Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else
ft.com
ft.com
Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.
It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.
TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.
You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.
Be THE product for half a decade, make your money, close up, next venture.
Maybe that's why users should focus on protocols and not on Platforms.
Like Matrix.org
Protocols have a massive problem with updating their feature sets and security features.
If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.
Skills don't matter if your business case has disappeared.
Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)
They had Orkut, they could have used it to compete with Facebook instead of creating a new service. Its the same thing with Googles multiple chat apps.
And for what? Discord stages are an absolute ghost town. The top ones are all "Talent shows" in bait servers. I don't mind changing UX as much as most people on HN, but changing UX to chase a fad that has already died out really grinds my gears.
Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content
Now, you might think that this still aligns shareholder incentives with the long-term interests of the company, that if the shareholders care about profits over the long term then they should also care about the health of the business rather than just about how much money they are making now. The problem is that the most efficient way for investors to make money (per unit time) is not to care about the long term and instead to "pump and dump" companies by directing them towards (usually destructive) activities that increase profits in the short term, then selling the shares before the value inevitably crashes.
Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time. As such, the system is setup to give power to those who are most destructive to real value creation. Ergo: broken.
What alternatives are there?
> Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time.
The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers.
> The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
The most profitable companies yes, but not necessarily the ones making the most money for their investors. Part of this pattern is that the companies typically end up dying a slow and painful death, meaning that they never get to be as big as the largest companies. But money in investing is made on change in value/profits, not on profits themselves.
I guess I would say that the pattern I have described doesn't describe the entire economy. There is more traditional long-term investing going on too. But it's there. And it's harmful.
Sure, that is an interesting option. But what about Discord, since it is not public? Does anyone that starts a business have to give half of the decision making power to workers from day 1?
I cannot parse the concept you are trying to explain in your second paragraph.
It could be mandated by law, indeed. Or the shareholding model could be outright removed because it's poison for society as a whole, as the history of workers/consumers coops shows.
If you really want to align the interests of the company with those of the users, you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product.
Usually you will find that they are, because workers are also users and vice-versa.
> support working hours only from nine to five on business days, higher pensions and fewer new hires, more job security
I guess you're from the US? "Higher pensions" should have nothing to do with a company: that's a public policy matter and pensions can be mutualized across employers as is the case in France (despite past & present governments doing their best to dismantle that public service).
The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now (several centuries in some industries/places), and even when it was not (see Haymarket affair) it was considered a pretty weak/useless demand, more symbolic than anything. Thinkers of the time advocated that given the established technological progress at the time, it should be possible for everyone to work just a few weeks every year and still enjoy modern comfort. Some more modern thinkers believe the same applies today, considering how many resources/efforts are wasted annually.
Moreover, "fewer new hires" is not necessarily correlated to "more job security". It may be true on the scale of a single company, but on the scale of a whole society, a public policy of everyone finding opportunity for their contributions to humanity (that rarely yet sometimes overlaps with what's called a "job") leads to better "job security" for everyone and anyone.
If a government really wanted to tackle unemployment, there's many areas of life that need considerably more workers and resources, including education & health which are pillars of a healthy (pun intended) society. But capitalist policy is to generate misery in order to pit everyone against everyone else so a tiny minority can profit... and in this regard, capitalism works excellently.
> you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product
That's how many non-profit organizations operate. You have to be a member (free or < 20€/year) to benefit from services provided by the association.
I am sure that the owners and managers of Discord are also Discord users themselves, so I don't see any difference here.
> The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now An 8-hour workday does not rule out employees working shifts so that customers don't have to take a day off to interact with the company.
My point is that, contrary to OP's assumption, the interests of workers and customers are often at odds with each other. Another example would be when more employees are needed to meet increased demand, but the employees do not want their votes and wages to be diluted by the new hires.
I've never heard any such stories from an actual workers coop. I'm not saying it can't exist from a theoretical perspective, but i don't think workers/users interests are "often at odds" since i can't think of a single real-life example.
You are free to found a company with such a board structure. You are also free to either bootstrap it or crowdsource the necessary capital for it.
Just spitballing, but an independent auditor that puts a dollar value on the expected long term gains/losses to a company's brand portfolio based on recent management decisions could help reduce certain types of short-term "cashing in" behaviour.
>The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Maybe not the largest companies, but he's basically described the default behaviour of private equity firms.
I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters: security in tech, safety in buildings/planes, low durability of products and planned obsolescence, impeding ecological disaster and the next massive extinction of species...
