Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn.
One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.
One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.
Discord is literally the only x86 application that is still installed on my MacBook Pro M1.
It's not the simplest tool if all you want to do is PM a friend or two.
Find the UI very confusing. Perhaps I'm just old; but damn, my intuition in using discord's interface constantly lets me down.
Yes, they do.
https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless:
> Hey, so I know this is somewhat of a bummer, but I got banned because of ToS violation today. This seemed to be connected to creating a new PM channel via the /users/@me endpoint. As that's basically a confirmation for what we've believed would never be enforced, I decided to not work on the cordless project anymore. I'll be taking down cordless in package managers in hope that no new users will install it anymore without knowing the risks. I believe that if you manage to build it yourself, you've probably read the README and are aware of the risks. I'll keep the repository up, but might archive it at some point. And yes, you'll still be able to use existing binaries for as long as discord doesn't introduce any more breaking changes. However, be aware that the risk of getting a ban will only get higher with time!
https://github.com/atlx/discord-term:
> Disclaimer: So-called "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service and therefore discouraged. I am not responsible for any loss or restriction whatsoever caused by using self-bots or this software. That being said, there's no one stopping you from risking using an account, so go head!
It's again TOS and people have copped bans for using alternate clients.
"All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them."
The fact that you can:
(1) Find a server with a simple URL (no pw needed, no port or IP, etc.)
(2) Find your friends easily with a unique username and use chat as a fallback
(3) Create an audio room (that scales!) that has great audio quality (doesn't "drop" calls and
(4) Client that auto-updates to provide more and more features
All within a few minutes is a HUGE upgrade or Ventrilo.
This doesn't even mention the network effects, bot integration, gif/photo capability, etc. It's superior in almost every way possible.
Everyone I have spoken to loves discord and thinks it is one of the best programs they have. It's only a select group of hacker news style users who complain about minute details the average person does not care about.
I know it's hard for most people on this site to understand but the average user has very different priorities. Being able to create a "server" with the click of a button is worth more than every other issue listed in this thread. Having to pay or self host to create a group is a total non starter in 2021.
To say people were manipulated into using Discord is obviously not true, but it's also disingenuous to deny the massive amount of marketing Discord pushed back when it first started, not only in advertisement but just branding in general.
I'm not going to address the latter part of your comment because I don't understand what you're trying to say. I'm of the belief that I'm allowed to voice the legitimate issues I have with the software that impact not only myself and other developers but users in general.
You don't see how those valuable those improvements are but the average person does and that's why it has a massive market share.
Mumble is also self hosted, and nobody wants to host anything anymore when there's a free alternative that's good enough and hosted by someone else.
Skype is just universally terrible.
EDIT: since I'm part of that tiny minority exception that proves the rule: s/nobody wants/the vast majority do not want/
* Where the server is hosted / quality of server
* Poor client UI
User interface and end user fulfillment just aren't great generally for OSS. I think it would take a commons improvement project with either government grants (infrastructure) paying for results AND/OR a university spearheading the development project.
I despise discord quite a lot btw :)
Ventrillo and Teamspeak and Mumble were all good. But you had to assign someone in your friend-group to manage the server. This meant paying for hosting to do it "the right way", and in turn one friend either paid the hosting themselves or you had to figure out how to split the cost. Then if someone else joined the group you had to split it with them, etc.. Some people would self-host teamspeak or ventrillo at their houses so you could avoid those costs, but now you are reliant on an unreliable system of one friend hosting your voiceserver on their desktop computer. This means that router mishaps could send it offline, them turning off their computer could send it offline, or if the teamspeak/vent daemon wasn't running then your whole server is offline.
Skype solved a lot of those problems because it was always online, no one had to manage a server, and it was free. It sucked in just about every other way as a game chat option, but the benefits of no-server-management, always-available, and no-cost, made an objectively inferior product dominate the world of game chat.
Discord simply took the features of teamspeak/mumble/ventrillo and combined it with the service benefits that skype offered. No more server cost sharing and no more server administration. But you still got the benefits of actual game chat servers like voice lobbies (as opposed to initiating calls like skype).
