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Comment by ds | Hacker News Reader

Not to be negative, but teamspeak and ventrilo represent some of the biggest failures of 'getting stuck in your lane' ever. They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. Ventrilo still has no official ios/android app (lol). Both remind me of craigslist, actually- Except that craigslist is still going strong (for now).

Both still exist, granted- And many still use them. Its just that discord really shouldnt exist, it should have been one of these players. The head start they had should have been insurmountable.

Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) - Its just I so rarely hear about TS/Vent that I thought it worth me shouting into the ether my disappointment I am not talking to all my friends on vent/ts in 2021.

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I've met the owner of Ventrilo a few times at Quakecon a few years back. Super nice guy, pretty smart and nerdy in a good way. Seems to me the guy got pretty wealthy off Ventrilo in its heyday, and was happy with it. Because as people can go search, Ventrilo is essentially abandonware.

Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity.

If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.

Good for him. Not every business needs to last and grow forever. That's a mandate that can't be met without selling your soul to VC.

Discord also has a big lead in video support that, IMO, now exceeds anything else. It has flexible group based video chat that naturally extends voice chat. It has broadcasting support so you can stream your gameplay to each other, as well as player-in-player, pop out support, and side-by-side view. Almost all of these features work on mobile as well, including PIP/broadcasting (e.g. I streamed Genshin Impact directly off my phone.)

These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this.

Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.

Completely forgot about seamless video conferencing and screensharing.

Yeah, it became obvious around 2010 that Ventrilo was dead and that no further development was going to happen. That's when my group moved to Mumble, which was significantly better (and cheaper for hosting costs) but in the end Discord ended up being a significantly better product in pretty much every way.

It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts.

That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.

Id be willing to bet discord makes more gross profit from nitro sales in one week than TS/Vent make in a year, combined.

I highly doubt it - what are you basing this on? I personally don't know a single person who actually pays for discord. Most people I know who use Teamspeak pay for it. That being said, Discord is way more popular than Teamspeak, it does remain to be seen if they can heavily monetize.

Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it

Majority of people I speak with on Discord do infact pay, nitro and server boosting, etc. Both our examples are anecdotal, though.

Any person who uses animated emotes/reacts is paying for discord nitro. It's not just the people who pay for server boosts, that's a higher tier.

I don't know a single person who uses Teamspeak, and every discord server I'm on has at least one person boosting it. I was paying for discord for a while until I did a trim of my budget - but it gets you a shiny icon, you get to use more emojis, and other little things. You may call me a chump, but Discord is a product I value (like public radio ;) ) and so I tossed a coin to them.

you're under 20, right?

Please, go on and tell me how my comment led you a conclusion about my age.

They probably need it, using someone else's computer is not cheap.

Does anyone know how efficient / cheaply they can use their servers? I'm guessing the chat part of the service save for file / image hosting is probably pretty cheap, but the low latency voice chats might be pretty costly, even if they can efficiently host them on virtual servers.

Discord's voice chats have no apparent upper limit in how many concurrent users they support - they basically say "the upper limit is how many your client device is able to support without crapping out".

I haven't read into this but it seems like they're doing peer-to-peer for audio or the server load is INCREDIBLY efficient, given this.

It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi...

This is observable to still be the case as an end user. When the discord servers are having issues, people's voices become inaudible. This can be resolved by moving the server to a different, less loaded region, even if that region should have worse connectivity to the users in the voice chat. For example, my raid group often have to bounce our server from Europe to the US to workaround reliability issues on the EU servers.

> It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview

> link describe a P2P WebRTC implementation

what am i missing?

edit: found it. they use a SFU forwarder. That's the cheap version of going full centralization (MCU) benefits. they probably have a better deal on bandwidth than CPU to justify that, or all their use cases work fine with only one person transmitting at once, which gives you the same benefit of a MCU with less cpu usage...

Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support.

They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.

They already have plenty. Personal user data and metadata. Remember this is the child of OpenFeint.

No one cares unfortunately. I consider conversations with my friends private. So I do not use discord.

We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms.

We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.

I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.

It's basically a Slack with more useful features and no bullshit.

Isn’t there a bit of a privacy concern though? Seems like a corporate nightmare.

I don't see more issues than with Slack

Less so than with Slack. a) If you're willing to accept using a SaaS for corporate communications, then Discord is no different than Slack. You run the risk that the vendor is recording what you do on the other end of that connection. For what it's worth, such a security stance also requires you to run your own email servers. The IT workload to run all of the above is extremely high, prohibitively so for startups and small companies. Even if, from a security perspective, it would be ideal to host it yourself - for most companies it's simply economically impractical.

b) Granted that you accept the risk of your vendor recording your communications, the odds of those communications being recorded are much, much lower for voice communications than they are for text communications, for the sheer cost of storing voice and video data. Running the audio through speech-to-text before discarding the audio may be a threat, but not for users whose office lingua franca is in a language not supported by contemporary speech-to-text tools, let alone automatically deciphering which language the users in a given voice channel are speaking without it being defined ahead of time.