As a species, we have enough production capacity to make sure everyone is well-off, yet a tiny minority grabs resources and ensures most of it is wasted and thrown away (see food/housing supply vs needs). Capitalism is the name of the system which holds such properties as virtuous, and it has proved to be a failed model in many regards over the centuries.
Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth.
It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not want to do the work of hosting it (e.g. teamspeak/ventrilo/matrix).
So what I am wondering is where the obligation for someone else to host these online services comes in, and why they “should” not have the goal of increasing their wealth in exchange for doing the work of hosting and servi the online services.
Have society really taken on learned helplessness on a mass scale? In a sense that everyone has a defeatist attitude of "we can't think of any system better than current capitalism so why change?"
Or is it more probable that there are some vested interest in keeping the status quo?
- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.
- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.
- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.
None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.
That, but capitalism.
Well first, we usually don't hear about alternative models because they're mostly erased from dominant narratives (or defaced to the point they make no sense). Famous examples include witch hunting during the renaissance and the abolition of community life (in favor of State/Church control), the Cronstadt and Ukrainian revolts in the USSR... see also "Popular history" as a research field.
Now, whether an alternative model is possible is up to debate. You use "on a large scale" as a premise, so primitivist/individualist approaches will not cut it (although they're valid ways of life for smaller communities). Have you considered the anarcho-syndicalist model? It has strong roots/history in Spain (especially in the colonized region of Catalonia) and was the heart of the popular (armed) uprising against Franco's fascist coup d'État. That is a well-documented historical experience of a large-scale agrarian/industrial (mixed) society operating on a large scale without a capitalist understanding of "profit" involved. Although to be fair it did not last long, as the revolution was eaten from within by Stalin's authoritarian clique (who had smaller numbers but considerably more weapons and resources imported from USSR, and started massacring anyone who disagreed).
We'll probably find common ground in that everyone needs to be valued for their contributions to society, which could be called "profit" in some variants of that concept. However, i would argue that not all activities need to be "profited" from (eg. arts), and that money and private property (in their capitalist interpretations, at the very least) are very bad implementations of that concept, in which a lot of people who are very useful to society are not being remunerated accordingly, while a bunch of parasite who contribute very little to society earn all the benefits.
The shareholder/investor model incentivizes "perception management" over real results.
It’s basically a picture perfect example of the market working.
Yet most times across all fields, better technical approaches are shutdown due to misaligned economic incentives. So while this is an example of the market working, its fame is due to going against the trend of profitable crappy engineering and planned obsolescence that plague industries.
EDIT: We could also argue that accounting for "privacy" and "autonomy", Discord is not a good solution to the group communications problem and therefore the market is not working.
The entire app was full of crap like this - it's not funny or quirky, it's practically baby talk.
Not sure how well that would localize in other languages though. Thanks for the examples!
Not well at all. Making it even more cringe worthy
Did that define your experience, or was you experience defined by what you did inside of discord after the loading screen had passed?
Why is all this bullshit important to people? Dumb gifs, emoticons everywhere, wannabe cute gamey jokes.
If you get invited to a whine tasting party with a bunch of boring stuck up people, but there is a kids-ball-pool thingie in the entrance, is the party awesome?
For the same reason some people will prefer Chuck-E-Cheese vs. a more conventional family restaurant with broader appeal.
too late
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...
I recall Slack's web app working on my tablet, but I think they may have disabled that now.
If they succeed, they will become Slack 2. If they don't, they will sink their ship.
Why would gamers stop using it?
IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.
Unfortunately, the one thing that it does well (chat, and nothing else) is supported by a dozen things that it does terribly, and support for them has been hacked on top of the chat features in most places.
Bouncers, persistency, rich media (youtube/twitter/image embeds come to mind), mobile accessibility, presence, the ease of channel ownership... these are all things that IRC lacks. Users don't want to switch from their chat app to their imaging sharing app to send a friend a picture inline. IRC works great where people are willing to put in the work to make it great for themselves individually, but the people Discord appeals to aren't really like that.
This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.
Every time. FTFY.
I like humor. Humor that, you know, is funny.
To see the nyan cat moving around your screen, you got to throttle the bandwidth: https://demo.filestash.app/
Did you quote them your business rates?
It's one thing if a joke is actually harmful, of course. But, beyond that, I'd say that denigrating someone else's way of being whimsical is a specific subspecies of taking yourself too seriously.
He responded to claim that if someone does not like those messages, then he "take himself too seriously". The response simple explained that author find those jokes unfunny.
