am glad that there’s frozen pizza in the fridge. Good to have it but I’m not gunning for it if a proper restaurant pizza is available.
There are a number of pseudo vpn like apps that give you similarish control over native apps just the same as an extension on a web browser that uses hostname blocklists.
That actually work on the platforms I choose. There are many apps that only work on iOS/Android that I want to run on my desktop or a more pure linux phone. I just want to be able to consume a service from a platform that clearly have the technical capabilities to do so, but no, it has to be a "app".
> Notorious for tracking abilities
And a lot easier to chose/disable them. This summer many apps (including stuff like spotify) would not even start on iOS because the facebook SDK crashed. On the spotify web player I can choose to block calls to recaptcha, facebook and similar with umatrix. Do you think that apps on average have less tracking or just that you tend to pay for apps but not for webapps and therefore get higher quality apps?
> data storage tied to the browser
Great! Data storage on the client should either be treated as unreliable or the only storage (for stuff where there is no "cloud" or privacy is critical). Tying storage to a single vendor (like icloud or google drive) is a very, very bad idea. Web browsers also have a well defined interface for you to inspect the data saved locally if you want.
> performance lower
For the majority of apps this does not matter. The reason webapps are usually slow is not that the platform is slow, it's that companies copy websites that are stuffed with tracking (if you block that they tend to be much quicker). They suck because the people who made them made them suck.
Most chat, mail, news, or any other form of text/image/video app could easily be performant enough as a webapp. Hell, amazon even made their real time game streaming service a webapp. The platform is not the problem.
> data consumption unpredictable
Not sure what is different here from native apps? Both can auto-update, both can download assets at-will, right?
> identification tied to web technologies
Yes please! That means it's portable and not tied into google/apple!
A native app has every opportunity a webapp has to track you and much more.
> data storage tied to the browser
So? Browsers make it as easy to clear the storage of a webapp as it is to clear the storage of a native app. If you are talking about PC apps it is even easier to clear webapps' storage than native apps. If you mean it is bad because the stored data can disappear from the users device, that is what the localstorage API is for. Browsers will only delete that data if the user tells them to. This isn't any different from native apps having to deal with users deleting their files.
> Performance lower
While I have to admit that for raw computation webapps are slower than native, most apps don't need that much raw computational power and WASM should bridge the gap to native performance for apps that do need it. If your webapp is slow it is by far more likely you did a poor job programming it, not that you are limited by web performance.
> capabilities limited to browser api
Browser APIs are expanding all the time (except on iOS Safari but Apple has a vested interest in crippling webapps). And again, most apps don't need deep access to a system and the few that do shouldn't be webapps anyway.
> data consumption unpredictable
This has absolutely nothing to do with if an app is a webapp or native. Native apps can suck down data like crazy while webapps can use almost none and vice versa.
> identification tied to web technologies
Not really? Name one form of widely used identification that webapps don't support. You can use emails, usernames, 2FA, security fobs.
edit: remove snark at the end, it didn't add anything.
Nope, an iOS app can’t leave a cookie that other apps can use to identify me.
Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
Maybe not directly, but by using something like the Facebook SDK the same effect can be achieved by shipping your advertising identifier off to Facebook who then does the tracking server side using events generated by the Facebook SDK. This is in tons of apps and you have no way of knowing it as an end user without reading the privacy policy or reverse engineering the app.
> Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
This is just as much of an issue on native apps as it is with webapps, browsers wont clear local storage for a website unless the user requests it just like how a native apps storage won't be cleared unless a user requests it.
> The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
Just because the App Store download size is predictable doesn't mean the final download size is, lots of apps download a bunch of extra assets on first launch or even regularly as you are using them. I also couldn't find a way to check data usage of apps or websites on WiFi on my iPad so that isn't really a point either way.
> - Advanced Persistent Device Identification: Identifies individual mobile devices for both iOS and Android platforms, even if they have been reset or if the application has been reinstalled.
> - verifies the integrity of the application in which it is embedded to ensure it has not been modified or infected. It also analyzes all other apps installed on the device, and reports their reputation and the presence of any malicious code.
There is no iOS API that allows them to do this. Apple removed it years ago: https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/24/apple-expanding-u...
I don't believe a website can upload your contact list, upload a list of apps on the device, log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
True AFAIK.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
Depends on what you mean. This is fully possible on many phones and only needs approval from the user.
Then again approval from the user seems to be becoming the standard in installed apps as well.
That said, I much prefer web pages for things that need cloud or apps/desktop applications that works offline for the rest.
Requires an opt-in permission on native, for browsers with support, it would also be an opt-in permission
> upload a list of apps on the device
Not possible on iOS for a native or web app. Depends on a number of factors on Android.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone.
Possible for native and web apps, but only after explicit opt-in permission.
End result, no meaningful difference between native and web for any of your examples.
But when it does go away (app reinstalls, phone upgrades, phone breaks etc), it causes a disproportionately catastrophic event: complete loss of access. Providing a simple email address would prevent this, but expecting the common user to have the wisdom on account recovery strategies is too optimistic. That's why many apps ask for email during registration.
That can be tolerable for Discord, because your loss is just your friends list and access to some servers, which can be recovered easily through social means. That's not possible or feasible for every kind of app.
You can easily offer an optional data safeguard feature for account restoration.
The idea is that, they already created an account by launching your code, so you don’t have to ask for account creation. Just ask for the information that is necessary to run your services and you can provide an optional method for account recovery.
This is especially pronounced now that application sync between devices is more or less universal on iOS and (to a lesser extent) Android.
To the layman, the intuitive perspective is that it "just works" and is exactly how they left it previously, regardless of whether they have wiped their phone or replaced it. This isn't a dig at tech illiterate people but it is just how things are for the normal person. Hell I have been almost burned by this in the past when I moved phones and a certain app(FGO)'s data didn't transfer over.
TLDR The most intuitive thing is working out of the box and seamlessly transferring to a new device. The easiest way to do this is to allow it to be bound to a user's Google account, Microsoft account, and Apple ID.
Those little security-by-securing-all-handset mechanisms kind of worked while there weren’t any publicly known rooted phone, in the wild, that can establish a session on featurephone APN, but emergence of iPhone and Android extinguished it.
