Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own. But users are locked into platforms so heavily and for such long time periods that they themselves give the platform almost the entirety of its value (not to single out Discord, since we all know this is how a lot of acquisitions work in practice). [As an additional caveat, I will add that Discord has definitely built something that its users love, and I don't want to undermine the absurd amount of UI, feature refinement, and scaling work they've done successfully. It isn't negligible, but it is also not >$10B of software engineering.]
I've read many discussions where someone says something of the form "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to", and I think upon consideration of this statement that there is something deeply wrong with the way network effects and protocols function on our Internet such that this can even be a common scenario. We really do have quite a crisis of non-interoperability that generalizes towards a complete lack of user control, be it software, hardware, data, or anything in between.
With that said, if Microsoft does purchase Discord, it might not be as bad as some foretell. While we can point to something like Skype as a failure, we can also point to something like Github, which has been doing very well post-acquisition, and in my opinion hasn't gotten worse at all. It's quite possible they wouldn't want to profit off of Discord individually, but rather use it as another tool to expand their general ecosystem horizontally. On the other hand, they could also do the exact opposite and start harvesting data and maximizing advertisements en masse, lest my post become too optimistic in tone, since this is still HN. Lastly, remember that this is still just a rumor that various news outlets have picked up on and is nowhere near guaranteed.
For those looking for alternatives due to this, or just because they'd like to own their own data for once, I think Matrix is likely to be the best general solution in this product space, both with respect to similar app functionality as well as quality constraints (real encryption, decentralization, FOSS, etc).
It kinda can only go upwards from there.
Desktop client also continually scans running processes.
Very aggressive client fingerprinting.
Not that it's necessarily malicious in intent—requiring “extra verification” only on suspected misuse isn't entirely unreasonable, and that's awfully hard to distinguish from things like targeted privacy attacks—but it would be nice to establish this sort of thing as common knowledge, especially since I imagine the chaff of “huh? no they don't” is only to their benefit.
Using any form of datacentre IP or anonymiser requires phone verification randomly within a few minutes or hours of starting interaction [regardless of server].
You get a different error message and cannot use discord at all: https://i.imgur.com/T57xcff.png
Isn't this in order to update current game status?
"CTO of Discord here.
We do not record all your processes and send them to our servers.
We watch the process list for 3 reasons.
Detect games to show on your status message. You can turn this off anytime in the privacy tab of settings.
Detect games to hook the overlay into if it is enabled.
Detect games run as administrator to warn that Push to talk won't work.
If you use the overlay we send information about your DirectX and GPU to our metrics server to track success rate of the overlay as we test it and improve it. We will probably stop sending this to our server as soon as overlay moves out of the experimental phase.
Nothing else is ever saved to disk or sent over the network.
Also the IP address you listed is an address of one of our US East voice servers which has no relation to our primary data center. Nothing is sent over it that would involve games. Our primary IPs (where we send your status) would be something else. Whatever data you saw being sent continuously was probably related to voice chat."
They have a switch to turn this off, but then they say this:
> The nitty gritty: when you turn the flag off, the events are sent, but we tell our servers to not store these events. They're dropped immediately — they're not stored or processed at all. The reason that we chose to do it this way is so that when you turn it off on your desktop app it also turns off automatically on your phone - and vice-versa. This allows us to keep things the same across all of our apps and clients, across upgrades.
Why not do it both on the client and server...
Because the network itself is also listening and never forgets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
If you're concerned about the current state of privacy at Discord, open the browser dev tools and look at network requests.
Lots of talk with respect to user privacy and discord, overlooks the distinction between a users privacy as a discord user (User <-> Discord) as opposed to the users privacy when communicating on discord (Discord User <-> Discord User or Discord User <-> Discord Bot)
While Discord is like the Twitch of its market: The most popular choice and with their specific feature set they don't even have any real competition.
Interoperability in communication software is impossible. I know this will upset a lot of people here but its just what we have seen time and time again.
Interoperable and standard software can not innovate because it is impossible to innovate since you need all vendors to agree and move in the same direction as you. Look at how ircv3 went. They promised the absolute bare minimum change to make irc slightly more modern and they weren't able to pull it off in time.
Discord could not be interoperable with other systems because most of its features did not exist at the time it added them. Interoperability means catering to the lowest common denominator of feature sets.
As discord has shown, siloed platforms are not the end, people will move to a new platform if it is clearly better. Discord was much much better than the rest so everyone moved. If someone else makes something much much better again they will move again.
Our entire ecosystem under the chat application is based upon interoperability, from Ethernet to IP to TCP to HTTP to even HTML (note how you use a single web browser to use all of your favorite websites!), so I don't want to be too quick to rule out that it's impossible just because it is difficult.
I would, however, agree that the incentives for it rarely exist. But with proper incentives, I'd say we could achieve some pretty amazing protocols for a lot of modern use cases.
And then on telegram you try to open an encrypted chat with someone on IRC, but their irc client doesn't support that.
Users don't care about talking to people cross platform as much as they care about everything working properly. Its easy enough to have 3 messaging apps on your phone.
Having compatibility between systems like between discord and telegram is just going to be a nightmare no matter what you do since they both want to decide on their own what the features should be.
[1] - https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
How many "innovators" have been born and died in the time that IRC has been around? It seems to be that proprietary stacks are impossible long term, while IRC and open standards continue to exist and evolve, even if they aren't popular right now.
Being able to see messages while your computer was turned off is bare minimum. Being able to use your phone to connect and receive push notifications is bare minimum. Being able to share a photo is bare minimum. Having a profile picture is bare minimum.
Some of these features can be sort of had with client extensions or middle steps like irc bouncers but the average user does not care for this. It should just work and every other platform just works.