As you said, humor varies from culture to culture, generation to generation, family to family, and person to person. That implies that not liking some kind of humor is completely valid sentiment.
I generally think that this advice is over-simplistic, but this tends to be a situation where the, "If you can't say anything nice, just don't say anything," principle really is a good rule of thumb.
It's perhaps even worse if you try to make your criticism amusing. Scalzi has a good explanation of why: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...
Because what you want here is one sided "one side get to insult the other, but other is expected to not even express their opinion."
Perfectly harmless, and adds a bit of charm to the app.
I personally found them to be like "wow, look how hip we are young children".
I'd also add festival themed icons too. The whole VSCode trolling a few years back might have been overblown but the end result was for the better imo. I find it distracting having seasonal icons and the fewer distractions I can find in my productivity tools the better.
Like Discord Businesses. Discord B8s.
You're trying to pull a YouTube Red here?
B8s = Business
...except then it would be B6s...unless the parent meant "Discord Businesses"?
Now I don't even know.
yeet that shit outta here
By coincidence, I recently stumbled upon this 'Discord for Business' support post from 2018 (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600302...) that generated almost 200 upvotes and 100 comments. I
The post starts as follows:
> My company is presently evaluating alternatives to Slack internally. Turns out, Discord is one of the most feature rich alternatives, with a relatively smooth UI and voice/video/screenshare capability. I couldn't even get half of about 10 people on the testing committee to try it.
> The reasons:
> -The logo in the tray is a video game controller
> -The home screen shows a listing of games
> -The chat bot addressed a female employee when she joined as "love"
> -Touchpoint emails aren't asking for feedback, they're talking about the journey for users to share gaming experiences
> Except the third one above, none of these are "bad" per se. And the product is really solid. There's a market there that could certainly use it as is, but perhaps an even bigger (and more lucrative one) that will be turned off to the current state. We're not moving forward with Discord because we don't feel it really has us as a high value audience. But some tweaks to modify the UI/UX to meet these differing needs based on license type may be worth exploring.
Discord, while lacking the app and file features, is much better in terms of what it actually does. It's almost enough to make me not hate Electron (?)
It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?
I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers.
It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down.
We need a systemic change.
Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.
Which often isn't the case.
Companies have lots of priorities that have nothing to do with end users at all. For example:
- it does not matter how good your product is, if your company dies because there's a competitor that does not need to make profit and can temporarily offer their services for free, until your company is driven out of the market
- dark patterns are well documented examples how working directly against good user experience can increase profits
- lobbying politicians to drive out competition is extremely profitable, and does not take interests of the userbase into account at all
There are probably numerous other, obvious examples how capitalism disincentivises companies from serving their customers well, but instead incentivizes gaming the system.
The correlation between user experience and profitability is shaky at best. One could argue that user experience has almost nothing to with how businesses operate.
If there is a system, people will try to game it. Whether in capitalism or communism or any other system of rules.
This perception of games is pretty outdated and I assume that is what Discord has come to realize as well. Video games (and gamers) are approaching to be as varied as music (and its listeners) and the only reason they have not achieved parity yet is the difference in how long each has been around as a mass medium.
Games have intrinsic qualities that set them apart from music, movies or other mediums – but being "fun" is certainly not it, and "gamery" would, at best, serve as a tautology.
It may be worse for you, but it feels way better to me. It has been very annoying to introduce Discord in work/casual settings and see it labelled as "a gamer thing". Right call by Discord.
Its why they might fail and make things worse, at which point, it is why someone else will come along to try and make things better.
Sometimes things are best left alone, but if this is attempted generally, then it'll probably lead to a stagnant pond, rather than a pleasant lake. Fresh flowing water is key.
Also, not sure how many agree with you on the cutesy humour. Maybe, it was just time for that to go.
Also I want to point out that nothing in the article indicates a shift to b2b. It sounds more like they are going after parteon, onlyfans, consoles, twitch, etc. I just kinda assume they will develop some more mature user management and server payment options along the way.
The result being that peoples personal and professional lives have started to overlap, which (naturally) results in dangerous positions for some people.
I'm especially concerned if something like disc-cool starts up again, or the data from it gets leaked. (Disc-cool was a group that used self-bots to create a database of harvested messages, letting you search up any users message history.)
That would be great even without any business features. Some open source projects are starting to use discord and it would be nice for some users to link and use their github names and identities for these servers.