Like, have http://my.number/ return the phone number for identification (though it would need some permission, I don't want every app to have access to it).
Make a HTTP POST with some data to http://my.number/validate and have it signed by the carrier, validate it against a list of public keys per carrier. Not sure why that wouldn't work today? It could even be a private/reserved IP address routed by all carriers to their auth service.
Edit: obviously, it wouldn't work over Wi-Fi without some cooperation at the OS level.
I know of at least one carrier, but is only usable for their own customer self care portals/apps. There it is possible to auto-login to their app if it is accessed via their network and not via Wi-Fi. For security reasons only a limited amount of functionality is accessible. Neither customer data can be changed nor can any actions resulting in additional cost (buying packs / options) be performed without additional authentication mechanism of a higher security level (auto-login via SMS or use of a password).
The MSISDN is only added to the HTTP request internally in their secure network and never exposed externally.
So, the users who switch from iphone to an iphone don’t loose anything if they follow the default upgrade process.
Sounds great while iCloud is up/you use iOS...prepare for the shitestorm when its not or the user decides to leave Apple... 'Easy' and 'Convenient' won't be the terms anyone is using.
Discord basically copied IRC and added voice chat. One didn't need an account for IRC why should they need one on Discord? Maybe to retain their nickname but that's it. And it was just a password, no email no phone number no nothing else.
I really liked the temporary and anarchic nature of IRC. No one was really in control.
The next logical step would have been to make it encrypted and add p2p voice chat via DCC or some other method. SILC tried the former but failed to gain traction, people either stuck with IRC or moved on to AIM and Yahoo Messaneger.
Probably better if the browser started to come with an e-mail set in it - then web admins can query for that and users have the option to change the email when they so choose...
- The app is used on one device
- Only one user has access to a device
- There is a convenient or reliable way to identify a device for all platforms you target
Plenty of apps can live with those, and plenty can't. email address is one of the least bad ways to do it.
what more are you typically putting in, other than an email address, maybe a username for uniqueness, etc...?
You can use firebase accounts to manage that. Start with the anonymous account which will create an account with a random UID and use the mechanism to convert the accounts into “registered”. Pretty easy, you don’t even have to create your own custom solution.
Why would I want every single thing I do online to be directly linked to one physical real world device?
It's not so much about data loss for me but I don't want anything real world linked to me to be used to authenticate me in any way other than monetary transactions or things with tangible physical value.
Other than that, I have a range of email addresses and usernames I use depending on the nature of the site and the amount of personal information i'm willing to disclose.
I have a fairly fine grained system for managing my user accounts accross various platforms and i'm personally finding it more and more aggravating the amount of places that require some kind of google or facebook sign in, let alone the idea that my phone should be my universal user account/name.
The internet should be like the rest of public life. For the most part, in my day to day life, I get to choose the amount of personally identifiable information I disclose to others. Managing multiple user accounts with differing levels of personal information is the internet equivalent of this.
I do not wish to be linked to one 'universal digital me' my real life interactions are not like that, why should my internet interactions be forced to be that way?
I have different groups of friends, acquaintances, coworkers etc. I don't act the same way with all of them, I don't talk about the same things with all of them, they don't all have the same level of information about my life, yet increasingly, online interactions are being pushed into this 'one you for everyone and everything' paradigm that is completely antithetical to the original values of the early internet and human interaction in general.
As an occasional discord user: yes, exactly. That's how Discord syncs communities and read messages between my phone, tablet, and computer, either via app or web client.
This is a huge convenience over say IRC where (last time I looked) the way to get any client-side consistency is to run a personal 24/7 relay on your own server and use special clients to connect to that instead of the main IRC server.
Which is the setup equivalent of not wanting a Dropbox account because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
For non technical users, the friction involved in setting up new accounts is a bit too much.
Anecdotally: my tech-handicapped friends all used hangouts. I suggested discord, but everyone wanted to continue using something they were familiar with. Once they did get Discord and discovered how easy it was to start conversations.... nobody went back to hangouts.
It will then bug you to "claim" your account (add e-mail address etc.), but you can already use discord normally.
Maybe that was also because I started by signing up instead of following an invite link (not sure about that).
What are you talking about? I've tried to create an account before it and would not let me without giving them a non-voip phone number.
YMMV should be included in that statement.
https://support.discord.com/hc/user_images/p4prIch_rOOP4zr7M... German Picture: https://imgur.com/a/qYLf7On
so if you join servers with the default setting you won't be asked for anything. most bigger communities need a validated email tough.
Facebook is nobody's favorite platform and yet it's the one most people have.
In our student organizations (at university) we've settled on Teams, which is what's available through our university accounts. I'd guess most universities have an equivalent, but let me know if I'm wrong. This has the benefit of requiring no sign-up, and separating work and personal life.
If you're talking about HS students, then I'd be surprised to hear that they're unwilling to install your preferred chat app to join the program.
A. Nobody checks Slack. In the beginning everything's great and people are engaging on slack, but after a few weeks engagement drops off.
B. The number of people without Facebook has been precisely 1. If there were more people without FB accounts, I'd 100% consider another option.
C. Begrudging use is better than no use. It's not that students are boycotting my program because they have some hatred of Slack. It's more that they're confronted with a form, which they put off and then forget to do.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" -- you're making the right decision by focusing on good mentorship offering instead of blocking on the perfect chat solution. Good luck!
Couldn't you create the account for them ?
Seems like a great idea... until a few years down the line you run into an issue for which you need to send a message to your users. And you can't.
These are often legal issues. Needing to forward on take-down notices, changing privacy laws (remember all of the emails that were sent out when GDPR came into effect).
Legal issues aside, the killer challenge is account recovery. People forget their passwords. How are you going to give them back access to their account without a verified communication mechanism?
The mindset around account recovery would be: if you value your information in your account, add an email. Otherwise, you can start again if you lose it. Doesn't work in all situations.
This is the Web experience at least, on mobile they presumably already have all of this (or the equivalents) right after installing their app.
EDIT: to add to this, I once created a Discord account associated with a fake e-mail. After a while they presumably figured that out, but instead of, e.g., letting me log in and change the e-mail, they just locked me out.
Go to discord.com right now, click "Open Discord in your browser", enter a random username, and hit enter.
