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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

Discord won because they found a unique purpose and focused all of their efforts on it while, making sure that all secondary features were also well crafted.

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.

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Pretty much every single subreddit out there has a discord server at this point. Still very tech-related but much more broad than just gaming at this point.

I actually switched away from Discord to Mumble, for higher audio quality & lower latency.

Don’t they both use Opus? I use both regularly and the audio is identical to my ears (as opposed to pretty much everything else).

Funny thing is, I've seen a lot of people complain about Mumble's audio quality.

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.

Mumble maxes out at 96kbps + overhead (which brings it close to 128kbps total) (enforced client-side, though the server can set a lower bandwidth), and I find it's a noticeable difference over Discords 64/kbps.

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).

> Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency,

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?

Should note that discord defaults to 64kb/s but goes up to 96kb/s for free, it is just a slider in the voice channel settings. and then depending on the "Boost" level of the server you can go up to 128/256/384 kb/s.

People treat me like I'm crazy when I say I like the audio quality/ latency on Teamspeak more but in my experience it's been day and night.

I agree. The core reason to switch for me (and I assume many others) was because the core features were better than competitors and it was free. On exposure outside main demographic: servers that are gaming adjacent like anime, content creators, and programming already see large numbers of members. A promising sign.

With the impending sunset of Google Hangouts, I've been using discord for family communication. It is nice that the barrier of entry is low enough that you can actually get people to use it, and that you can use it on desktop (otherwise you'd just use SMS)

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