What's stopping an organization from buying multiple server boosts from a single account to unlock these features? If you need the level 3 perks, you can have a single account, owned by the organization, purchase the 30 server boosts to get there.
Or am I misunderstanding the problem?
You can do that.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020877112-N...
Discord doesn’t seem to do anything well except sign users up quickly.
The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus.
Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (enthusiast) Supra profitable, was to build it on the same platform as the (normie) BMW Z4. The Z4 gets some of the spice of the Supra, and the Supra owners don't feel cheated out of a place in the industry. Effectively, both cars maintain the same back end, but completely different front ends. Maybe discord could do the same. If reddit was run by competent people, then they'd know to continue supporting old.reddit.com for the same reason.
Some aspects of Discord's platform are incredibly useful and class leading. However, their users are a very particular kind of internet person, and the complete un-intuitiveness of the platform highlights that. You can't preserve the 4chan-esque spastic wonder of a platform while still appealing to normies, businesses and older folks.
A platform as funny/productive as 4chan and as sanitized as Teams is the holy-grail. Alas, like all holy-grails, it seems entirely unattainable.
Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus.
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...
The client is buggy and slow.
It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem.
Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.
It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really.
Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.
I agree from a moral standpoint but because of the general use of emoji in servers, it really doesn't prove to be that much of an issue. People also enjoy using their own emoji, which is generally good for communities.
I think you'll find that as users find platforms to coalesce and try and build communities on, they'll want those customizations. Being able to use them anywhere on the platform is just a bonus - unpaid users can still use those emoji within the servers they come from.
Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.
If I could stay logged into my social discord servers with my gamer handle and be being logged into work servers with work handles, especially on mobile, they would gain traction I think. Add active directory account management as a paid option and would be an easy sell some places.
Looks like the only one who support this is Telegram. Might be because they (supposedly) don't mine your data.
Telegram clients support multiple active sessions with multiple accounts, you can switch between them easily and receive notifications from all accounts.
This. It's pretty much impossible to run several identities on Discord. If we ever move work to it i want it separate from my gaming discords.
So, we're right back to where this conversation started, that Discord doesn't support multiple identities.
Edit: and besides, I am the potential customer. They want business use, they should help. I don't even understand why I'm allowed one gaming identity.
(Speaking generally. I haven’t used Discord, but I don’t trust websites to keep multiple logins straight.)
Similarly for mobile, look into keeping apps separate at the OS level or carry two phones.
I think there are quite other social networks that tried to retain the "universal identity" idea while completely and entirely missing this point.
Instead, if Discord want to be taken seriously, need to allow multiple accounts on the same device, so people can switch between things.
I'm by default a private person, I feel uneasy sharing my preferences with people (even basic things like music that I like) and I don't like these broadcasted social features. The first thing I did when installing Discord was turning off the feature that says what game I am playing.
It's now my first choice chat app, but there's no social features so it's nowhere near a full replacement for Discord.
I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.
I really wish you could though
Since I started using Discord, they have on three separate occasions moved a button I used frequently, and in its place added a button that attempts to extract money from me.
They've established a pattern of trying to monetise the application by tricking the user into doing something that they didn't want to do. That isn't just bad UX, it's actively hostile.
Tricking is 100% the right word for it. They are putting those Nitro buttons there with the clear intent that a user will click it by accident while attempting to access a different feature that used to be there.
> You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it. I'm not claiming that they're outright scamming people out of money, but that they're using actively hostile UI/UX to profit by serving advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo. That's absolutely worthy of criticism.
The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking. Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
Perhaps you don't remember what that UI used to look like. For most of Discord's existence, there were two buttons to the left of the chatbox in the mobile app. The leftmost of these was a camera icon (for taking a photo and immediately uploading it), and the rightmost was the gallery icon, for uploading an existing image. For the vast majority of users, the gallery icon would have been the most commonly used.
In 2020 they got rid of the camera icon entirely (now requiring an additional menu to get to it), moved the gallery icon, and then where the gallery icon used to be they added the Gift Nitro icon. Instead of using the empty space vacated by the camera icon they moved a feature used >10,000x more so that the Nitro button could benefit from everyone's muscle memory.
At the time it happened misclicks and feeling tricked was an extremely common complaint [1], to the extent that I do not believe for a second that a team of people competent enough to build such an otherwise excellent piece of software could possibly have not foreseen it occurring. That this is not an isolated incident but rather part of a pattern helps cement that judgment.
> Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
I do have a problem with it, because they're trying to make money by tricking their users. I'm perfectly happy to go back to IRC if the only way they can think of to keep their company afloat is to deliberately make their product worse to use.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=discord+gift+nitro+button+im...
