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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting thing about Discord is their ability to scale. Their product really works well in my experience, and their scale is no joke.

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The have some really disciplined engineers (some of them I used to work with). I have learned a lot from these people. Erlang is everybody's secret weapon for high concurrency (like Discord) and Rust has predictable performance that is easy to tune. GC is not an option for many use cases they have. One interesting problem they run into was the GC is Go and the lack of configuration options for it. I think they are the prime example of using the right tool for the job, whatever it might be, instead of trying to sell you a single programming language that solves everything.

I've been using Discord on a near-daily basis for 9 years, in servers from 10 to 25,000 people, and I think I can count on two hands the number of actual breakages I have had with the product. It's honestly pretty nuts.

I have been using for 2-3 years, and it had loads of breakages for me. I cannot count on two hands, need more. Europe.

> I've been using Discord on a near-daily basis for 9 years

Wikipedia says Discord was released 5 years ago. Am I missing something?

Hm — maybe that’s in reference to it coming out of beta or something? I can tell you I made my first Discord server in 2015.

I've seen it go down quite a lot. https://discordstatus.com/ shows at least 5 breakages in the last week.

I agree, I always found it strange that an app aimed for gaming really has better performance than slack/teams and their massive budgets behind them. But I never saw a company that uses discord for communication.

> I always found it strange that an app aimed for gaming really has better performance than slack/teams

Makes sense to me, its users would be running games alongside the software, and would be quite cross with the software shitting itself in the middle of a co-op game. Somewhat good performance and behaviour is (or at least was originally) absolutely necessary to getting traction, a bunch of checkboxes would not suffice.

> But I never saw a company that uses discord for communication.

Currently working at a place where at least one, if not two, teams use Discord for daily chatting. Official meetings are mostly handled over Zoom but I believe their intra-team stuff tends to happen over Discord.

The closest I've found is the Spotify open-source project "Backstage", which uses Discord for communication (https://github.com/backstage/backstage) - I have no idea about the rest of Spotify, mind.

My view is that they solved voice communication first - that was their original use case. Reliable multi-party voice is a harder problem than text chat and means that you can't/don't just rely on Electron for everything. Their product is a way to 'sell' some good non-trivial (but not groundbreaking) engineering.

Whereas Slack is successful because it understood it's usecase well (including how to sell to enterprises).

Budgets are not a subtitute for programming talent and willingness to experiment it seems.

A lot of opensource teams use Rust for communication

I know that rust is the greatest latest thing but I’m still not quite convinced of it’s excellence as a communication platform.

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