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Comment by dualboot | Hacker News Reader

Discord wins in a lot of ways. A few that jump out to me as important are :

* 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.

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> Excellent group voice chat quality and controls

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.

I'm all for more functionality!

yea that would be considered an advanced feature.

The killer feature for me is TeamSpeak's "raid leader". You can assign someone to be able to instantly mute everyone else on the call while holding a key. It seems very convenient in, well, raid settings. No idea why Discord doesn't have that.

Discord does have priority speaker [1], is that close enough?

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011876531-S...

Whoa, that's great. Seems to be a new feature though, as it's only supported on Windows. Thanks for letting me know though, I'll definitely make use of it.

I think it was just forgotten about, it's been in the options page for a while (first archive snapshot is from december 18, 2018[0]).

0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229093058/https://support.d...

This feature has extremely limited usability. If there's one group medium-sized group (2-10; and 10 is being generous, I'd say 2-7 is more realistic[1]) and the conversation is chaotic, it is a great feature. However, if you're playing a game that requires coordination across multiple squads, Ventrilo or TeamSpeak are the definite winners.

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.

There's "Push to talk (Priority)", which doesn't mute everyone but does lower their volume while you hold it down.

> Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications

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.

Yep, I ran into this a few times and now my `~/bin/discord` is just `chromium --app='https://discord.com/app'`.

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.

That's not a cross platform issue but your packages being outdated. At least on Arch I haven't run into this issue once, it can self update just fine on linux.

I personally use Flatpak for Discord and Slack. I used to have issues with my package repositories not being up-to-date too, but this is much more convenient.

> 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.

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.

> Discord basically does everything Slack does

Except message threads and drawings while screen sharing. Two features we use in Slack a lot in my current team.

> Discord basically does everything Slack does

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.

Good points. Didn't think of cross-platform.

It's a big factor. Discord is essentially a "better" iMessage for my immediate family.

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