It also took me a while to figure out how to quit the damn thing. The only way seems to be right-clicking the tray icon. Which is nice as long as you have a tray in the first place. Having a "File > Quit" menu wouldn't have hurt. Or a button in the same menu that lets me log out and disable the account.
And judging by the fan noise in my laptop the Discord app seems to be a heavier burden than my Firefox session with over 1000 tabs. Now at least it's not particularly slow, but I don't understand why I should use Discord unless I have to.
Other than that, most chat apps minimize to tray these days. You can toggle that behavior in the settings.
With your last point, I agree. It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.
> It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.
A barebones Electron app has maybe ~100MB memory overhead and starts without noticeable delay. To me this seems like the same problem that leads to oversized and sluggish websites. Snappy, lightweight Electron apps exist, though they're uncommon.
And yeah, discord is for sure very javascript heavy.
That isn't always there. If you navigate away from the voice channel page to read something, your only option is that tiny little button on the corner; or navigating back to the voice channel page, which is unintuitive itself.
You say this like they should contradict, but heavy use of Discord should only make the UX more intuitive to you. Maybe it's less intuitive to less heavy users?
Decent chat (file sharing, emojis, support for code snippets), decent voice chat, decent streaming and supports PUSH2TALK button?
and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk, but it's not must have.
and is e.g F/OSS?
Because I'm unable to name and that's why I started using Discord
>Allow users to enable push to talk in group meetings
>2021-06-01
>Thank you for your continued feedback, we have not forgotten about this ask. The feature remains on our backlog. We will share an update as soon as one is available.
>In the meantime, you can try using the keyboard shortcut to toggle mute (Ctrl+Shift+M)
It has 3400 votes since 2017(!)
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
_____________
and yes, this feature is important because switching between apps just to mute/unmute yourself is terrible experience and
this problem has been solved like 2 decades ago or more with PUSH2TALK.
It makes gaming or even coding and streaming and talking while having people at home
(especially now, during WFH/pandemic) annoying as hell.
___________
The rest I didn't check.
I remember during my days of wow raiding hearing someone else's background or breathing noise during the raid was not acceptable.
That doesn't work well for gamers, for obvious reasons.
NVIDIA Broadcast (Previously called RTX Voice) is a godsend for those scenarios.
If you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out. It is absolutely magical. https://youtu.be/uWUHkCgslNE
Sadly, AFAIK, it does require an NVIDIA GPU, but it doesn't need an RTX card. I used it on my GTX 1070 and it worked wonderfully.
What's really amazing about it is that you can use it to filter incoming voice audio, so if you have someone in your channel that has tons of background noise or breathing, you can filter it out on your own side.
The only complaint with this is that if I'm running multiple voice chats at the same time then I need to use some other keybinds to mute individual applications. Still, for most users this would be more than adequate.
Anyway, I prefer mouse scroll button (mouse3) instead of caps
Gchat has probably 10% of the features of Teams/Slack, and even those don't work. As an example, try to copy the link to a gchat thread.
Discord solved this. Small red icon on the dock icon indicating that there are messages in a server you haven't muted. The icon changes to a number if you got a ping or DM.
Having said that I also prefer Discord, especially the drop in voice channels.
Mattermost is the best self-hosted alternative and it works great for the chat part. Dont know about the rest.
While it's bleeding investor money, it's also grabbing your data:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...
Great, so it's not an alternative at all.
e.g when somebody needs help with something / to help debug something or show current version of app to my product owner.
It's very handy feature
Voice chat with push-to-talk: Mumble
Streaming: OBS
> and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk
Only let your friends connect via Wireguard.
You can freely choose a real server and can talk to anyone on any other server.
[0]: https://element.io
Fyi in case anyone reading this didn't know, Element is a client for the Matrix protocol, by the people who are the prominent developers and supporters for the Matrix Foundation.
Matrix only has inbuilt support for 1 on 1 calls right now, it (Element) uses Jitsi for group/channel calls. Native Matrix group calls and video calls are coming very soon, along with (hopefully) push to talk in the Element client, and custom emoji for those who like that stuff.
And having that feature exposed to the web is a security nightmare. Unless you have a native app for your service, it's unlikely to ever have that functionality.
I like Matrix and I like Element, but let's not pretend something missing features that forums have had since 2007 is going to have a user overlap with Discord. It's much more cumbersome to use in comparison, and much more work to set up.
Is Discord the best answer to that broader question, to handle many different use cases for many different audiences? If so, it makes sense for them to expand their market. If not, stick to what they are good at.
Seamless video streaming is harder. And like others said, Discord is pretty much spyware freemium software. Your incredible experience is being subsidized by investors and your own data.
Every couple years a new chat app with the same basic features as the last one (and slightly better background noise filtering) will crop up. However, the new chat app won't contain the legacy contact information of people you don't really want to talk to anymore, but feel awkward about deleting. And the old chat app will have started to do annoying things for monetization purposes, having run out of VC money.
And of course, you use the new chat app. You will try, but fail, to convince your friends to use the open source alternative. It requires self-hosting and IP addresses.
This have happened so many times, it's actually a good indicator.
Has anyone conducted a study of HN sentiments?
As far as I'm concerned it's pretty much a drop in replacement for slack. There's very little that slack does that I need that discord can't do. Slack however does lack the nice/easy to use UX for talking to each other or sharing screens.
Where they lack is enterprise features that have nothing to do with the UX which would include things like auditing and security, billing for a team, ensuring everyone in the team has the premium features, etc. That's probably hard to fix because the way discord is setup, only individuals pay for getting premium features such as high resolution video for sharing. That makes more sense for gamers than for corporate usage. Likewise, you have one account on discord for every community and slack has a one account per community thing. I have about 10+ accounts with them. Really annoying actually. Discord could do something like Github did which is allowing Github members to be added to any team and managing premium features on a per team basis.
My great gripe? No 3rd party clients. It's also massively bloated for my need of sending a few bytes of text. For this reason I use it for just one server and to communicate with two friends and my brother.
Otherwise I use IRC where I'm on three networks and 26 channels. IRC is much less convenient for sure in terms of nick registering (some SOB took my name!) "back scroll" and persistence across clients/systems but it does 99% of what I want from a chat client: chatting via text.
I use a web browser to access Discord. But I would not use Discord for anything personal, only for public channels.
You can't today, there's no reason you eventually couldn't.
I found this phrasing subjective because I don't find it easier to use. I tried Discord Web, Desktop & mobile, frankly they are not easier to use for me. I found it confusing because I suddenly need to have a role assigned to me. For that, I have to go through loops and hopping on subchannels to get myself a role for me to be able to have a conversation. One server that have like 5 different subchannel and I have to go through each of them to get a role. After trying to get figure out how to get that for half hour, I gave up. Simply too much work for trying to ask for a help. Discord is not designed AND substitution for general forums. I seen several game developers/publishers trying to tell their Steam users to go on Discord for any issues, requests, anything. I found that convoluted because Discord is not easier to use for first timer and plus there is Steam forum for this.
One thing I can't do in Discord (Slack & Signal included as well) is that I can't have multiple chat windows in my desktop like we can do in Trillan, Pidgin, AIM, ICQ, etc. My work is using Slack and it is a pain in the ass to go back and forth with various channel than having multiple windows for easier access. I prefer Slack over Discord because Slack don't make it complicated when it come to channels.
Not every Discord server is configured like that. With many, you just add the server and start chatting. Some servers use the "role" thing to slow down spam and force an acknowledgement of the server rules.
In fact if anything I'd honestly say it might be a negative to be that wealthy. A lot of ideas are the products of inventiveness in the face of constraints and a sense of urgency. There is a lot of super-wealthy 30 year olds that have emerged out of the big IPOs and a lot of them have basically retired.
Myself? Definitely retirement. And race cars.
Honestly, that sounds like propaganda telling poor people to be happier with their lot in life. Who says they'd put 18 billion towards their next company anyway?
Context: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/mark-zuck...
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-bil...
Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?
There are also a lot of bots you can add for different tasks.
It kind of feels like a realtime social network.
Where it's really lacking is to structure information that should be available to anyone, but I guess that's not what it's meant for anyway
Slack's business model is selling to "the group". The features you have available are what your "admin" decides is good for the group, and upgrades (especially upgrades from the "free layer") need to financed/budgeted as a group decision.
Discord's business model is that individual users are the paying customers so there are fewer features "nickel and dimed" at the group level. If I want better paid features as a user I don't have to convince an entire group to buy into the idea. I especially don't have to convince multiple such groups to do it if I want the same paid features in every group I am a participant in I don't have to convince the admins of multiple groups to pay for them (and/or figure out how to bill for them). Where Discord does have group-level paid features ("boosts"), they are presented as bottom up "collective individual effort as multiplier" more than "the group needs to top down pay a monthly invoice".