The average user also doesn't care if the proprietary messaging platform of the day dies and is replaced with a new one because its easy to sign up again on the next platform
I'd offer an alternative explanation for why we haven't seen interoperable communication software—because proprietary systems make more money.
Its easy for the MPEG group to say, this is our new standard. Thats what it is, not debate. But imagine trying to come out with Email 2 and getting that to work on every email server and client.
emails have been interoperable since the beginning of time!
It's only impossible because the business models formed after the explosion of the internet required that they own the platform for profit. And doing so requires that other platforms not intrude. Hence, the failure of interoperability.
Email encryption is different because HTTPS certifies that you are connected to the owner of that domain name. How do I certify to you that the email you just received came from me and not someone pretending to be me?
The only bullet proof secure way is if I visit you in person and hand you a copy of my public key and then you use that key to verify my emails. We have had tools to do this with email for over a decade but they are so inconvenient that no one uses it outside of a few privacy nuts.
I use PGP quite often. And I know how hard it is and how much it lacks.
But I'm no 'privacy nut'.
A legitimate easy and underused option is how kraken employs it. I've uploaded my public key. They now send all transactional, security and other mail signed and encrypted. This is a solid solution to phishing.
The only part 'missing' is how I get my pub key on my kraken account. For me it was an export+copy+paste. But it should probably as easy as an OAUTH alike flow between kraken and my mailprovider. 'Kraken wants to import your public key to sign and encrypt it's emails to you'. An UI thing.
There isn't anything quite like the Browser - Webserver simple connection to encrypt. I would like my connection encrypted to my mailserver using SMTP/POP3/IMAP/HTTP + TLS, which it can be. I would like my email server to talk to your email server using TLS which it can do, but isn't guaranteed, there are several approaches to it (STARTTLS and others). I would like incoming mail to be spam-filtered which means a service that can read the content. My company would like incoming email to be malware and phishing filtered, which means accessing the content. My company would like outgoing email to be signatured and branded, same again. My company requires email to be archived for legal reasons and cloned off-site for DR reasons. The design of SMTP involves store-and-forward, failover and fallback options, multiple MX records, so there's not a trivial path email always takes from sender to recipient. Attackers will try to intercept SSL connections and force fallback to plain text SMTP and people would rather email arrives than doesn't arrive. Tons of companies are using ancient not-updated network equipment which proxies and edits SMTP traffic as it goes through. Coworkers would like Webmail which almost necessarily requires the server having access to unencrypted email to show it to you in a browser.
Trying to put some kind of "secure" on top of that pile of entrenched systems is much harder than saying "the biggest players don't want it", what would it be, which layers would it go in, which sides would manage it, how would it interact, who would standardise on it, how much bother is it for users and for people who forgot their password? The main approach is to public/private key outside email and send encrypted blobs to each other, which is full of key management problems, or a service which intercepts email and pulls the text out and sends on a HTTPS link and a blank "someone sent you an encrypted message. Sign up and login to view it" which sucks, but is a lot more practical and does actually work.
"How all messages are sent" and "who signed the message" are mostly separate issues. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging which works on pretty much any messaging app/network.
The IMAP protocol is a known dumpster fire but getting jmap implemented over every email client and server is basically impossible. Gmail avoids this by just implementing their own proprietary protocol which only works with gmail and the web ui/apps.
Have you considered that it’s the password reset center because it’s the only thing that works well enough?
Anything completely proprietary is a joke for security from a business continuity perspective. It’s the same reason serious companies don’t depend on “sign in with Facebook” as their only login method.
Well that’s a clause doing a lot of work. I guess email could have been the permanent contact repository a la Facebook if it had been easier for people to own their own addresses
* In discord, you need to install the "native" client to be able to share your screen or see other peoples' shared screen. The web client cannot.
* Microsoft Teams in Firefox does not do Calls; "Native" Microsoft Teams in Linux cannot "raise hand"; Microsoft Teams in Chromium on Linux cannot do the background thing.
Some of those may have evolved, I have only used Teams in chromium recently.
Here's to decentralized, encrypted, community based communication for [people who are interested in decentralized, encrypted, community based communication]!
Really? How did you come to this conclusion?
Discord is, without a doubt, 10x better than Slack, Teams, or Zoom combined. They've solved the problem of a communication in the non-business space. That's huge.
For comparison, look at Coinbase, who has a 100B valuation. What they're doing is relatively trivial. Is that >10x the value of Discord?
I don't even think Coinbase is overvalued. 10B for Discord is just a steal.
If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software.
I think the point is that almost all of the value of Discord comes from the network effect of people locked in to using it. On the one hand, that's kind of a trivial observation, of course the users are value comes from. But, if you don't realize this, it's important to know. It means you that if even if you build something identical to Discord you're not going to be worth anything like as much - unless you also happen to get users. Or, put another way, you could build something technically worse, but if people adopted it for some reason, you'd be worth more.
No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.
Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc.
The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.
My one wish would be an easy way to handle multiple accounts.
And what about Slack, Zoom or Coinbase?
Are they $27B, $100B and $100B worth of software?
What company is $x billions of dollars worth of software where x is their valuation? Even Google almost certainly isn't $1.3T (!) worth of software.
It’s more like the user base and network effects are a multiplier of the software value.
The game industry is larger than both music and movies combined. Discord is behind almost every gaming community I've run into the last five years, from Eve Online to Valheim and Smash Bros. Looking for a Discord community is one of the first things I do when playing a new multiplayer game. Same with hundreds of millions of other gamers. You can't program your way into that kind of market adoption.