In short, as long as you're not buying communication services from a competitor, you're probably fine.

Text is recorded, it has to if you want persistant chat.

Audio maybe - but stored indefinitly? No.

By recorded I mean keeping a separate copy, i.e if somebody deletes a message or file in the UI then the malicious vendor doesn't delete their copy of the message or file. That's eminently more feasible for text communications as the costs of storage are so much smaller.

This is the common use of "delete". Just a flag in the db to hide that specific message.

I am similarly astounded that Discord hasn't tried to reach for the enterprise market — if they had good multi-account support, and the ability to have audit logging on corp accounts, I think it would be hands down better than Slack for that use case. It's already better than Slack for personal use cases IMO.

I hope they monetize in that direction rather than ads (Discord seems to still be pretty reliant on VC funding, which makes sense to me since Nitro is pretty cheap and not particularly necessary to use the product) — it seems less soul-eating. They've been dialing back the gamer branding at least, which could help reach a broader audience.

Teamspeak and those tools currently have cross-channel communication which is very useful for large squad games. They are definitely a minority as most games are like 5 players per team.

So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue.

Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways.

Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.

I wouldn’t say that all the Craigslist competitors failed. Dozens of successful startups represent the unbundling of a single category on Craigslist into a more feature rich experience.

> unbundling

and re-bundling:

https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-...

I'm a member of several squad gaming communities on discord. We always do our briefings in teamspeak for the better audio codecs and features for ducking and crowd control.

> They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat.

> Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix)

As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.

And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.

> Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases.

As an ex-heavy user of teamspeak I can tell you that nobody cared about that.

Yes, I think I joined a TS server twice in my life when it wasn't part of a guild or clan or something for online gaming.

So it 100% did what it should do. These days most people seem to use Discord which also works fine for up to 30 people (didn't try more) or Mumble (works fine for hundreds), in my filter bubble

It matters. In some parts of competitive gaming scene, Teamspeak requires a VPN because of DDoS attacks. Discord doesn't suffer from this, neither does Matrix.

How so? That seems like an extraordinary claim.

There is nothing extraordinary about this claim. Without using a VPN you can get DDoSed. A DDoS is very cheap and easy. This happens in competitive gaming. Had it happen to myself and peers multiple times. Also, your voice server can get DDoSed as well. Seen that occur as well.

You can get DDOSed with and without a VPN. Your IP does not change. You probably leak your IP somewhere and people then DDOS that.

> You probably leak your IP somewhere

I probably leaked my home address somewhere as well. Doesn't mean you got it.

Which is why you do use the VPN for gaming-related purposes such as a voice chat service, while when you visit Hacker News a VPN isn't necessary.

VPNs work adequately for this purpose. They work terrific to avoid civil lawsuits as well. What they're terrible for is avoiding law enforcement. But that isn't what we're discussing here.

>Which is why you do use the VPN for gaming-related purposes such as a voice chat service, while when you visit Hacker News a VPN isn't necessary.

No you usually don't. Games and voice chat don't usually leak your IP to someone else. P2P in games is very rare, as is voice chat. Discord/Mumble/Teamspeak don't reveal your IP to a random user. Now if you join a Mumble/Teamspeak server, the admin can of course see your IP. But if you get ddosed right after you join such a server ... you know who is responsible.

>VPNs work adequately for this purpose. They work terrific to avoid civil lawsuits as well. What they're terrible for is avoiding law enforcement. But that isn't what we're discussing here.

True

You're talking about casual gaming on public Team Speak / Ventrilo servers.

I'm talking about gaming where the voice chat server is owned or administrated by a clan/group/guild/team (or whatever nomenclature). If you're half serious gaming, you don't use public servers. Their reliability is comparable to Discord, minus the profiling.

Then where do you leak the IP that will get you ddosed?

I wasn't talking about public vs "private" servers. The fact that the admin can see your IP applies to all.

Corrupt admin on a private, rival server.

Avoidable (why should I go there if I have my own?) and easily detectable (I only get ddosed after joining that server).

Because you got a match against them? Because you have friends in their group? Or peers? In the game I played, the top players knew each other.

Actually, you got a good idea who does the DDoS; "supporters" (hooligans) of group X, who got your IP from admin of voice chat server of group X.

>Because you got a match against them? Because you have friends in their group? Or peers? In the game I played, the top players knew each other.

So it's avoidable. Just use another server which maybe you, or a neutral party controls. Doesn't matter if they know eachother. Having a match against them is not a factor, if you play vs. them you don't need to be in voice chat with your enemy to begin with, but maybe you have an example of a game where this is common.

>Actually, you got a good idea who does the DDoS; "supporters" (hooligans) of group X, who got your IP from admin of voice chat server of group X.

Then don't join group X. It's simple really. Or you gather evidence, seems simple enough if you just write timestamps.