From a user perspective, in Slack I'm not the customer, I'm a cog in some wheel that is the customer. On Discord, I'm the customer, and that deeply impacts a lot of how Discord operates including and especially how it treats the "free layer".
Because I haven't. It's a nightmare, you need custom software to even invite people.
Besides that, its severely limited. Discord has a real free model, slack does not.
It offers a couple of gamer-y features that Slack doesn't like voice channels. But make no mistake, the main reason is because it is free.
What an absurd privacy violation.
Not to mention that you can obviously disable this.
Hence if Discord aims at expanding its user base beyond the (multiplayer) gaming community, it should definitely think twice whether to keep this sharing setting enabled by default. At a minimum I would expect them to try to deduce somehow whether you are using Discord as a gamer or in a non-gaming-related setting, and use the suitable default. Or maybe just disable it by default, so gamers who want this feature enabled need to turn it on.
Don't worry, Discord will!
Not the same as native support, but in fairness, I was being tongue in cheek!
But you can enable it on a per-app basis.
I've known people in office settings automate their IM status (back to at least Lync/Skype for Business before Teams) to say things exactly like "making a presentation" or "busy coding", whether for fun or for micro-managing bosses or nagging coworkers hoping to digitally "peak over their shoulder".
Making it opt-out versus opt-in is maybe "gaming context-related" as Xbox and PlayStation both have opt-out versions on their own social networks. But the existence of detailed and automated status messages certainly isn't new from "gaming contexts".
Free
Able to hop servers/channels extremely easily (for a game it's just hey join this discord server/channel -> click and you're able to start speaking immediately)
Search is good, as it @ing someone to get their attention. Private messages also good
Share screen really easily
The bots are phenomenal. I use it to play world of Warcraft, we have a "raid bot" which is fantastic to organise stuff, and also have several music bots where everyone can hang out and listen to the same Spotify/YouTube playlists at the same time. I'm sure there are plenty of other bots but these two are just what I use.
Inline images, GIFs, videos etc are really smooth, as are reactions/replies
Drawbacks I've found:
App isn't the best. If I close it in the background as I do with most of my apps, I don't get a push notification so if someone PMs me I don't see it until I open the app again to check
Channel notifications can get overwhelming quite quickly, but tbh I'm not sure there's anything they can do about that other than maybe add an option to default mute everything and then only get notifications for what you want on joining a server.
Discord took off because:
* The message search is much better than free tiers of slack
* You don't need to set up a separate account per server
* It didn't have the user limits of Teamspeak
* It didn't have the ads of Skype
* A big inflection point was Skype launching their desktop client that was basically Web Skype in a window and sucked
* For a server with your gaming buddies, a drop in drop out perma voice channel is really a better model than distinct calls for slack. Also for public servers. And if you want to VC with your friends 1:1, the option is still there.
* Link sharing to invite users to a server vs having to set up a server/bot to give out invites as running a public slack used to require. Also used to not even require an account so was great for that pick up player you found for one night
* For the large server setups, discord's permission/moderation setup is way more flexible than Slack's. Slack basically has admin/not admin. (though discord does need to separate pinning from deleting other user's messages)
---
For a summary, Slack is targeted at the business case. In a workplace chat, there should be no need to moderate, since bad behaviour can be taken to someone's boss/HR. And the sign up/multi server flow was not optimised for this usage model as Slack didn't care (at least when I last tried public Slacks, these days the only Slack I use is my employer's).
Discord is actually optimised for consumer use cases, and consequently built up such a network effect that even if Slack did invest heavily in their UX there, would be quite behind.
The rest is network effects. If your entire gaming guild or clan or group of friends or whatever is using Discord, you are also using Discord.
If you mean "why is anyone besides gamer groups using Discord?", that is because most gamers are not just gamers, but also people working in day jobs, or open-source contributors, or active in NGOs, or have non-gamer friends with whom they needed to chat lately due to COVID restrictions, or whatever else. They knew Discord from their gaming life, so they just tried applying the tool that they already knew well to the (slightly different) job. With varying success, but with some success nevertheless in some cases.
Maybe it's because Discord was targeted towards gamers, and I'm a gamer that had no problem understanding its UI?
If you join more than a dozen servers, yeah it can be a bit overwhelming, but Discord lets you put servers into groups, similar to how phones let you put apps into groups.
Steam's voice chat is nice. Somehow low latency VOIP where you don't interrupt eachother due to lag is something only gamers need ...