I really don't think Marketing is what made Discord successful. This is truly an example of someone who solved a need. We needed a product like teamspeak/ventrillo/mumble combined with a service like skype. Discord was that creation. It truly solved a problem for gamers. Gamers were not looking to cling to skype, but they were all using it. Discord created a product that fit into the market perfectly and the masses ran to it because the need was so big, and Discord solved the problem that gamers needed. The ease of setup also helped. Sending a single share link that someone simply clicked was all it took to join a server and start talking. I think that ease of setup is also an incredibly under-rated strength of Discord. In fact I would venture to guess that most gamers joined their first Discord server by clicking a discord share link that was sent to them via Skype.
The ability to easily create servers, invite users to your server, and then make that server your homebase with its own channels and emojis, is pretty novel and perfectly fit into the gaming community which is basically a loosely connected graph of friend groups.
Even years later it's still the only platform I know of that combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place, all accessible from your 'server' as they call it.
It also has clients for many platforms, including a web client, all of which look and function the same.
Any alternative out there does one of those things decently well, but either completely lacks or is utterly awful at the other things.
and unlike skype (and probably teams too) supports PUSH 2 TALK which gaming oriented voice chats had close to 2 decades ago and is even more useful now, during WFH.
The big issue they have is building up a large enough network effect. I really can't see the discord communities I am a part of moving over there any time soon. Also, they were recently acquired by roblox, and nobody knows for sure what the new ownership will end up doing to the platform.
1) They send magic links. Pretty easy.
2) They make all known workspaces you've logged into before discoverable and allow for a one-click "add to desktop Slack" option, which makes dealing with the whole "different users" issue. And to the extent that I use different emails for different workspaces, Slack accommodates that and allows me to do so within the same desktop instance, so not really sure what the concern is there.
All the features afterwards are mostly just them throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
It's not bad per se but there's plenty of crap in there.
The shortcuts situation is absolutely dreadful for one, I don't understand how gamers can cope with it:
* there are all of 5 actions you can bind to custom shortcuts
* discord defines dozens of built-in shortcuts you can not rebind or disable, if any of those conflicts with something you need you better hope the OS has a way of overriding it
Large chatrooms as well, the moderation tools seem rather limited, maybe it's better for administrators but as a user all you can do is block someone and you still have to see that they're posting comments. It' incredibly frustrating.
Then the linking and jumping to old message works half the time, maybe, search is absolute dogshit, and I've rarely seen a less reliable @-autocompletion, half the time I have to find old messages of the person I'm trying to ping before discord remembers they exist and lets me actually @ them.
And I don’t think support actually exists. You just post into the black hole that are tte support forum thing.
I do have to open the official client whenever I do voice calls though, because there's currently an issue that can cause incoming audio to sound terrible. But for text chat, it's great.
I really prefer IRC.
I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical.
Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.
How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?
I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).
Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.
0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
Think: every content-creator or streamer.
But also: regular corporations that provide platform services that people build their own stuff on top of, such that people want to talk to each-other about the service rather than just talking to the corporation about the service. (The sort of thing you used to stand up a hosted forum for.)
> was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications" [1]
Of course that doesn't mean anything about the current model of Discord, but good to be aware of.
Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled.
0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game....
It's a bit of an odd model for paying for businesses, but works well in the gaming world where multiple people can essentially help pay for a server (if you want the extra toys)
Discord makes you the product. It's gratis in exchange for letting them spy on you. If you don't know why that's bad...
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-private-is-your-private-discord-...
if you have public IP or use stuff like hamachi (at least that's how we did it decade ago)
That seems easy to you. That would be easy for me too and most likely 90% of the people on HackerNews.
But the average person doesn't have a "random Linux box" in their house. Most people don't even know what Linux is. Most people would be overwhelmed just looking for the terminal emulator on their computer, before they even typed a command into it.
Most people don't want to manage an always-on linux box for a voice server. Most people don't want to manage port-forwarding on their firewall/router. Most people don't have static IPs at their house and wouldn't know how to setup dynamic dns to solve the problem. Most people don't even know what DNS is.
MOST PEOPLE just want a program they can launch when they want to talk to their friends. That is why Discord has been successful.
I'm not saying that's good. I am just saying that its the way the world is.
It's no wonder so many projects and FOSS tools fail to gain large userbases when it seems that most developers seem to be living on another planet entirely.
IRC is pretty similar, but much more fragmented and not really very user-friendly.
its not a technical challenge, its a moral challenge. it means doing what is good for the users even if they don't really know it
Discord's a pretty good product, and they've got the engineers and money to get better, but the only reason they won is because of timing. Same for Slack; there were identical products to Slack that tried for decades to gain traction, but they weren't free, because that business model didn't exist at the time.