But back then there was no official way to browse more or less public servers, which is the case now. I guess to join those it might be good enough in their eyes to just create a temporary account to let users test the waters and hopefully later convert into a proper account.
I don't remember the last time I joined a community or Slack where I had to enter a bunch of info, but I see in my Discord a bunch of servers I've joined because it is so easy.
I’m sure it is a pretty small percentage of users this impacts but I think confirming an email address as real before allowing access avoids this wasted sunk cost and probably more importantly to small communities, avoiding troll accounts/harassment.
Not for me. I was forced to give away my phone number to create an account.
While that's good, it would be better if they added an option to "log into an existing account".
I created 3 different discord accounts that way. There was no way to realize that I was creating a new account rather than just creating local name for an existing account.
Edit: this was for an invite on a server I control and allows unrestricted access. It is not a server requirement; it is a discord requirement.
I also want to add: you don't have to install a thing either. I played a few games that heavily encouraged community coordination and still remember people backing out of VOIP because of the download ("I'll do it when I log off" and then never do). In addition, because of a central API, users can be authenticated with in-game/game account info and automatically assigned a role, instead of sitting about waiting for an admin.
Discord removes every barrier of entry possible.
> to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
This lets you measure engagement. Discord trusted their product enough to know engagement would happen.
On one app that did require an account, a user can use the app up until the point they need to save something, which is when I take their email address and password and then they are in.
Email is only for password resets. But I don't think I will even require that by default in future. Perhaps a prompt that the user can add their email address just in case they forget their password, but not require it.
I'm highly pleased with it. From all other platforms I've tried, Jitsi is the saner, offers more freedom and is more inclusive (no account needed). As an educator, platform inclusiveness ranks very high on my criteria for choosing which way to go.
Anyway, that’s great. Do this. Maybe more people can do this.
Going for auth impacts everyone because you have to provide (and verify) your info to us, and this translates to 99% of the users being impacted by the other 1% who will not play by the rules. Sure, you can blame companies for not coming up with smarter options for eliminating the abusers that hurt everyone else, but when we're offering a free service without asking for anything back from your side I find it hard to justify investing months of development into this. And this is why you create an account with your email or phone number, and if you make the life hard for everyone else you go out of the platform and let everyone else enjoy it peacefully.
That's how I ended up with three Discord accounts with no way to merge them and I am not alone [1].
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600531...
[0]I acknowledge that if you're in some private servers where inviting is disabled you might need mods to create an invite for your primary account
[1]I haven't tried to delete my discord account recently
This morning I left my daughter at home until noon. Not knowing how to stay in touch with her 'just run case', I tried to set up a Google Meet that I could join at work to see what she was up to.
Cue 15 minutes of:
- trying to create a meet without an account => fail.
- use my account to create a meet, take link, pull it up on daughter's computer.
- need to create account for daughter on Google so that she can join.
- creation of children account requires me to login because children not >18.
- create family with my account.
- back to creating account for child.
- strong password entered.
- google requires a payment setup, picks up my credit card (??) from my account to add to daughter's account.
- cannot dismiss payment option, stuck there..
Then I thought about Discord:
- Go to Discordapp.com
- Click on "open app", enter chilren first name, server is created
- copy paste link to my computer and go to children server
- Done
This is just fantastic. I just abhor the user story on anything else now, this is just so easy, and solves so many issues.
curious why you didn't choose to charge a fee for registering an account in the end?
Are you monetizing the service in any way? I assume hosting files up to 20GB doesn't come for free right?
Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software.
Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure).
It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.
Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)
The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.
The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.
That gave me a chuckle
The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.
Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.
I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.
I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.
Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.
There isn't one.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)
For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.
(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)
You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!
After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."
When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)
Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.
The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.
I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.
“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.
Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
"Hey hop on my mumble server"
"Hey hop on my vent server"
"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"
"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"
One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.
Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.
You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.
I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.
No idea why they made Discord audibly ping whenever someone say anything in any channel on new servers you join.
I think sensible defaults are valuable, and I don't think Discord's approach here is sensible.
I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional.
Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.
These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.
Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).
I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.
They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
* Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications
* Excellent group voice chat quality and controls - Every user can control the volume for each chat participant(You control your own mix.) This is something Teams doesn't have and god I wish it did...
* It's Slack for friends. Discord basically does everything Slack does (rich-media real time chat with a specific group of contacts.) It's far easier to crank out a new discord for your friends and you don't get slammed with the "Free Organization" restrictions that come with Slack.
There are lots of things it does right, but these were major selling points for me.
Discord is still miles behind Ventrillo for this. There are still participants on every server I've been on who can't be heard at 100% boost on my end. On vent, I could just set up a compression/normalization chain and never have to worry about any participant being too soft or too loud ever again.
Maybe sound plugin chains are an advanced feature, but I really, really wish it was offered in Discord.
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011876531-S...
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229093058/https://support.d...
We tried really really REALLY hard to make a shift to Discord[2]. We even tried writing bots that mimic some TS features. We ended up using Discord to include the more casual gamers from the guild, but most of us still use TeamSpeak, with a few people who're on both to help coordinate the less tech-savvy folk.
Discord always seemed to target a much broader "gaming" audience. It's simple, it does what it does in a mediocre way, but that's okay, because it's a casual product and nobody cares (evidently). You need to be a bit more tech-savvy to connect to set TS/Vent up, but if you're serious about multiplayer gaming, then it's worth the extra effort.
I'd (and a lot of my friends probably) use Discord fulltime if they started catering just a bit more to non-casual gamers too.
[1]: I wouldn't be surprised if Discord's aimed at small gaming groups and that the feature was designed with small/medium sized groups in mind. I'd guess the average room size on Discord probably falls within that range.
[2]: Most people had it already, so adoption wasn't the issue, it was the usability. However, the fact that most people already had it speaks volumes about Discord's conversion strategy/onboarding.
Until there's a client update. When the client detects that an update is available, it asks to apply the update without any way to start without the update. So far, I had 2 weeks this year without the desktop client, waiting for the update to appear in the package repositories.
Only missing push to talk, which I don't need on Linux. One of these days I hope browsers come up with a way for a webapp to request access to capture a particular key, in the same way it can ask for your mic.
Except message threads and drawings while screen sharing. Two features we use in Slack a lot in my current team.
