Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
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I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing AFAIK that can replicate this particular experience except for Teamspeak, which has other problems.
I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:
1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting
2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy
3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people
Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.
All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.
When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!
Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.
These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.
I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!
At first, students got to use what they were already use to, but when the pandemic got painful and everybody flooded to online, thing went crazy. Discord is freaking enormous in that area rn. Servers for High school classes, university cohorts (ie. CS'24), university programs (ie. Electrical Engineering), There is even a course I am taking at uni where we have an official server with the teaching team, profs, auth with uni credentials, and a freaking ad-hoc ticketing system.
It is bonkers how much systematization is done through these bots.
I'll be doing a livestream on AWS Twitch on Thursday discussing Sqwok.im if you're interested check it out.
On the Python discord for example, there is a system of help channels which get assigned to the first person talking in it and returned to the pool after 30min of inactivity or once the problem has been solved. A bot keeps a few channels in a "free" pool, marks some as "occupied", and moves the surplus to a "dormant" section for UX purposes. Newcomers often get confused and ask questions in already-occupied channels, etc.
Bots make this possible but it's never as good as the threading that exists in Slack or Zulip. I'm sure any sizeable organization (like a University) is running into this as well.
Surprisingly, Slack's sales seem unaware of Zulip from what I heard from some colleagues so I doubt Slack is going to steal Zulip's (much better) threading model any time soon.
like server admins viewing the IP addresses of other users in the server, if that counts
But Discord does have significant profit motive to collect information about you. In fact, their entire proprietary protocol, client, and restriction of clients is based around ensuring this.
i've been invited to random, huge discord servers to play just one game, and after the games over i usually leave the server unless i know everybody. i never have to worry about the server admin or one of his buddies deciding they didn't like me for whatever reason and DDOSing the shit out of me for weeks, forcing me to change my IP address because i didn't use a VPN.
that's just personal; it could even turn a profit if a professional gamer joined a server, several users recorded the IP address, bet against them in an upcoming game, then DDOS'd the shit out of them.
Trust is always important for these things, regardless of the platform. Discord didn't even have my email address for the four first four years I used it
Both of the solutions you have still disrupt the game, even if they do temporarily solve the issue.
Here's a convenient, albeit somewhat outdated pastebin explaining how https://pastebin.com/ViWmrsDJ
[1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/networking
I notice that you have a support Discord, maybe a Discord integration would be good.
It’s hands down the communication tool i use the most in my personal life
I'm really glad MS is not buying Discord after seeing what they did to Skype.
- No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...) is in progress
- No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi
- Even if you have Jitsi the experience is not the same. Discord's experience is like a chat room, except with audio and video. In Element it's more like a standard call
To be explicit, no group audio/video. I run my own Matrix server for my partner and I and it uses webRTC based audio out of the box for 1:1 calls which we use every day, and sometimes video. No Jitsi enabled in my config. (I only share this so other readers can gauge if Matrix can meet their needs.)
People just started using what they were used to, and now Discord is freaking emourms in that area. High school classes, university cohors (ie. CS'24), university program (ie. Electrical Engineering), specific sources...etc everybody around me is using discord.
Discord allows anyone to share the same username. It appends a nearly invisible hash to disambiguate, and you can even change it.
Discord does usernames right.
Seems like a pretty readily used vulnerability. I remember back in high school on AIM someone made a username very similar to mine and said some nasty things to a girl I was talking to - she told me to stop talking to her and I didn't figure out why until years later. I imagine the same exploit could be done more easily if you can use the same username and discord actively tries to hide the hash.
Maybe I'm just overly sensitive since impersonation has hurt me, though.
Furthermore, this is just the MXID, the Matrix ID. This is usually de-emphasized in the UI and only used to disambiguate and add users (as you say).
What is usually displayed to users are display names and these are allowed to have collisions, in which case they get disambiguated via MXIDs.
Other Discord features like servers aren’t there yet, but “usernames” doesn’t seem like a real deficiency.
Discord has both text and voice (and IIRC video) chat. Mumble is voice only, and the UX is... dated.
Secondly, I wish there was better support for E2E encryption, even just in direct messages. I wouldn't even mind it as a paid feature.
Sometimes it feels like technology from the past was so bad that, given no alternatives, it interferes with the thing you're wanting to do (Skype/Internet Explorer). Those products can easily be subsumed by a competitor that is a superior product (Discord/Chrome).
But now it feels that because the options for those niches have been completely filled by those services, everyone becomes beholden to them, and in many cases there are undesirable aspects of the services that are not mutually exclusive with them being the most competent product on the market (inability to use Discord 3rd-party clients, Chrome's user tracking, Plex still showing you advertisements after buying a yearly subscription).
It feels like those products became too polished and attractive to users, if there exists a good reason to convince them to use something else, and even if we want to move off them, the network effect inevitably draws some of the holdouts back in (Messenger as a compromise for not using Facebook, sites that are incompatible with non-Chrome browsers). These products now have millions of active users whose behavior can be controlled or manipulated on a whim, for better or worse, if the company decides one day to make changes.
Now I'm starting to get the impression that succeeding in being the best solution in a given market is not necessarily a universal good. So many people were loathing how terrible Skype was for the longest time, and so Discord was founded. Yet, while the experience of participating a chat community is so much easier than in the past, I can't help but thing that so many people are now beholden to a new technological dependency.
What I have to wonder is: if money was not a factor in driving developer decisions, would Discord have allowed third party clients to be used? Preventing automated spam is not a problem unique to Discord.
Can't guarantee it'll be usable without using some custom CSS though.
Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism.
Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming, though.
Things like TS and Vent is voice-chat-first and thus, you will only join _after_ you've made friends to voice chat with online in some other platform (like irc or a game). There's no TS community, since it's purely utilitarian, unlike discord.
Vent 4 release saw our v3 server die. It was then we realised that a "phone home" was part of the deal.
We now use Mumble.
https://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/21/video-man-sells-gt500-ra...
I guess there's no more of that.
I didn't make it back in time.
That being said, I would argue that any voice chat with more than 10, maybe 20, active people talking is going to be nearly unusable. Not due to audio quality.
It turns this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dM3HqNFox8) into this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znv6Cf4IKgE).
Maybe it’s the wow culture of having raid leaders and specific callouts, but it’s very much usable and enjoyable.
If you want to see how it usually plays out, just search twitch for anyone streaming a raid.
A new thing comes along without this problem and dominates the new playing field. For Teamspeak and Ventrilo the field changed in that it became possible to host the voice servers themselves, rather than the 'customers' hosting.
Comment from a 2019 support thread "I am pretty flabbergasted that people aren't making a bigger deal of this than they are. Discord actively monitors your executables, but the larger concern for people now seems to be its inaccuracy in identifying them as games. As if to say "make it better at identifying games" instead of "stop scanning my programs"."
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600307...
The API does not require authorization so you can view it in your browser: http://discord.com/api/v8/applications/detectable
With regards to Discord's invasion of privacy as a whole, I'm not sure if it's malice or incompetence.
I'm old-ish, so it was a bit hard to get to at first, but after some time with it, I'd replace everything with it if I could. (And this is coming from a big time free/open source guy! I'm not thrilled with how centralized it is, but I'll take it for now)
But the biggest benefit by far has been groupwork. As far as I see, pretty much all of the big synchronous players (Zoom, Collaborate, etc) and asynchronous (all the LMS's) work atrociously if you're dealing with anyone who isn't a toddler -- which is to say, they are all too centralized and top-down.
E.g. - In real-life groupwork, I would tell them with words to go to their rooms or to sit in groups, and they would take themselves there.
In most of these goofy systems, I am personally responsible to "physically" place people in rooms, even if they disconnect or whatever. It's ridiculous.
Now, I do all my group work in Discord. I make however many text and voice rooms, and tell them to go there. I don't even worry about the "roles" part, because, again, my students aren't toddlers.
Bonus, of course -- these sub rooms plus a main room, available at all hours, facilitates interaction between students as well as with me. Contrast to most of the LMS which are both clunky AND frequently have policies against non-school chatter (which, in the age of online teaching is asinine.)
I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.
Make it free up to 1000 concurrent users, then $x/MAU at plateaus /w reduced rates + $ for extras such as white labeling.
The current in-game Discord overlay is an end-user 'hack' by comparison. Games/applications are notorious for limited/locked-in communication systems and are non-trivial to implement internally. See Star Citizen's 'Spectrum' developed by Turbulent as an example of complex in-house solution.
Heck, Epic provides grants for this exact sort of development. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
If anyone from Discord is reading this feel free to contact me for bizdev/implementation advice :D
Discord has 14x more active users than Slack.
Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack.
The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.
Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it
Maybe Discord could monetize in game integration for its voice network, especially on console games.
Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.
Being asked to log into another Teams instance, for example, results in baffling issues; I had to switch to the web version and that only works sometimes.
Turn off a VPN? Be prepared to suddenly, without warning, have a 10-15 minute period where people are messaging you and you don't get any of them. (I am talking about Teams instances that do not depend on you being behind a VPN, more on THOSE after)
Video conferences are terrible. I keep getting invites without the Teams URL attached because of UI issues, and worse, there are situations where I can't even access the URL I am given.
Low quality Enterprise security teams often ruin Teams installs. For some customers I work with, I am not even able to upload an image to a group chat. (Not a meme mind you; screen shots). "Sure that's the price of a locked down / professional service" you may say, but for some obscene reason, I am able to use Giphy in these chats.
And many other miscellaneous issues (degraded experience on Firefox, authentication headaches w/ AD Azure, etc..)
As far as I am concerned, this is MSFT's fault since they sold a product that can be configured into complete uselessness for its purpose (sharing information).
(Disclaimer: I own MSFT stock and generally like their direction but the execution for this and Azure DevOps is seriously lacking)
I have since found a workaround which requires reinstallation per each launch, because the installer installs an older version that will soon be automatically updated to a newer version, and that older version can retry on the failure with an alternative login prompt that actually works. So Microsoft has at least two login prompts, only one of which is working for me but unsupported by some versions of Teams so that I can barely work around. Brilliant.
I really wished this deal could have been reached, but then again, competing products will do each other well.
Teams is basically Discord for business. It's as if the development team were big fans of Discord. It shows!
There's other minor problems like insane chat latency, but I can work with that. Voice and Video generally works fine.
The only three value propositions Teams has over Discord are:
* Support for threads - albeit again very inelegantly.
* The ability to embed web apps as tabs in a Teams page - this is my favourite feature
* Integration with Office 365
The most impressive thing of all is Discord seemingly worked out stable audio/video years ago. I've had numerous calls on Discord which were more stable than calls through Slack, Zoom and even Facebook Messenger. The obvious choice for Discord is a professional offering, seeing as their core market is growing up with the product and largely probably in its late 20's, early 30's. I can see why Microsoft would have been interested, calls via Teams are like pulling teeth. Forget the terrible UI, the call quality (for me at least) through Teams has been atrocious and surprising given Microsoft have the resources to invest in making this component at least comparable to other products around.
Discord really needs to address the lack of server-specific avatars, though. Why can I change my username per-server, but I am stuck using the same avatar image for every server? Now that I use Discord for a wide variety of uses, I have needed this ability for a while now. Many of us have been crying out for this for years now.
I ever run Teams on my Mac just fine. So I guess YMMV but it's been fine.
Discord hasn't grabbed me (but I can't play any video games without getting motion sickness so there's that).
Is this really the year of the linux desktop? But really, what a weird time to live in. Native (working) linux clients from Microsoft?
Mumble isnt easy to use but has great voice and terrible text, matrix and irc are both -- for most non techy people -- hard to use and esentially text only, jitsi is video conferencing, xmpp is mainly not about voice and suffers the same issues as matrix.
I really hate the state of things as I would love to contribute and join some oss communities but they only exist on matrix and I hate using it. Its one of those things i wish i had the know how to start building my self, but webrtc alone seems impenetrable for mumble/discord style audio.
And... some of it may be toxic to a company like Microsoft. The moment Discord needs to start censoring across platforms (not just blocking iOS access to certain content as they've needed to do to play in Apple's garden) is the moment it starts to feel unsafe for content creation. I'm not surprised they walked away.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. If anyone from Discord is reading this:
- not letting people opt-in to be prompted to set a username before entering a server and having a bot announce our membership, and
- not letting people set unique profile pictures for each server
creates situations where one could either leak a real-world identity to a server on which they desire anonymity, or leak a pseudonymous online identity to coworkers.
And this gets REALLY bad for people using Discord to explore their gender identity, where this could cause a profile picture or name that indicates identity to leak between spaces when that's not desired. I've met people who need to be incredibly careful to create multiple Discord accounts to avoid being outed, and Discord makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to do this, with its deep browser integrations that forward to the native app. It is no joke that Discord's UX choices could hurt people, here.
But it speaks to the strength of the platform that Discord is still an incredibly vibrant place for communities like gender-questioning communities that rely on pseudonymous identities. Because it puts natural conversations at people's fingertips. It was Clubhouse before Clubhouse, just divided into communities of like-minded people. In certain ways it's the superposition of Clubhouse and Slack. And the UX problems are solvable problems. I think Discord is really going places.