"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)
The actual form of the saying is something like "if every Coke factory burned down, Coke would be back in business the next day. If you hit every Coke customer on the head, Coke would be out of business the next day". (The idea being that if Coke's customers all forgot they were Coke customers, Coca-Cola wouldn't be able to grow a new customer base on the strength of their product.)
Lots of other soda makers, especially the bargain-bin "generic store brand" stuff, taste pretty gross after a can or two, by comparison. Pepsi's alright in that department, but this is a huge market differentiator for Coke.
You're moving the goalpost. Your assertion is wrong. Revise it, because I really can't understand what you're trying to say other than "you aren't popular unless you're good, because popular means good!" or some other tautology.
Of course it does, because software is part of the overall customer experience that built that network momentum and is inexorably linked. Users would not have tolerated, promoted, and evangelized otherwise. It may not be the primary ingredient, but in Discord's case I think it helped.
† Email and mailing lists were something we forbade from day 1. There are a variety of sociological reasons why they're vile, but I think a lot of it has to do with bikeshedding, via "low-cost involvement" - people who care more about potstirring than actually getting work done have a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on big announcement and pick fights. I've experienced a huge number of people who've earned a 'stake in the discussion' by making some small contribution, and then jumped in on every discussion trying to exercise some informal kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto (insofar as such a thing arises naturally from the basic human decency of giving people the benefit of the doubt). What I like about realtime comms - especially ones with nice, logged discussions in multiple, visible rooms, is you don't have to be plugged-in 24/7 to keep up with stuff like you would on IRC (without a bouncer), but at least you have to have some real "skin in the game" of paying attention and being involved - which generally biases towards the folks doing the real work. Decisions get made without the armchair generals; occasionally they'll show up after some big decision got executed on and something was built, with an angry assertion of "Why wasn't I consulted?!?"††, but usually the existence of the actual finished work, fait accompli, tends to to stifle that nonsense real fast.
After multiple decades of dealing with that petty squabbling on email, I don't miss it at all. It was a huge source of burnout.
Your use case of “putting a project” on it is a minority. Most users are there for gaming communities.
Discord didn't "happen to get users". It made a platform people started using despite huge network/entrenchment effect of other players because it's so much better than everything else. I've learnt about Discord following open source projects and moved mine to it as well. It's fantastic, much much better than anything else on the market. Zoom is valued at 100b. Discord for 10 is just a steal.
Coming back to your question: even if you multiply it by 10 and add infinite acquisition resources the team would most likely never be able to recreate Discord.
History shows it cannot. Discord is on another league in terms of technical and usability excellence when compared to competition.
I think the problem is that this random group of people could never create Discord.
They could create a superficially similar chat application, but it’s just as likely to be worse as better.
If someone wants software now, rather than in 450 years it may be worth paying a premium.
It feels like theyve nailed the technical part.
Discord with a voice call of > 50 people really starts cracking about and it just isn't usable. audio quality goes way down.
Not sure how you got the 5000 number.
I mainly just find the user-experience to be terrible. I hate how each server is separated as if it is it's own isolated website or something. On Discord, I can switch from server to server in a click easily.
Playing GTA? I can join the GTA Discord server. Playing League? I can join that one. It's all right there.
It's also the weird SSO Slack has going on that just seems broken. When I open up Discord, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to.
When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess? I'm never sure weather to use my work account or not. Sometimes the @domain matters, so this creates even more of a mess.
Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.
Tangential: I really do fear for them if they get acquired, though. Their tech is built on the actor model, which almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on. It feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally (probably to use Azure) or have their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.
Tools like Akka are very much alive and well.
> t feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally
I doubt that, unless they're using a lot of proprietary GCP tech. A Microsoft-owned business using Azure to (most likely) save money is kind of an obvious move, and I don't consider it a bad thing.
> their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.
Or maybe even the other way around? Discord's tech is no slouch.
https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks...
It sounds pretty cool but I can't build the mental model of it without an example.
If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio.
The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there.
> Really? How did you come to this conclusion?
Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts?
If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.
My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.
But what about actually getting the engineering headcount to execute? And to build it with enough flexibility to experiment and adapt to users? And to pick technical challenges that will actually keep the headcount engaged?
Google Plus seems to be a pretty good example of a competitor doing a copycat, doing a decent job technically, but then the product fell apart. Plus didn’t hit Facebook-scale growth, but it was wildly popular with certain niches like the CS academic community. Imagine if Plus had channels (in addition to circles), less corporate emojis, and 100% private circles. Then you’d have most of Discord, no?
But Google didn’t build into Plus that ability to iterate. And the headcount got interested in other things like AI. And Alphabet got to join cookies through unified auth to get their ad targeting more competitive with FB. So the Googlers had their giant offsite in Maui and then let Plus die.
So I don’t know if the tech stack in this Discord deal is necessarily worthless. The user engagement is probably worth more, but the software is part of the whole organism.
These 10 billion are for the userbase alone.
I haven't used Discord, but I'm curious, what value can Microsoft extract from user data on Discord? Shared links?
Microsoft isn't a data company.
Deja vu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19854922
Surely, you haven't heard of Windows 10's horrendous surveillance?
Data collection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298
Ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13835733
Phone home: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352
There were no signs data collected outside of web browsing were used to target ads or sold. So I conclude MS isn't a data company.
I'm not saying their level of data collection is OK. I'm saying it's not a key aspect of their business model.
0. https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar20/index.html
Not sure about that one. Teams is an absolute failure of a chat and audio/video calls app. I think, even if Microsoft tried they could not get it worse than it is currently.
The only saving grace Teams has is it so reliably overheats my MacBook Air that no meeting can be over an hour long
Discord would be a completely different territory of getting the users to join rather than their bosses.
- The history (scroll up) takes a lot to load (this is on 300mbit up/down and fast processor)
- html content in the chat totally hogs the processor
- Attachments takes forever to open internally. Not so large files like 4-5MB of log pretty much wreck it
- upload is hilariously slow (again 300mbit up/down)
- loading in browser requires an explicit login to microsoft account to open, instead of a generated link that actually works (to add some salt, my company requires 2FA for the MS login)
- audio quality issues, 'intelligent' (echo blocking algorithm kicks in wherever it wants), call drops. Esp. bad in group calls
- 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product
- Video sharing has a massive lag on screen sharing both on visual and startup time
- Blurred background algorithm is a massive flicker and it really resents people with green (t-)shirts
- Calling the phone, instead the desktop while working on the desktop. (Half of my team uses phone version as it's less buggy)
- One more: if you don't login the phone app, it will remind you to login every 3hours - until it gets uninstalled....
- As soon as I start a Videocall, the rest of the Application is almost completely unusable
- The Application uses 500MB of RAM after it has been idling with one message received in the last hourPlus when running multiple instances the call goes to the first instance
I've never understood this either. What is the purpose of the Teams tab? Why doesn't it show up where all the other conversations happen? It doesn't make any sense to me.
that's not my experience, especially with a much worse connection. Maybe I live closer to the server?
> 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product
Interestingly, I like this feature: it's different from a group chat where all discussion are mixed together, each subject has its own thread, so it's easier to follow. And each thread can be ignored
Meanwhile, Zoom works daily without issue.
I'm not seeing anyone raise issues from within my organisations other than the engineering side of the business preferring slack.
Each and every tech worker I know loathes Teams with passion. On the upside it's like a common enemy so there's a small team building aspect to using it.
On the other hand, we're mostly using it for few page design doc, and have no idea what "final professional doc" or what "proper section numbers" are and why would anyone care.
But hard to point someone to the right place without decent numbering.
I also use both as I'm a partner on the engineering side of the business but also run a large consulting pod - I really don't care which one anyone uses. I don't personally see Slack being better 'enough' to justify the effort of switching for those that are already on teams.
It would be a dark day indeed if we'd have to stop spamming memes while at work
While the development effort, skill, and time, that goes into building something like Discord is certainly significant, I feel it's certainly something Microsoft could have built given their resources and technical aptitude. What you can't buy is the inspiration, ideas, and culture that make something like Discord happen.
If it follows the inspiration and ethos of tools like Github and VSCode, I'll be really happy. Given Microsoft's shift in attitude over the past few years, I really hope that's the case.
This always come first over user's convenience. But the user experience of this tech is abhorrent, so I could see that Microsoft would like to fortify Discord with security features and sell it as Teams 2.0. This actually could work if done right...
I disagree fervently. At my current job the department has strong pushes to use these features amongst the teams and if they weren't there we could explore real solutions.
As it stands we're doing things like task tracking and taking meeting notes in teams and it's a terrible experience. I can't help but wonder what happens to that corporate data when teams eventually gets the axe
It is widely used in this context and is highly profitable. The closest true competitor would be Google which lags far behind.
Nevertheless we know that the product is not that important. If all slack/zoom customers are migrated to Teams over night. The Teams product will keep most of its new users and will have a value for an acquisition, not because of its product, but because of its users.
So even though I disagree that MSFT could build the chat application itself, I agree with OP that what is bought is not linked to the actual product
I used to be absolutely in awe of the technology Skype had... got bought for $8+B back then and Microsoft managed to ruin the p2p part and stability/latency of the calls
I'd hard argue
I've been using various VoIPs / Voice apps over last 15 years almost everyday - ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, skype and I must say that Discord is unparalleled.
It fucking eats competition by it's quality, design and technology (API, BOTS). It offers also some kind of innovation because none of those most popular VoIPs / Voice apps combined Voice+Chat+Screen Streaming!
Things like Skype, MS Teams and probably similar CANNOT EVEN IMPLEMENT BASIC FEATURE LIKE PUSH 2 TALK THAT VENTRILO (or software that's aware of gaming users) HAD LIKE 15 OR MORE YEARS AGO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429842
So how is it that "No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own." yet nobody can some with something that's even cloes to Discord?
In MS Teams, Zoom ... you are probably paid to use that software. So it unforunateley is made to be noob compatible.
As soon as it gets Microsoft all over it we'll all move on to the next Discord
You are expected (maybe it's a "gamer" thing) to setup properly. No echo, no loopback, no shitty microphone. Which in turn makes using audio communication a joy to use. MS Teams on the other hand is a pure shitshow because of all the people who can't setup their stuff.
You can adjust other people's volume on your end and mute people. That's something a lot of these pay for voice apps lack and it really sucks.
1. Making it actually secure. 2. How does a user logging in to multiple locations share the key. 3. Full text search.
It would be hard for discord to do 1 and make everything e2ee. But the casual nature of discord users makes 2 and 3 a deal breaker.
But searching is hard to do with encrypted text.
You can search on the client with the decrypted text.
I'm frequently on a mumble server that can have 1000 people on it at the same time. A channel hierarchy is vital to global broadcasts from command, allowing foot soldiers to shout important information to command, allowing platoon leaders to communicate to their subordinates, allowing squad leaders to communicate to just their subordinates, and allowing the foot soldiers to chit chat to just their squads.
Discord is fine for playing video games with friends, but its voip is a nightmare for actually organized groups who are voip power users.
Maybe it's because I mostly use free Discord servers, but the sound quality is much worse and, more crucially, Discord is apparently completely unable to automatically filter out any system sounds that get picked up by my microphone. My headset is really not the best, but in many years of TeamSpeak use I never once had a problem with my sounds playing back to other users, even on default settings.
In Discord, if I use automatic voice activation levels, other users can hear practically my entire system sound and I have to crank the activation threshold up so high that apparently sometimes my voice will cut off. Even then, particularly loud sounds on my headset still get picked up by Discord.
It's really been a subpar experience.
Competitors are plentiful. Remember Digg had the largest user base among news aggregators? People moves when there is a better service available... or more like existing service is getting worse.
I know a person who keeps an entire virtualbox guest virtual machine that only has access to the internet through a VPN service, for the purpose of logging into Facebook in a browser interface. For the unavoidable purpose of keeping in touch with non technical family members who refuse to use anything else.
If Microsoft was capable of building equivalent technology on their own they had plenty of opportunity to do so.
Maybe in Microsoft's eyes they are paying for the users, but from another perspective the users are only using Discord and not Skype, MSN, Teams, etc, because Microsoft has not built/maintained something as good, and maybe isn't capable of doing so.
That is why we need more GDPR, more laws giving you right to see all the data they've gather on you, along with how they connect it to other data they have on you too.
This way people have a chance to educate themselves on all the things they gave up in order to have better emoji (as one friend suggested that the emojis was what Signal lacks awhile back).
Regardless of the strength or weakness of the product MS' emphasis will to harvest and aggregate data, and then profit from that.
There are tons of pateron pron creators running discords for their patrons.
American attitudes towards pornography really irk me. It's just as much free speech as any other speech.
First, it's not just Americans. Second, it's not free speech and it never was. People who came up with free speech supported obscenity laws. The main purpose of free speech is to ensure that you can criticize the people in power.
I'm almost 100% sure that if you went back in time and showed them furry porn, you'd be thrown in prison. If you're lucky.
If we went back in the last century, they'd throw me in an asylum for being bipolar. Heck, I'd probably be forcibly sterilized due to the US being the first country to support and implement eugenics.
Violations of civil liberties in the US have always existed to great extremes.
This is not true. It gives children a false impression of what sex is like in reality. I don't need a scientific paper to tell me that children looking at this stuff is bad.
The rise in the number of incelibates around the world is dangerous and it must be due to the wide availability of pron. Just take a look at what's happening in Japan.
Parents who don't want their children viewing this kind of thing can't block all the 18+ discord servers. (Although I personally don't think kids should be using Discord given the amount of grooming that goes on).
Further it’s the parents job to supervise their children and not the corporation. In addition one would think that your little 10 year old shouldn’t be playing GTA 5 on discord in the first place and that is more disturbing than seeing a naked boob.
American’s attitude towards sexuality and nudity is quite conservative if you ask me.
https://archive.is/PfJd9#selection-429.17-429.66
We've taught children myths, legends and now cartoons and comic book heroes for centuries, that is fine. What isn't fine is exposing them to pornography at such young age. When you're addicted to pornography you progressively seek more and more hardcore stuff, as anything milder doesn't do the trick anymore. If you want a population full of sex offenders, then go ahead.
If anything, the accessibility of pornography is reducing violence.
So does every other part of American culture. I'm throughly unmoved that producing adult material in an artistic sense is harmful to society. (None of the communities I'm in allow photo or videos. Or minors. We ban them when we find them.) Such things have always existed and have always been a part of human culture, despite various moral panics.
The assumption that incelibatity is due to pornography is unproven. The Japanese birth rate started dropping in the 1950s, well before this could be a factor.
Right now, one of the communities I'm in is split between Telegram and Discord. We had a Slack server for many, many years and no one would use it, no matter how hard we pushed. Moving Slack to Discord was a roaring success. We still have more people on Telegram despite moving all official activities to Discord.
MS is actually one of the few companies that could try.
Most companies are unable to innovate even with a clean spec in front of them.
With the 'real time' aspect of Discord, which makes it much harder than MSTeams/Slack .... it's that much riskier.
Look at how s**t Skype is.
So the question then becomes one of risk on the product side.
But the brand and userbase is the valuable thing at the end, 'Mixer' was never able to catch up to Twitch despite having a decent product and XBox lockin.
There's also the part where Discord is very very similar in nature to Skype, as a product, and not similar at all to PowerPoint.
Discord is currently at the top of its game (more like PowerPoint was), whereas Skype was suffering from mismanagement under eBay. Microsoft was supposedly hands off on Skype in the first few years post-acquisition and most of the mistakes that killed Skype were some combination of projects already started under eBay management or still all planned "inside the house" at Skype. (Microsoft in 1987 was said to be hands off with PowerPoint for the first few years following acquisition so as not to interfere with the creative efforts already in progress. Microsoft in 2021 is supposedly still remaining pretty hands off in GitHub management, other than replacing the outgoing CEO.) Microsoft's MO seems to be to give acquisitions enough rope to either succeed or hang themselves, and Skype sounds like they took that second option.
I'm just noting that at least from the outside, the Skype case looks much more relevant to this situation than the PowerPoint one.
Surprisingly, they didn’t. I am using Microsoft Teams for work daily, and that is the buggiest and the most poorly designed application I have ever used, not to mention their awful macOS integration or how they synchronise notification statuses between devices.
I read somewhere that the Teams concept came out of a hackathon where someone integrated skype with sharepoint. It still feels like it is a proof-of-concept rather than a production ready application.
People are not going to move away from Discored 'because Microsoft' - however, they will move away if MS screws it up.
Discord Meet Now is now available in Windows 10 taskbar so you can meet with a simple click. No sign ups. No downloads required.
Would you like to try Discord in the new Microsoft Edge, "the browser recommended by Microsoft"?
Microsoft branding is such a clusterfuck.
- Visual Studio (the real deal), Visual Studio for Mac (MonoDevelop), Visual Studio Code (Atom clone)
- OneNote (the original, part of Office), OneNote for Windows 10 (nerfed UWP rewrite)
- Skype, Skype for Business (Lync)
My issue is that the same name is slapped onto different products that have significant user-visible differences and lack compatibility with one another. That's why I'm not including Outlook, because every product that is called "Outlook" does at least talk to Exchange and doesn't create its own island.
For Microsoft, however, it holds incredible strategic importance to their Xbox division. If suddenly the #1 gaming voice and text chat on PC is fully cross-compatible with Xbox and Xbox services it puts Sony at a huge ecosystem disadvantage. When added to the context of Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda and their shift in strategy to Xbox as a service it makes perfect sense.
If they treat it like GitHub and let it be it's own thing then maybe I'll stick around. I doubt they're going to treat it like that though because they don't treat gamers like they do devs.
Maybe now's a good time for somebody to start building an alternative.
I think there is also going to be higher public expectations of moderating and monitoring of what is discussed on Discord if Microsoft owns them. That may not be a headache that Microsoft even wants to deal with.
Mojang recently announced that all mojang.com accounts would be migrated to Microsoft accounts. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/mojang-account-move
Continuing to silo it into the gaming niche when Slack was just bought for 3 times as much makes no sense.
Feature-wise they're 90% interchangeable.
Microsoft can slap a white theme on Discord and rename it to something stupid like "Agile Teams" and have a ready-made Slack alternative.
Server admins control users on slack on the other hand. Your server admin can deactivate your entire account, DMs are tied to a server and your server admin can read them. It's a business tool, the expectation is employers have access to your business communications. The same on discord would be a massive privacy violation. But now as a business, how do you ensure that users aren't sharing passwords in chat, that your departed employee doesnt have a ton of company secrets in their dms etc
Their UX and APIs are incredibly different and their server management and moderation tools aren't even comparable between them.
The 90% interchangeable is only in feature checkboxes for the client application.
You cannot leave a channel in Discord, and by default it will notify you of every message sent in every channel on the server. The best you can do is mute a channel and select 'Hide muted channels'.
Discord has far superior voice comms - in both quality and features (Voice Channels are great), and then there's the whole "roles" system.
In my experience in places where Slack was settled on as a corporate messaging solution the three questions asked (in order of importance) were
* "Does it support custom animated emoji"?
* "Does it have website and document previews"?
* "Can I send my notifications to it"?
I have a small server, and I can't see the point of paying for Nitro just to have animated custom emojis. Not worth the $10/month to me.
If you get value from Discord, would be sad to see it go out of business, and have steady income, consider subscribing at that tier.
$5 feels right to me for cross-server emoji, control over your user hash, and the animated avatar. I never really bought into the server boost thing, myself.
It may be just me, but the Login experience is an essential one for me.
The current one I go through for Office 365 is like this:
- type in email, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- type in password, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- 2FA, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- click "next" - redirect, blank screen
- redirect, blank screen
- redirect, blank screen
- redirect, blank screenPerhaps the most contributing factor that kicked off the chains of event that resulted in the mess of that chain of the event is that sometimes the “domain” part of RADIUS or other authentication servers(called “realms”) don’t resolve, because they aren’t FQDN, in the same way com.companyname.myapp1 never is. On top of that, you would want to be able to log in with non-matching realms in ID, such as ballmer1@microsoft.com on contoso.com, so it’s always just a long String with at signs and dots with no discoverability anyway.
It's however still annoying and could use a better design.
Maybe they’ll take some performance and UX cues and add them to Teams (but I’m saying this about the people who decided to make a greenfield chat/collaboration tool and make the file storage backend SharePoint, so, I suppose I’ll just cry)
Discord worked so well for everyone on different platforms and Teams has got so many problems.
Slack is much much better in that regard (though not perfect).
Matrix is comparatively lacking in features, tends to be somewhat slow, and is not a platform that any kid can sign up on for free and be chatting on any device within minutes.
I hope things will improve with Matrix, but for now I also hope that MS doesn't totally fuck up Discord.
Also slightly terrifying are the privacy implications. I never expected privacy with Discord, but now that MS is involved I expect that every interaction with the interface will be tracked, analyzed, and used to target ads at me. And is waiting to be exfiltrated in a data leak.
The federated login thing is really not something that web services should be doing, it should be provided by the browser or some public system.
I currently use mattermost as discord backup/replacement
All these platforms are only "better" than IRC because they're giving investor money away to kids.
By the time the VC money is gone, we'll all be back on IRC. And all the effort spent on integrations with platforms that used predatory pricing to destroy competition, could instead have been spent on open protocols.
The problem with Matrix right now is that it's too difficult to self-host and Matrix-the-organization doesn't have the resources to offer seamless, Discord-like performance on their default/official instance.
Matrix is an open protocol; it doesn't need a company behind it to continue existing, unlike Discord.
If you mean Element (formerly New Vector), are they? I'd believe that they're not raking in the dough or anything, but they've gotten some good government contracts in the past few years so I'd assume they have some money.
One problem with Element is that there's no "individual $5/mo" plan or a "you and your buddies pool your pocket change every month to keep a server up" plan. And the free hosts all have bad performance which leads to a bad experience.
The minimum plan is $20/mo for 10 users. That's a bit steep for a group of kids to pool their money for, compared to old-school Teamspeak hosting.
And I don't know of any company that I can pay for personal Matrix hosting, or any company that offers a Discord Nitro equivalent, where I can pay a few bucks a month and get this or that extra perk. Where is the Fastmail of Matrix?