This is what I often point to in Discord's favor. Slack's business model is at the "team"/"group" level and makes the most sense for organizations with a strong cohesive identity over time, whereas Discord's business model is at the individual user level and allows for a lot more ephemeral friend groups to flow in/out of "servers" (teams/groups/what have you) as makes sense to them.
There is a simple reason why we are on slack. Drawing on someone's screen. And it doesn't even work on linux, but we are still on it until someone makes a voice chat app that lets us type threaded messages and draw on someone's screen.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system. None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers. I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why?
In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it.
Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers.
My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime).
If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way.
Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...
I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups.
I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.
The problem has been getting everyone on voice chat in guided. It just didn't work as well as discord and our group more or less abandoned it. Getting a hundred people organized and trying a new tool is a pita. Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since.
It's definitely a catch up game now. :( :( :(
But I have faith it can work out.
We haven't announced it yet, but we've just started rolling out an all new "bot creator" feature this week, which'll allow you to create bots for your server without writing any code (and if you do want to write code, we now have an early-access request form for our upcoming API). If you want to try it out and don't have access to it yet, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile).
(we've improved voice significantly and have also added streaming channels for streaming gameplay, too, if you want to give those a shot!)
that's cool! good luck with that. I think many of us already have many bots that we use. But honestly the biggest hurdle was the audio issues. At least with Mumble it is the evil we know, but when we first tried Guilded like 5 months ago, even getting the client to switch microphones was a big chore and we couldn't get some people to even get on voice chat.
Point is, if you can make it work as seamlessly as discord, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I love the thread features, all the document management, I eat that shit up, but no good voice, no use.
Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience.
Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes.
Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
IRC, the famously secure communications platform? [sorry, I couldn't help it: I loved IRC growing up, but something something glass houses?]
I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services.
I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff.
Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common.
All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord.
Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization.
Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself.
Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC.
And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude).
That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc.
---
The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology.
Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days).
That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.
If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.
What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.
Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.
Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.
However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years.
As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency, which again is a noticeable difference (the average person can detect latency over 50ms, for example, audio and video can be out of sync by 30ms and it's pretty much undetectable during playback).
The USA is around 2,500 miles wide (+/- 200 miles depending on latitude), which is around 4000 km. If you live on the west coast and connect to a server on the east coast, you're looking at 50 ms minimum based on laws of physics alone. Real world latency is usually 60-70 ms.
Of course, that's a worst case scenario of connecting between the coasts. Honestly I don't know what Discord's voice latency is. I suppose I could measure it, but it's already low enough to be good.
Besides, it's a voice chat service. Even if latency was a ridiculous 200 ms, how would you even notice, other than when you hear your own voice coming from someone else's microphone?
Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord.
If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
-Lots of server downtime -Obnoxious amount of system resource use -Crashing -Bugs -Forced updates -Privacy concerns. (Scans your open processes, etc)
Some of us can agree to disagree.
From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
XMPP - Stuck in the past, lacks modern basic features like "If I leave my laptop open and receive a message, it doesn't disappear into the ether and I can still read it on my phone". And if you do manage to configure it to match modern messaging services, you just spent hours in config-file land, which 99% of users aren't interested in attempting.
Hipchat, Slack - So now at work, when you present in meetings, and show your Slack window, everyone will see that you're in "Dave's Sexy Game Server" as well as BigSeriousCorp? No thanks.
Google Hangouts - In typical Google fashion, they've taken the perpetual-MVP approach to this product. Somewhere, someone inside Google is arguing that removing chat functionality from their chat platform is the best way to simplify the product and cut costs. Oh okay. I'll describe it. It's a 200px by 200px window of sadness with no searchable chat history.
Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger - Mobile-first experiences.
Forums (PhpBB etc.) - Better for offline communication, mobile sucks, hard to keep track of new messages to conversations.
If you wanted to play a game and do voice chat with a group of friends, TeamSpeak, Discord, and Mumble were the only options that were group-first (easier to do lobbies than single-person calls). Discord's UI is 2 decades ahead of Mumble / TS, and it's free.
the actual competitors were teamspeak, skype, mumble, and ventrilo.
And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online.
And I don't think Discord is as competitive with forums as you think. My forum has a Discord. Yeah, people hang out on it, and now it's an essential part of the community. A lot of our casual conversations and friend-making is just shooting the shit which forums are awful at. But now I see my users engaging each other on more and more personal levels and getting to know each other.
But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse. I think it's much better now because it went mainstream. When I was growing up, being a "gamer" still had that loser virgin stereotype. Now I see my friend's 13yo son in Discord voice chats when I'm hanging out at their place and you hear a healthy assortment of even women gamers. Seems so so much better than when I was 13yo. Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
There are always things that change for the worse in these kinds of shifts, but it's also important to understand the upsides.
You're cherry-picking a specific use-case of a forum and constructing a straw man out of it. Forums are (at least more than Discord) a very good tool for discussing strategies, making counter-arguments, posting guides, or organizing information.
> But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse.
Except that wasn't what gaming culture was at the time for everyone. Because the attention economy is now concentrated on unthreaded discord chats, you have more drive-by commenters, messages taken out of context, lack of deliberate information, and more hoops to go through to get good information organized. Pinned messages aren't obvious to everyone and the UX for those limits the utility gained from it. Therefore it becomes much harder to disseminate good information to your community, guild, or whatever. People just aren't going to see it as much. That becomes baked into the culture, and the notion of sharing or teaching becomes seen as a thing for "boomers" or "autists" (actual words I've seen people use on the subject). This system might be an upgrade if you're getting drunk or doing drugs with the homies on a Friday night, but if you take gaming and teamwork seriously, it's a massive downgrade.
> Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
Ouch, depending on the model those have been known to emit 5000 times the RF radiation that a cellular phone typically emits. http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report...
Every time someone invites me to discord, it shows me that the world indeed couldn't care less about the values that are central to me when evaluating software. But I wouldn't expect that from the gaming community anyways, those guys never cared. The true pain comes when I find some free software project where all developement talk is on discord. Because it shows me that even the people I'd expect to care at least a tiny little bit about all those points, are okay with this.
I also want to add that I want to punch an executive every time someone calls his discord space a "server". It's not a server. It seems that fight is lost as well. Discord servers are what people think of now when the word server is used, and this change of meaning will not be reversed.