These suggestions wouldn't really help. Every Discord account has a permanent public user ID attached to it that stays the same regardless of if the username changes. Someone wishing to track an account across multiple servers is always going to be able to.
Using multiple accounts is the only real option, and I think that's what Discord should recommend to people. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to use multiple accounts simultaneously. (Desktop app + any number of browsers.)
I agree they could improve the multi-account UX. If you have only your browser tab open and not the desktop app, joining a server will start the desktop app as well, but it doesn't actually join the server in the desktop app, from my experience. So it's initially concerning, but I don't think unsafe. I'm not sure if other people have observed it joining a server with an unintended account, though.
Honestly I also would like to enter to this market but breaking the market share of discord will be very hard indeed.
A gaming clan no longer needs to maintain their own Teamspeak/Ventrilo server + their own website and forum. The convenience of having it all in one centralized program wins out over Discord's UX oddities, privacy concerns and more recent bloat. This ease of use also lowered the barrier to create a clan, so it captures a larger audience than its predecessors ever did. And yet it still provides powerful tools for moderation and user permissions, an API for chat bots, video streaming...
It’s not just glorified IRC. The bandwidth and storage costs are real.
In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir.
[1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang
[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
EDIT: added reference and clarified that I don't know if they still use Elixir.
Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
My guess would be pagerduty is the first?
I'd like to move my group to Matrix, but Element (fka Riot.im) is nowhere near as polished or user-friendly as Discord.
My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned.
edit:
I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
I used to prefer trello to what ms offers for project management, but then you’re leaking your data and documents outside of the ms system which weakens security. This didn’t used to be a problem because MS was equally as suspicious.
However, most companies no longer want their own in house IT solutions and will just take everything that ms offers, and hand all data to ms.
Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.
Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.
I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.
It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work:
> Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often.
A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth.
But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.
But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.
They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely.
You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
Slack, Teams etc. are B2B so end-users are forced to adopt it.
The UX of both reflects this.
[1] https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-di...
Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO?
After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers.
Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered)
--------
In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer.
Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.
Or, is discord more for private chat?
I’ve used it a few times for organizing online gaming. But, it wasn’t worth it to keep it installed.
Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.
There is a vast gulf even in terms of „just working“ between garbage like Microsoft Teams and something like Discord.
Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit.
Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever.
There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.
Microsoft can easily recreate the platform, they don't want the capability, they want the existing audience.
The truth is there is no room for a standalone service in an area as competitive as enterprise communication. Microsoft would be able to undercut them in price no matter what. Bundling is the only way forward, and hopefully Salesforce can put in the resources to keep it competitive.
Hit the nail on the head.
So whatever makes people use Teams, it's not Teams working well, that much is for sure.
But Office is the standard, so bundling it Microsoft won the enterprise by default.
I'm not saying it's bad by any means - in fact the search functionality is pretty sweet... but there is very little there that couldn't be out competed.
I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least.
Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had:
- No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience.
- No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better.
- Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack.
One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs.
Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.
Discord works well on Linux, Skype doesn't. None of the new Minecraft games work on Linux.
This is the best thing I have heard today.
[1] https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi...
What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world.
The Netflix analogy is not particularly apt here either, as where Netflix produces the content, here the content is user generated. So its about technological executions, platform agnosticism, and features sets. Valve's Steam app on iOS didnt even support iPhone X screen resolutions until a year and a half ago so I wouldnt hold my breath for them to compete well in this space at all. Maybe Epic's acquisition of houseparty could cause some competition for them? But I doubt it.
Do you mean that in a positive or negative way? Netflix is doing very well - it's the other, broadcasters-cum-streaming platforms that are struggling.
I can't believe anyone at GitHub is particularly thrilled about having a Microsoft technology that broken imposed on them.
Or are the real suckers the investors, and the corps are just doing these purchases in a performative capacity to keep razzle-dazzling them?
1: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
We don't want to pay. And we're upset when they vanish or change dramatically try to find a way to remain viable financially.
In general, I try not to fall in love with free products that seem too good to be true, because the party has to come to an end at some point.
They know it so well the new Xbox Wireless Headset essentially has a "Discord feature" though obviously not named or marketed directly as that. (It supports dual pairing with a bluetooth phone for "phone calls over game audio", but everyone I know got the message between lines that it supports Discord chat, and were talking about the headset precisely because of that feature.)
Microsoft would have bought Discord for the gaming community and pursued tight integration with the XBox ecosystem. Which could have boosted the platform, but probably not in a way that resulted in a lot of direct revenue.