You don't know beforehand who is going to DDoS you, or when. So, re: avoidable, a sensible solution is to just use a VPN for that specific purpose. Its easy to set up, cheap, and the added latency for voice chat is negligible.

Yes, but you know it afterwards. It's the overkill solution to a (probably) very small problem.

You don't have to route 0/0 through the VPN...

Then it's even more useless. Just use tethering.

Instead Discord goes down globally if Cloudflare has a problem, which already happened multiple times.

If Cloudflare have problems, so does a large part of WWW.

Not Teamspeak (or Mumble) servers.

Much more susceptible to DDoS than Cloudflare.

You can just chose another server. Can't do with Cloudflare (or Discord).

Discord "server" admins can set a different region for their server to work around some types of outages. I've had to do this once.

I am not talking about public servers. If your team/clan's voice server is being DDoSed. Bonus points if a member hosts the Mumble or TS server.

There is not much difference. If your team's voice server is getting ddosed (for whatever reason), there are lots of public servers that allow channel creation.

Yeah, and there's Discord, which also has group chat with history, and a decent interface.

What Team Speak, Mumble, and especially Ventrilo have going for it is that they are more lightweight. However, Ventrilo has a strange latency which cannot be solved (except by moving on). Team Speak, Mumble, and Discord don't suffer from this. Also, Ventrilo cannot be self-hosted (while Team Speak and Mumble can).

What year was this? Nobody cared about censorship when Teamspeak was in its prime. Many definitely do now.

Yes, let's all centralize and commercialize everything and stop making software that you can self host.

Why not both?

Due to network effects, users are a tragedy-of-the-commons resource. The more people use one type of solution, the less people there are to use another. We have to choose, as a society as well as individual agents, which types of solutions we use on principle, not merely what's most popular in the moment, lest we find ourselves stuck in local optima.

Are you familiar with Matrix though? Its very design is intended to mitigate this effect. You can use Matrix and still communicate via a bridge with users on other platforms.

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction

Well they never were for a seamless purpose. We would mesh Ventrilo and IRC into a real awesome tool but I think we were the intended audience. There weren't millions of us there were tens of thousands of us.

It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in.

I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.

I used IRC regularly for ~20 years and still don't miss it compared to Slack.

I miss the people and the tone of the conversations and some of the aesthetic of clients like BitchX but as a technology, I don't really care.

Wow!! I haven’t thought of BitchX in about 15 years. I wonder if my eggdrops are still up?

Basically this. IRCv3 never really took off and it's not really feature-comparable to the modern chat clients. I still connect to IRC for one project I'm on, but I think IRC will likely be just the last few holdouts from here on out as it's way too late to pull people back in.

In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had.

I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has.

I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.

I think Mumble tries to be what you're describing: https://www.mumble.info/

I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.

Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew.

Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.

Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting.

On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?

Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018.

Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year.

(Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)

I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable.

Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".

Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.

I can't understand the argument that Mumble is functionally better. I used Vent/TS/Mumble/Skype for years while playing WoW and within 2 minutes of downloading Discord it clearly blew all of them out of the water. Joining a new server was frictionless, channels and settings were clear and understandable. It combined everything from those 4 services into 1 and did it better. I wouldn't call that "frilly features" it's just a flat out superior product.

Oh yeah, that reminds me of the one time I wanted to join a TeamSpeak server, but my "security level" was not high enough. My CPU had to calculate some stuff for 2 minutes to get that required security level, it's apparently an anti Spammer measurement.

Discord is easier to use, no doubt about it. However that ease of use has been achieved by ruthlessly cutting control. Mumble options have I think literally 100 dials you can turn to tweak audio. Discord has like three. The Mumble options require a lot of knowledge to even comprehend, which is why they're not good for popularity. However these options are a godsend when you run into a weird audio issue.

Where I live, craigslist has all but been replaced by facebook marketplace. There are too many scammers and too much spam on craigslist.

Doesn't help that Craiglist haven't updated their UI for years, isn't the most user friendly site.

Also having fixed locations isn't great, esp. in the UK. Cities are covered but smaller towns are chopped off under bigger city 'communities'.

As a part-time reseller most of the scams and headaches come from platforms other than CL (FB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, etc).

Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

> Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.

I disagree. WebRTC is utter nonsense. You neither want to implement nor use it. You never know if it's working. With Mumble (TCP and UDP, both can be used for voice) and Teamspeak you know that when you connect to a server, your connection is working. With WebRTC you only have a vague idea, since HTTP is working, but that doesn't mean much.

Teamspeak Server seems to be free for 32 players now.

No idea why you wouldn't just use Discord though.

For bigger groups it is actually quite good. Its also a more lightweight experience as opposed to Discord with all the chat ect. functionality. And I have found it to be more ressourceful than Discord.

That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.

I don't know if it's actively maintained anymore because it's been a while since I played, but there was a mod for Arma 2 that simulated real radio physics and depended on Teamspeak.

Still maintained: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2

It looks like progress is being made on Mumble support: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980

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