*Except my two best friends, who continue using a self hosted teamspeak/mumble with me and of whom one shares my grief about the whole discord situation.
As far as I know, they don't even internally use that name, but call it a "guild", which is kind of a bad name in its own right (because not every community using Discord is a "guild" - not even in gaming, since mostly fantasy-MMORPG-style games call their game-internal groups "guilds", other games often use different monikers, "clans" or "corporations" or whatever fits the game world). However, I must admit that it was a genius idea to market the thing to users as a "server", because that invokes the idea of an actual dedicated server as they were typical for earlier Teamspeak/Mumble solutions, which usually was a significant time and money investment. By calling Discord communities "servers", people who switch over from one of these classic self-hosted setups subconsciously think they are now getting the same thing for free that they usually had to pay a significant sum of money for.
Don't get me wrong, this point I deem mostly good for the users, abusive admins bullying people where a problem since the bbs times, but the new price is more than I'm willing to pay. I'm just so very, very sad that everyone else is for some reason fine with being bullied by discord instead of someone's older cousin.
I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in.
Emoji are not innovation.
Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.
I also like having GIF profile icons.
It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.
Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").
0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...
24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year
Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?
As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy
> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.
> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.
> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.
And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety
> We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.
Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.
Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:
------------------------------------------------
† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡
‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.
Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.
The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".
That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out.
The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom.
I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
It is pretty much fluff chat en masse the way it is now without huge contractual and infrastructure modifications.
1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebraic Geometry Syndicate" and "Modern Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry".
The activity includes: technical math chat; people giving each other advice (e.g. on the job market or online teaching); advertisements of online conferences; some other stuff.
2. I've also been on Discord forums attached to weekend online conferences. These were sort of similar, but short-lived -- and we also encouraged everyone to introduce themselves. We had a "math memes contest" and organized a board games night for all who were interested. Basically, it was an attempt to replicate some of the social aspects of conferences.
It seems like Slack is designed for groups of people who all work at the same company. Discord worked well for us -- where participants work/study all over, and where it's super easy to join.
I've been trying to move friend groups more towards Slack and it's been a huge improvement over group texts / Facebook chat / etc.
(of course, for our gaming group, discord voice chat is still superb. But, we only use it once a week and all the rest of our chatter/discussion happens in our new Slack team)
Beyond that, there is a somewhat long tail of little features like integrations, LDAP, etc.
You can switch to "open mic" with a mic threshold (with an "auto" option), which would probably work well in a meeting situation where keyboard noise isn't an issue.
1. Try to log onto a channel, but get presented with a "We've detected something out of the ordinary going on. To continue using Discord" where my only option is to verify by phone, which I don't want to do.
2. Occasionally, I'll figure it's worth a try in incognito. I get a step further, only to read "New login location detected, please check your e-mail.". Go back to non-incognito, check email, open the verify link in an incognito window.
3. Instead of finally signing me in, it says "IP address authorized" and "If you followed this link after trying to login on the desktop or mobile app, please go back and try again.".
4. Fair enough, time to log in, again. Submit credentials, get presented with the bizzarely slow fade-in recaptchas. Fail twice, succeed on the third time. Horray! I can see the channel!
5. Finally try those other organisations invite links (in the form of discord.com/invite/org), but get "This invite may be expired, or you might not have permission to join.".
They may also ask for ID or birthday or phone at any time. This is not something I want in a casual chat app.
But also the idea of sharing my life with yet another American company is really not appealing to me. I want to be able to express myself without the fear of it being recorded for whatever reason. Can't wait for Signal to introduce encrypted group chat...
I miss IRC.
Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
That's one of the positive features that keeps streamers and communities using it -- you can't bother people who don't want to be bothered.
Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness.
As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for.
Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
The two major points are:
1. Discord makes money by letting users elevate their status, while offering core feature for free.
2. It is 10x better than other offerings.
Regarding 1, immediately after making that statement, the author lists perks such as bigger upload file size limits, better audio quality, screen sharing resolution, etc. These features are not about status, they are core. I therefore do not accept the premise that Discord is "free to play" like the mentioned League of Legends. Ironically, live game coaches for League of Legends will tell their customers to not share the screen on Discord, but on Skype, due to better quality and latency, for free.
Regarding 2, the 10x factor is obviously marketing speech for "significantly better", but even that is factually wrong. As mentioned in 1), a lot of core features such as audio and video quality are limited, unlike rivaling software. Even IRC offered unlimited file sharing of even gigabytes in size (and therefore had a community around it). Meanwhile Discord will not even allow you to share short video clips less than a minute of length due to file size. Skype is being criticized, but what's conveniently being left out is that Skype rose to fame before it was bought by Microsoft and had its architecture changed from peer-to-peer to server-client. Skype used to be much better than it is now and used to have less limitations, and was give-or-take better or worse than Discord. Certainly no 10x here.
The real point IMO, and other commenters have written about this in great detail already, is the ease of onboarding. The article only talks about the ease of joining a channel etc. and compares that to Skype for example, but calling somebody in Skype is also only 2 clicks. It's really account creation and server joining (click a link). And the fact that competitors drove their software into the ground.
Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at better-than-Discord quality (not talking about Skype here, but Teamspeak and Ventrilo) and with better-than-Discord administrative control over groups (especially Teamspeak had this nailed, with very extensive rights management that's even suitable to the largest and best-organized gaming guilds). What Discord nailed is ease-of-setup, especially of the server part: by offering free hosting that imitated the "one server = one guild" structure well-known to gamers while actually implementing a much-cheaper hosting structure serving thousands of users from one physical server they eliminated one of the typical pain points with existing solutions, which all depended on either having one technically-savvy gamer hosting the server on his own hardware (mostly virtual private servers were used here), or someone paying for hosted versions. This structure provided an opening for Discord: since gamer clans and guilds come and go in quick succession, each time this happens, the continued use of "classic" voice chat solutions like Teamspeak etc. depended on whether "the guy with the server" would continue hosting the voice server for the new guild. Often enough, the new guild simply wasn't lucky enough to have that guy, so they look out for solutions, and Discord offered them one: a free "server" providing a good-enough group voice chat solution.
With regard to monetization one could even argue that Discord failed a lot in that department. The attempt to sell games was largely unsuccessful, and besides the Nitro program they didn't really find anything that works. And even the Nitro program had to be made into an actual "premium" program in order to lead to significant-enough adoption, offering better quality on core features of the service instead of purely cosmetic status-boosting, which is AFAIK not what they originally intended to do with the program.
Meanwhile, I am still unable to how understand how slack's WYSIWYG works.
There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too.
Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.
Speaking of this, I think Discord also conquered one more application in relative secrecy, and that's the gaming community forum. reddit took on regular forums, but for smaller communities I think reddit fails at this.
Discord gives you multiple channels to talk in, which allows conversation grouping like sub-forums, and extensive chat histories with search, removing the non-permanence of other chat options.
To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
Discord's UX/UI can be disorienting and complex for professional communities. With AirSend, We are targeting the professional niche with clean and simple UX (https://www.airsend.io/build-community).
While Discord is trying to cross over to other communities, there is a good possibility that it will alienate their original supporters and make the system more complex overall. For Discord, there is definitely a multi-billion dollar opportunity in just gaming itself.
[Note 1] However, Discord's message search seems to be quite finicky when it comes to searching links. For example, if someone posts a link with "www.twitter.com/user", it wouldn't show up with a "twitter.com/user" search, but it would show up for "twitter.com" or "www.twitter.com/user". Room for improvement.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
Also regularly I can't log into discord without first filing out a captcha and receiving an E-Mail from them even though my password is valid.
And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
What? I just tried, and it took about 4 recaptcha challenges just to create an account, 12 clicks (excluding the clicks on recaptcha challenges), and 4 more clicks to create the server
One click + a captcha
Any big service will require multiple security checks, after you sign up to Discord, you can login with a QR code on a new device. No captchas. and get the above for free.
It is going to be a mission to get a bunch of friends to use this 'Freenode' service.
For now, Mumble serves all my needs and works great. It is by far the lightest and fastest voice system out there right now.
> Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process.
> Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow.
To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server.
> Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching.
> Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly).
How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.
The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.
For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.
IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.
But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).
TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.
I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.
Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.
Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.
I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.
Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.
> Setup
How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link.
> Paid hosting
While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it.
> Unclear benefits
Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho).
> Weird ideological reasons
It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
* voice + chat (with emojis, images, videos) + easy desktop sharing
that's all I guess, no other software did offer that.
Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble and so on.
So long as you don't join a voice channel, right? As I understand it all the voice and video is webrtc, so p2p.
Our story on why we switched from Slack: https://medium.com/originprotocol/moving-from-slack-to-disco...
One thing that I don't like in Discord in particular is that if you haven't launched it for a month, you're in for a bad time. First, it's going to update like 7 times. Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
Also message replies are about as awkward as one could've made them.
I just use the website versions. No installs, no updates. Also means no global keybinds for voice chat, no automatic "currently playing ...", and no electron-specific XSS bugs - but that's fine by me.
> Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
The per-server notification settings in Discord can let you mute these. The defaults are admittedly annoyingly permissive, resulting in a repeat annoyance that will eventually crop up every time I join a new server.
Other services have tried the same thing I guess (Hangouts did something kind of similar), but everything adds up to a completely different feeling around voice chat. It feels more like walking into a room with people hanging out than it does dialing someone's number and all the low-level anxiety that goes along with it.
Polar opposite of Ventrilo. Discord is the community, not some chat widget on the side. Kind of like a modern MMORPG vs a MUD's `telnet 107.141.162.82 4500` to point out that World of Warcraft didn't innovate much because you're still just connecting to a server.
For some reason people always make the mistake of thinking that "a UX/experience that the mainstream will use/love" isn't hard nor innovation. In fact, it's the engineering that's the easy part.
There is, actually -- you can call a user who you're friends with, or create a call for a group DM. It's just separate from group voice chat.
I run a discord channel and there are several inherent flaws that make me want to move over to Slack or something better.
No threaded replies, no voice message, confusing Direct Messages, confusing screen share, etc, let alone the I am Playing video game status updates makes it unsuitable for other than gamers imo.
I can say though they did an amazing job with the bots system and customization of ranks and channels.
It feels like a matter of time someone combines the best of Slack, Discord, and IRC ...
Nowadays though, I'm kind of weary of it. Their struggles to find a proper way of monetization makes me feel a bit uneasy at times to be quite honest. I would prefer to have a way to talk to my friends on a service that is either self-hosted, such as Matrix, or at least a little more transparent and trustworthy. But now it very hard to get people away from it and even if, it would probably create split groups again which would be a step backwards. They certainly did fill a niche of easy community building in a time when you would either have to set something up yourself, i.e. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, or rely on arguably worse services such as Skype. I guess it also helped that they looked towards Slack for some inspiration in a way. But there's still the issue that any of the open-source alternatives are arguable worse to this day, so a lot of people are stuck with it, sadly.
I'm bearish on Discord (as I was last year). Discord didn't win, it's burning money and nitro is (currently) not saving them -- just how their previous attempt at monetization (the store) didn't either. Alternative narratives won't make this fact true. People seem to conveniently forget about XFire, and the many other "gaming chat apps" that preceded it. Why Discord appears to have won is because it's free.
We'll see what happens when the money dries up.
Generally the fun phase of a consumer-facing social company does not last forever though, and I'm not looking forward to the phases that often seem to follow. We can look at anything from Reddit to Youtube to Facebook to see the types of issues that lead social products to become increasingly user-hostile over time, and I'm not confident that Discord can avoid the pitfalls that have led to the decline in quality of most similar products.
The issues that often lead to the increase in user-hostility have many different causes and manifestations, but they often start with an increase in monetization, often with vast troves of user data, of which Discord is obviously not lacking in. As the platform grows and controls the social lives of hundreds of millions, there becomes increased demands for censorship, not just of political and ideological nature, but also for the purposes of copyright and IP, and the from multitude of governments that they must work with (obviously including, but not limited to the US). Discord already has very strong network and gate-keeping effects in many communities, and social ostracization is faced by users that contemplate not using it; losing network effects once you have them is generally not very easy, so it will likely be the dominant player in its area for a long time.
I don't want to just sit here and spread negativity about potential issues, but seeing an entire generation of people use yet-another-social-product, it does have me concerned from time to time. I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies sitting in between users, reading and storing their logs, every click they make, and gate-keeping access to begin with. We've seen some of the places this can lead, and many of them aren't very pretty.
Regardless, Discord has made a great product that strongly beats its present and past competitors (which is what I'd add to the full article above - competitors like Skype were really bad! From excessive ads to laggy calling to leaking user IPs, which it still does), and for that I'm grateful that there's such a better software alternative for communities and friends to get together with. But I would definitely love to see pro-active work and assurances from Discord that help to convince me that they will be a unique force of Good in the consumer social space rather than regress to the mean that we see exists today.
For the real time chat space, my personal hope is that Matrix will eventually take off. Currently it is still in a phase where there is lots of development and technological improvements, but I hope that eventually there will be an ecosystem of compliant clients as well as a large user base. Another good alternative to matrix is zulip, although it's hard to maintain which discussions one wants to stay up to date with vs which discussions to ignore.
The thing that Discord is missing and is failing at is that it doesn't have any sort of a friend graph or social structure. Discord users want this sort of Reddit anonymity where people are semi-social but not really.
Discord isn't a social app and Reddit looks like where Discord will grow to, not mass market, not super data heavy because there's no friend graph and structure.
It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.
Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.
Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.
Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.
And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.
It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?
I think compromises can be made, and in practice, perhaps have to be, in order to attain a large user base (large enough for common network effects, too). I don't want the minimum requirements of all software to be perfect decentralization, censorship-resistance, 10 different client implementations in Rust, and so on. Just, better than what we have. Nonprofit companies could do a good job of it imo, similar to how we see Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as such forces of good that will not become corrupted by ads, selling data, and the likes.
Your username, user ID, profile photo, mutual friends, and mutual servers are always visible to anyone. Something you said years ago could potentially come back to screw you over at any time. Changing your username does not help, as the messages you posted back then will be displayed under your new username.
Want to start a serious game project as a developer? That clan you posted drunk messages in 5 years ago might still have someone in it who can then use those messages against you, for little or no reason at all. Gaming communities can be savage.
Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
The moment I stopped being a mod though these problems seemed void to me.
their tech blogs have been pretty cool to read, talking about the various problems of scale they have had while leveraging the BEAM vm.
I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages.
I remember looking through their engineering job postings once recently, and not one of them mentioned Elixir, making me wonder how much they are really committed to it.
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
computers are more than mere quick abacuses, they define our lives. the amount of personal user data and metadata that crap gathers is quite frightening. user privacy loses bad with Discord.
Being proprietary, who knows what else will be the best step in their malicious software.
it's cute to think UX is everything, but not everyone laughs at each PRISM reveal.
IRC, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo and Skype are operating in a very different space. Mumble is a small open source project. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are old school desktop apps, I believe both are a one man project. IRC is an open source communication protocol. Skype was just a VOIP app.
The truer competitors to discord would have been the Twitch App, and maybe Steam itself and Microsoft Xbox on PC. But still, I'll just contend Discord is a social media platform tailored to gamers with an emphasis on voice chat. And that was just a unique product that had not been done before. It appeared at the right time, since technology, broadband, and gamers owning good quality mics and competitive online gaming growing all made it possible.
I feel the article should have focused more on how Discord succeeded, and less on how it won, since I don't really see who it competes with.
If you try to have it compete against Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagam it definitely didn't win. If you try to have it compete against Slack, Teams, RocketChat, Chanty, Mattermort, it also didn't win, since it has no paid footing in the enterprise world.
As an example, IRC isn't a community building tool. It doesn't have offline async notifications/messaging, for one. It misses these tools that helps you develop relationships. It's just ephemeral chat (for better or worse).
That's why it doesn't matter if Discord isn't perfect. People want to form relationships, not just chat, not just post.
I don't like Skype, but still use it pervasively for basic business communications.
My aging parents use all sorts of technology, even with their grandkids, and Discord is not on the list.
'Gaming' is a very key, central social aspect to Discord and I'm doubtful that it would exist to such a degree of popularity without it.
Also - despite the fact that it is, indeed quite good ... it's also complicated.
On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
The feature request has been made... in fact it's been made multiple times and been deleted at least once https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600317...
Slack handles this well, even at the free tier, with threads having a separate type of notification. In fact I'm on two communities that use slack... the limits on free slack (10,000 messages mainly) can be a feature for communities, hiding past messages.
I'd gladly pay for threads in discord. It gets even worse with private channels. Want to discuss something between three folks on a discord server that don't have a shared role without adding another channel to someone's list?
As it stands, this requires knowing someone's username on discord (not what they are called on the server) to add permissions then navigating to edit a channel's permissions, and setting two permissions for each discord user name so they can read and writ. Alternatively, you can do it with the creation of a new role and channel and adding that role to folks, which is annoying if you use roles for communicating anything other than permission levels. And that's if you have the permissions to do that. On Slack you can let anybody thread a conversation.
It's annoying, even as as discord owner. I've been contemplating writing a bot to handle it, but frankly it should be built in. And so should message threads.
https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/hzobo2/threads_...
A server joining flow so bad that people have to host another server just to let people join it.
Also our team doesn't currently pay for Slack (small academic lab), so all our old message history is being held hostage, which has been a bit annoying.
It’ll be interesting to see if they keep their edge once they expand into other areas
In a professional or educational setting, custom emojis and cool-looking animations aren't that important. You just want a tool that does the job and does it well. If it does it for free, even better.
If you look at it from that perspective, companies and educational institutions were a problem for Discord. They were using the service same as everyone else, while not bringing much revenue. This was especially true for school groups, which consisted mostly of kids that didn't have credit cards.
The marketing move to appeal only to gamers, making the service unattractive for others, may have been deliberate after all.
Nowadays, Discord has enough features to justify paying for, even if you don't care about status, so the strategy has changed.
As a college student that's constantly told to join Discord servers for every class/club/friend group, it's so annoying for this not to work intuitively, and the Discord documentation isn't too helpful either. I think I must have joined about 6 different servers across 3 different email addresses by now just because of how obtuse it is.
Oh boy, that is putting it so naively.
The tricky part with "status for sale" is projecting some semblance of legitimacy. Specially among more tech savy and piraty communities (eg gaming), if you are paying extra for a free service and making a big deal about it with flair, you are just a fool.