The ux of Slack is essentially screen+irc implemented in JS with emotes. It enabled technical and non-technical people to use the same tool. The key to success is not technical, it's that they tailored the product to a specific group that would then lock itself in.
I didn't understand Discord's success, but comments here point that gamers couldn't find free group-voice apps at a critical time. Here again, they tailored the product to a group that would then voluntarily lock itself in.
Later, they sell the companies with valuations based on the captured user bases.
Another big thing that the current crop of winners has going for it is that cloud hosting allows applications to launch literally for free and scale quite a bit without paying much of anything in infrastructure costs. That also wasn't an option 10-20 years ago.
But it's important to remember that Discord is not that. Discord holds all your data, in luxurious detail, with no option to delete. They go as far as ignoring GDPR when people ask for their messages to be deleted. "Deleting" your account will not even anonymize your ID, it unsets your avatar, renames you, kicks you from all guilds and disables logging in. That's it. And if they ban you there is no place to move on to.
These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable.
Hmm
I didn't meant your server being DDoSd, but you being DDoS (but probably that's what you meant with Skype P2P example?)
Skype (at the time, no idea now) was a very shoddily written piece of software. It was trivial to query the IP of any online user, even if they were not on your contact list or appearing offline.
You had to use a VPN or carefully conceal your Skype ID, I did work with a somewhat popular live streamer back then (so a VPN wasn't feasible), and their ID was a very random string that was not to be shared under any circumstances.
In some games where people were often switching teams, you couldnt.
It really has helped the social factor of moving nearly everyone in the office to remote working. Every department that has adopted the "virtual office" Discord setup loves it over Slack and basically never uses Slack anymore. It's way less awkward to call people, it's easier to not incidentally disturb them when they're busy, during breaks/lunch you can go to the "breakroom" and hang out and chat with everyone else. And it was all very easy to setup and with the Discord server template stuff we can even clone it for each department with very minimal work (renaming channels to that departments' people).
Also paid discord is 100x cheaper than paid slack, for non-corporate entities. You can get top tier discord for like $100/m while slack price goes up with each user. Not to mention that discord allows users to easily assist in upgrading your server while slack doesn’t have that functionality at all.
Discord has great tools around moderation and membership tiers; it's designed for users you don't trust.
Slack is much more for a community where everyone knows each other (or at least trusts each other a bit, like you'd trust a coworker).
One of the best hammers I own is a screwdriver.
Discord School Hubs page: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/p37s7s/so_disco...
Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.
Discord uses proper markdown and supports syntax highlighting.
These are two things that make me think Discord is better specifically for engineers, aside from it just being generally way better.
It does, but only if you make your code block into its own post as a "text snippet." (I assume this is because Slack's internal markup doesn't allow regions to have parameterized metadata, but there is parameterized metadata at the chat-post-event level.)
You also get other benefits of doing this, e.g. being able to collapse the snippet, download it, etc. Code pasted into Slack should really always be pasted as a snippet. I just wish it auto-detected you were trying to do that and offered to make a snippet.
Not even remotely.
Discord supports:
* fenced code blocks (but not indentation)
* quoting, a single level (nested quotes don't work, properly replying to other comments is painful)
* inline decorations (italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, code)
* inline spoilers (an extension)
* disabling autolinking (an other extension)
It doesn't support: headings, paragraphs, lists (ordered or not), labelled links, tables, images, footnotes, images (you can only use the image upload feature which puts a single image below a comment).
It also has a limit to 2000 char (4000 with nitro), which can be rather low when posting code snippets.
No bulleted lists... that's disappointing.
Maybe worth upvoting:
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600400...
My experience of the community forums is it’s only worth if you like venting or seeing people vent, the folks in charge of discord really don’t care.
Once you're in an enterprise space, Slack's features become actually useful.
To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.
True, but to be fair: the next iteration of Teamspeak will be based on the Matrix protocol, which is quite a big iteration. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 .
If you had a mic that had issues in any way (buzzing, volume, balance), "The Wizard" and "AGC" were supposed to fix it for you. Do not fret little one, for you do not need nor want to manually fiddle with settings, The Wizard will make everything right [1]!
The pivotal feature that was the reason so many people I know stopped using it is the ability to change the volume of an individual person [2]. It has been a requested feature since the beginning of time, yet it took until 2016 to implement in dev branch and didn't actually make it into a release version until 2020! Too little, too late.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumb...