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Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

>No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own.

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?

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It does miss an important feature.

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.

Mumble generally has better voice quality and it's more straightforward to maintain good server performance than it is with Discord with its relatively opaque and game-ish 'server boost' feature.

I would love something like this for wow raiding, sometimes I want to say something thats relevant only to my fellow class/role but the raid leader is saying something important. We ended up just having a teamspeak server running in parallel with discord for my class, which worked but is understandably not optimal.

I have a vastly different experience regarding quality in comparison to e.g. TeamSpeak.

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.

Teamspeak, Mumble, Discord have one advantage: They don't treat their users as idiots. You are expected to setup your microphone properly, no speakers, no adjusting your mic levels automatically. While there might be sane defaults, if you have a shitty microphone you will get less interaction.

In MS Teams, Zoom ... you are probably paid to use that software. So it unforunateley is made to be noob compatible.

I think you're lumping Discord in with the wrong crowd. Discord is insanely easy to use compared to the alternative, that's why nobody uses the alternatives anymore. I'd still prefer Mumble myself but I'd have nobody to speak to

As soon as it gets Microsoft all over it we'll all move on to the next Discord

The alternatives are just as easy to use as Discord. The audio part is still the same. What Discord makes better is the persistant chat with various "servers", which the others don't have.

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.

Completely agree. Turned my back on Zoom for casual video chat and use Discord instead.

I'd argue Discord also handles improper setups well though.

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.

Yes, this also works in Mumble/TS3.

The only Thing I don't like about discord is that it's not e2ee, so I guess with regards to talking in huge groups or video chatting it has a performance advantage in that sense.

Is end-to-end encryption in Discord even feasable? Discord is massively multipler text, audio, and video chat - end to end encrypting that is very hard, no?

Text obviously, because if you want a history you need to store that on the server.

You can store an encrypted history on the server.

But searching is hard to do with encrypted text.

You could, but then a new user can't read the history. But there might be ways around that, ie. automatic resending of the history by a participant.

You can search on the client with the decrypted text.

It could be. The simple approach is generating a key when the server/channel starts and sharing that between clients. Of course there are downsides to this, but you can make improvements to this system to get aspects that you want (such as rotating the key when someone leaves and giving all keys to new members).

There is only three hard parts of e2ee.

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.

"only".

Well, the last time I tried, Discord was the worst. It requires to install stupid software which is essentially embedded web browser to fully working.

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.

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