They did a great job in integrating technical perks with flair in a continum; from audio quality, through animations and banners, to vanity URLs. And the boost system creates a ladder with different steps. And it only worked because of how discerning their users are (for contrast, some people are plainly oblivious to media degradation in places like whatsapp).
They knew very well their market and how to package legitimate status to them.
Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.
The problem with basic protocols is they are inherently very slow to develop and iterate, so problems stick around for a long time. UX can vary widely across different clients for the protocol. SMS has had huge longevity and will stick around for a good while longer, but I don't think anyone is arguing that SMS is actually better than the internet based closed systems that exist today.
But to answer your question, plenty and not sure if they are willing to pay. Many open source projects now a days start on discord and then eventually add a subreddit. For example, deno.
People don't want to "switch". They don't want to host software. They don't want to register for a bunch of different communities.
They just want to click "Join" and build relationships. Or click "Create" to create one. You can't just try to solve chat and protocols (IRCv3), you need to solve community.
I certainly agree with what you're saying. But so far our attempts at decentralized social systems are clearly early on in the experimentation process, to put it the nicest way possible. Open protocols are a great idea, but that is the easy part that we like to fixate on. The hard part is a compelling experience that people will want to use so that you have people to chat with.
And so far we're still trying to figure out what that solution looks like.
Yeah, I don't like this walled garden aspect of most sites either. But let me explain:
Basically, on sites like Reddit, if a community gets controversial, it almost certainly will get media attention, and potentially get banned or censored because of that. Similarly, if someone says something controversial on Twitter, that could mean losing their job or what not too.
That can't happen as easily on Discord, since you need the invite link to join, and can more easily keep out snooping journalists, moral guardians, etc.
Firstly: won what?
Discord was born _years_ (over a decade for some) after some of the "competitors" mentioned became defunct, while others are still thriwing, and is built on top of the foundations and groundwork laid by that same competition.
For casual or small parties, Discord is great. For large scale multi-squad coordination Discord is the worst out of all the competition (priority speaker feature does not solve this on its own).
Discord "won" this round of social musical chairs because of pure luck, just like AIM and MySpace and Friendster and Facebook and Snap and Tiktok, etc. In a few years, its users will be "old" and then the next generation will flock to some other "cool" service.
You can't control, nor predict, nor copy anything about this sort of service. It either gains traction, for whatever reason, or it doesn't. Once it does, network effects take over and growth is exponential.
Analyze Discord to death, it won't give you any clue how to duplicate it.
...and then you have to delete that account because you're not logged in on the browser, and log in to the main site with your browser, and click on the invite link again
I think there is a "get verification link in email" step somewhere in there for me too, it's always a major pain in the ass to accept an invite for me and I kind of dread getting discord invites because of this.
I'm not sure how Slack is related to Discord but they seem the same for me UI wise. I always wondered why Slack didn't purchase Discord and turn it into their gaming division.
Before Discord you as a gamer could either use clunky Skype or something like outdated Ventrilo.
Might be an opportunity for discord there, perhaps integrate with slack
Then I persuaded our team at work to switch from skype/hangouts/slack to discord. It just work much better, has less connection problems, uses no transfer when you're not talking, filters noise better, allows to change volume level per user, has infinite history on text chat.
There's no competition.
We are devs or small SEO plugin for WordPress and we use discord for all our comms, despite the fact w.org is using slack. And that they will move to matrix. Because they invested in it.
Anyone actively and freely communicating on an actual independent platform is instead seen as a liability to the public because there's no implied threat or leverage over their community.
https://blog.discord.com/our-stand-on-racial-equality-320088...
Nope! (Well yes, but, historically ...) Skype cracked down on free conference calls. I seem to recall this was before the Microsoft acquisition which ultimately destroyed it.
Skype was bustling with fun conference calls, when they were free.
We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school.
> let alone important things like preserving offline messages
Jabber is federated, that's up to the service or client. Also, Jabber is extensible, it could be implemented in a breeze.
He's not wrong though. The average IRC user, especially, hates emojis.
I think the article is a little biased, also the price table is not explained very well.
I think Discord guys are great, but I'd like to not underestimate Slack and MS-Teams on this area
on a DIY server, I see a job ad for devs, I sell myself to that person and soon I get invited to a room. It's about making a discord game, turns out my almost new boss is a 13yo boy with business envy. Was highly surprised.
I've not historically had a problem with skype for voice chat, so I don't see how discord is "10x better" than skype
• Why does Discord snoop my clipboard/pasteboard without any explicit paste action from me? (iOS 14 has exposed a bunch of other apps that do this. I can only hope this is not malicious.)
• Why can't I mass delete my own messages?
I've this this happen when someone is not logged into Discord in their browser and is logged in in the Discord app. When they click the server join link, Discord creates a new dangling (no-email-attached) account. However, since they are logged into the Discord app, their real account also joins the server when they launch the app from the browser.
I'm pretty keen on sharing this knowledge because I recently realized I've done this myself, and it took me way too long to figure it out. I "started" using Discord a few months ago, and in one of the servers I joined, I saw an account with an oddly-familiar username that joined a server about a minute before I did. And then I saw the same thing happen in another server! After a few weeks of having a weird feeling about this, I finally found out that in my browser, I was logged into a dangling account I created back in 2018, before I really knew what Discord was. (I think back then I thought Discord was just a voice chat service without permanent accounts.)
I would love for Discord to solve this and a few other identity management-related issues!
But as an easy social/community tool for a small group when you want something more than just a WhatsApp group, it's great.
The downside is that it's just chat and thus any important info being discussed can be hard to link, find, and centralize. I'm part of some organizations that handle this by having a Facebook group as a lightweight forum and landing page of the organization along with the Discord for more hangout and meet each other vibes.
unless it stays private: at some point it'll be loaded full of ads and then their fickle audience will move onto the next thing
So where's the big revenue?
In fact it seems to have killed IRC for many, which is kinda sad. Most of the IRC networks i use are mostly dead now. For me Discord has replaced TS and IRC.
I am not a huge fan of Slack.
that removes a lot of friction, compared to, say, splitting a teamserver costs or putting a paypal donation button.
I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly.
I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.