Also, the UX of Element flat-out sucks. It's like those "we have X at home" memes.
I'm not sure where you got that number, as the minimum enterprise plan is Nickel, which is $10 a month. They also have Element Home[0] now, which is $10 a month for 5 users, plus custom domain.element.io server. Costs $2 a month for additional users, and I believe they're adding more options.
> And I don't know of any company that I can pay for personal Matrix hosting
First google result leads you to matrix.org/hosting which lists Ungleich.ch as a non-Element option. I've seen at least one other place also offering it, but admittedly I do not remember their name and that's still a small number.
> the UX of Element flat-out sucks
Eh, to each their own. I don't mind it too much (the Android app is great for me) and it's getting better over time.
Still, I think the Element desktop client is really lacking compared to Discord and I haven't been able to get any of the alternative ones working smoothly.
I've talked with a few of your devs at the chaos congress in leipzig, and as Quasseldroid dev and contributor to IRCv3 I know the issues too well.
The constant new features, more performance, more storage, etc as Discord offers them is just not possible in a sustainable way. Especially group video calls in massive communities of non-paying users (which is common on Discord) is just almost impossible to do in a profitable way.
That said, you've had the most success in open communication so far, and I sincerely wish you good luck with it in the future :)
I'm curious, what features exactly you have in mind? The basic text chat feature is here, in both public and private form (tho, the concept of rooms for private messages is kinda weird) so is audio and video but I haven't tried that yet.
Not to mention the default Matrix experience is somewhat slow and clunky. The client ecosystem just isn't great yet, and there's no free-as-in-beer homeserver hosting that also has good performance. Broke teenagers who want to talk about Javascript, anime, and keyboards aren't going to pay for or self-host a homeserver.
I really hope Discord won't just be sucked into Teams or turned into an Xbox thing.
I also fear that MS Discord might destroy any remote chance of a Discord app on PS5 or Switch.
While I'm hopeful that they turned a new leaf... I don't think they've held GH as long as they did Skype before they broke that..
That's exactly what they'll be doing. 'Xbox' is now MSs umbrella term for all their gaming stuff, regardless of platform.
Consider one of my favorite "stories in two headlines", and extrapolate :)
- NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution (2009) https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...
- Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly? (2011) https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
Also, kind of modern IRC.
It’s very much a fit for their portfolio, and it’s a great time to sell for them. Nitro can’t do that much in sales, but certainly Microsoft will find a way to make money with it.
I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years).
In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained.
Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.
lol wut
Plus full screen isn't. I have to ask people to zoom in when they screen share.
They mess with the Windows audio driver somehow, so even though I have an audio interface that works with Windows for Ableton and Zoom browser calls, Teams will not permit it to be used in calls. It will start the call and then every time you speak say “This microphone isn’t compatible with Teams”, so it is detecting sound and choosing not to pass it. There’s no reason for the application to do anything other than refer to the default audio device but for some reason it doesn’t do that.
Then there’s the painful markup capabilities when messaging. Oh if I paste in an IP address or something and then I want to style it as code, the backticks are ineffective since and pasted text somehow carries its own styling which apparently cannot be overridden. So the backticks just show up as literals.
Pasting large console output generally sucks as well. Out teams tends to switch over to Slack to paste big text dumps.
I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case.
I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).
A series of headlines:
2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1]
2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2]
2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3]
2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4]
1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/
2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/
4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-dataAnd I agree-Microsoft Teams is solid, but could use a faster and better designed user interface. The video chat feature is also sub standard compared to Zoom, but it largely hits the good enough threshold.
Teams is a 7 star resort with free beer and wine, when compared to google chat.
https://media.tenor.com/images/43009a72264654dcca101de9bc5cb...
I guess clueless company is clueless.
Tech M&A (and particularly the list of examples you pick) is often driven by the desire to acquire talent, technology or capabilities that you don't already have, expanding the scope of the company. If you can integrate the acquired asset with your existing offerings, the theory goes, you will be able to create something greater than the sum of the parts.
The system is working. but only really for the biggest.
I have had invitations to meetings that I can click on and that don't trigger the Teams app. The "Join meeting" button doesn't show up in Firefox, and even in Chrome, I get sucked into a redirect hell.
I even have meetings created without the meeting invitation link - despite the meeting having been created within Teams itself. I have resorted to inviting people to Google meets just to get stuff clarified.
But it's still better than Azure DevOps.
This was the reason the last place I worked switched to Zoom, since if you invited someone outside the org it just popped up a box asking them for a name.
From what I see over my spawn’s shoulders, Discord is substantially better than Slack. Hope they don’t kill Discord with enterpriseyness and keep it more on the gamer side.
Discord doesn't. Either it has to start monetising so it doesn't lose money (which it could do regardless of Microsoft so the acquisition doesn't add much value) or Microsoft justifies the acquisition by integrating it with it's other services (probably gaming) and taking advantage of the user base.
So it doesn't feel like the same can apply.
For example, I got hacked on Skype. Already I’m upset because it wasn’t my fault. However, I couldn’t delete the malicious link it messaged to all of my friends because reasons. Instead, I had to contact each individually to tell them not to click the link.
It’s a lot of stuff like that where Skype actively worked against its user base on each new release.
We use it at work, and 95% of users have issues with it.
I have to open, close, then open again the macos client every single day when I start it because my keyboard shortcut doesn't work otherwise.
I don't even mind the horrible UI/UX if it actually worked as expected.
Don't missundertand me, on a technical level Mumble is impressive and can do voice channels with thousands of participants, but on the clientside its just a mess.
It would be great if someone could make a modern Mumble client.
But the audio setup and tweaking was a nightmare. It was the biggest problem for every participant to tune and tweak their levels in a way that would work good, it was very, very frustrating.
The chat was also super barebones and of course no way to stream video.
Also the account you use for Discord is now the same one as the one with all your Azure stuff on it.
Yayy. Please Microsoft, ruin more social apps.
I'm sorry but this is the most absurd thing I've read in a while.
I'd hide a 20 year old password in shame haha, no matter how many characters it has
For MS, the obvious integration point is Xbox Game Pass, but Discord has been busy pushing gamers off their platform for the past year in favor of broader communities. It'll be interesting to see if they reverse course here, or if MS will position Discord as a free community version of Teams.
If you're looking for a better alternative, check out Guilded (YCS17) - https://www.guilded.gg
I've heard users say Guilded makes Discord look like Skype, but didn't realize how accurate that would become.
Disclaimer: I work at Guilded, but views are my own, etc
Why should I drop discord? Why should I create an account? Why should I download the app and not test in browser?
Even at the bottom: > Ready to try Guilded? > It's easy and free.
If there is a try, there is a catch. (maybe not but on the web it's implied nowadays)
This is not appealing at all.
I'm pretty sure the product is good but your "marketing" sounds completely off to me.
GitHub 7.5B. This one has terrible UI is 100x easier than Discord from UI and engineering point of view and will open for disruption from Discord like team in the future. It's very easy to imagine much better GitHub. With Discord you can think of many cool features to add but that's about it. It is a pleasure to use and has fantastic UI.
Skype - 8.5B 10 years ago for a steaming pile of shit software.
LinkedIn - 26b for trivial (in comparison to Discord) software full of dark patterns people don't really like to use.
It might just be Microsoft best acquisition. Let's hope they leave the original team in charge and let them continue to work on it. Discord is exceptional but there are still many cool things that can be added to it.
If anything, I hope they will treat it like GitHub and let them act mostly on their own, while actually improving the service.
Recent feature additions point to an Enterprise service they are setting up, so this may be a part of their new strategy while keeping the service accessible to free users despite their crazy operating costs.
The same will probably happen with Discord inside the Xbox ecosystem where they want to rival Steam with their Xbox game pass. Discord is the perfect community to do it with.
GitHub and LinkedIn are similarly thriving under Microsoft's wing, without a Twitch-like competitor in sight.
Instagram is more popular than ever since it was acquired by Facebook.
Discord will be fine. Microsoft has a lot of experience in the gaming space thanks to the Xbox ecosystem of services, and in the online chat room space, thanks to Teams.
In 2015 my Skype install used >3GB of RAM within minutes of launch. Searching for an uncommon term in chatlogs took hours. I've not been able to open it at all for years because it just hangs on boot.
I'm sure that for the average user none of those are concerns because they're talking with a few dozen users at most, but it had incomprehensibly terrible resource management, which is why all the power users jumped ship the second a viable alternative text chat became available.
The older I get (I'm 39), the less I understand this tech world. Huge valuations thrown out of thin air, indecent crazy ass salaries in the valley, sales of companies in the range of ten of billions. I don't see why I should read tech news anymore, apart from actual tech and not business related news.
I'll go back in my small OSS world where I feel "normal".
Xbox can see the direct relevance of the Discord users to its own. Integrating Discord into its ecosystem allows for synergies directly.
This is not a Teams/Skype/Lync replacement. The underlying technology might get used eventually, but that would be invisible to the userbases.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/04/source-microsoft-mulled-an...
Discord gives them something gamers know and love and could be paired with Xbox. Gives them a huge competitive edge against Sony, especially if they intend to build a cross-play centric platform between Windows and Xbox.
Discord is so much better than Teams. I hope they don't integrate it with the Microsoft stack.
It also feels like there's much less of an inclination of it failing like Skype has, with a high likelihood of joining the Xbox division while keeping the brand.
> I’ll be brutally honest, I am quite disappointed to discover that a service so popular that goes out of its encourage developers to integrate, embed, and build on top of their api, lacks any machine readable API specification for developers. Really, really disappointed
> Edit: This shouldn't be funny. How is the discord public api developers lack of respect for the developers who use their api funny? Standards based api specifications makes it easier for everyone to work with their API. Their API documentation isn’t translated, they have no machine readable API specification to make up for the lack of translated documentation for people who speak languages other than English.
> I am disappointed because this is at odds with their professed goals of being for everyone. Apparently they are only for everyone if you’re a user/customer. Developers better read English and have enough spare time to implement their api from scratch... And before someone mentions their community libraries, I’d argue that being required to use those to get anything practical done, because the official API isn’t specified well enough to just use directly with standard tools, is just a further disappointment.
Not to forget what a mess they have done with Skype UX.
Why must Microsoft buy everything.
Eg. the community for c# and Dapper is on it.
Good for the stock options holders, bad news for the rest of us.
The only thing teamspeak will achieve with this update is further alienate it's current userbase that stuck with them for various reasons, may that be the familiarity, the native client, the ability to selfhost or the availiable plugins for games like arma.
There's no solution to this, they're in a position where the only possible move is to lose.
Some of the work on Siskin is being sponsored by our other project, Snikket.
For all these projects one of the best things you can do right now is simply try them and give feedback, reporting any issues you encounter.
And I'm saying this as a person who was a daily IRC user 20 years ago.
why do they want to buy everything that works? they love destroying things?
microsoft buying Github is fine, since everything i do on github is open source, but chat applications are more private, and I would consider ditching discord if a company like microsoft buys discord, just like i ditched tumblr when yahoo bought it
It doesn’t matter how many successful businesses Microsoft buys up, if they don’t also start buying talent then they will destroy this one as well.
Also I think Planner is nice! :)