Skype used to be good too. Somewhere down the line they switched to some high latency mess.
It's mostly real-time vs less than real-time communication. Discord for what is worth isn't that hard to search, and I wouldn't mind if they gave the option to some servers to have their logs automatically go to a crawlable page so they'd be indexed by Google. Of course, that won't work everywhere as real-time chats are often also used as they feel more ephemeral.
I don't like this: https://www.tosdr.org/en/service/discord
I have never installed Discord because its privacy policies are scary
Nope, sadly not! People are complacent and unwilling to make a change due to the convience of it. Most people are unwilling to leave the online friends behind that refuse to join you on more ethical platforms. People become tied to communities, of which most are on Discord, and are unwilling to leave them out of fear of feeling alone, or because they require whatever feelings of happiness/dopamine they get from those communities.
I used discord primarily for a large friend group, on one guild/server, but of course was in a bunch of other servers for things that were ultimately useless. Leaving Discord made me feel less controlled by the dopamine effect of interacting with 'communities'. My friends barely use discord for anything other than our friend group, but are unwilling to move off of it because 'pretty UI', or 'emojis', or 'bots', etc. Some of them "don't care about privacy" because "no one at discord cares about your messages/data", " I have nothing to hide", the usual fallacies regarding privacy. The last reason is "laze"/"don't care".
My friends are all in the tech/software space, have careers or are aiming for careers in the space. Some of them even share posts from Hacker News on the regular. Some use Linux, one of them even uses it partly out of privacy concerns. Point is, they're not oblivious to this stuff. If anyone begins to start trying out other services with me like Matrix, they're immediately disuaded because someone else in the group doesn't want to and says they're never going to leave Discord.
I've since just been using a Matrix bridge to continue being part of the group. I've decided though that I will have no part in Discord's increasing monopoly in the chat message space, with their walled garden practices. Once Matrix native voice and video chat rolls out, I'm done with the Matrix-Discord bridge. If my friends don't want to make ethical decisions and put themselves back in control of their online lives and data, then I lose my online group chat. So be it. I'll still see them out in the real world. Friends (for better or worse) come and go every decade. Sucks but I'm so done with no one caring and having to jump through hoops for people who don't care.
Hi ***,
This is a just a super quick notice that we will be closing your open support ticket and I will be eating it shortly.
Hopefully we solved your issue with such grace and finesse that you didn't need to respond. If that's the case, great! Meal for me.
Otherwise, please respond and we will sick our support team on the problem like a dog on some marbled wagyu. And then I'll find something else to eat, I guess.
Thanks,
Eater of Support Tickets
This is the HN comments of Facebook’s latest valuation in 2007:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057
I wonder if HN will ever be bullish on a product that’s targeting the general audience. We seem to only be able to see technical expertise as the only moat. I guess this is why product managers that can’t code get paid the big bucks. Anyone know if there’s a HN made up of folks with astute product sense?
Or even better: Anyone know of a Discord server I could join. ;)
Sure. I don't think anyone is doubting Discord will pump a ridiculous valuation and make boatloads of money. That's not really impressing anyone here, not anymore.
In more general terms: that you can impress the general audience with shiny trinkets, shepherd them into a walled garden, and then milk them for all they're worth - it's a well-known, common pattern. It's not interesting, except in terms of what we're losing as a society and as an industry because of it. So it's the latter things that get disproportional attention on HN.
It’s insulting.
Edit: typo
I have not used them myself.
Bit of an aside, but TypeScript was invented at MSFT, and they still maintain it – why would it not count? (Other than not being a consumer product).
Sure, but JavaScript was already there, so I don't look at it as a MSFT idea event though I agree it's technically a msft product.
I have to work with Teams every day and many times I wonder who thought the way it works is a good idea? There are so many other decent products mentioned here like Discord, Mattermost, Slack. Just nick a few ideas from each and set up a not exciting but equally decent chat software. Somehow Microsoft managed to make it worse ..
UX preferences aside, I think it's a really bad fit for businesses compared to slack, because it seems to also want to be social media, where you have one profile across servers, where slack and others are team-centric.
If your team is on-call and incident management could be improved, just try putting your team in a Discord room and see what happens. Don't put managers in there, just the engineers.
It works great.
Slack just added this recently: https://slack.com/intl/en-de/help/articles/4402059015315-Sta...
Huddles are more like the audio calls Slack already had, but without the channel notifications.
It lacks the auto silence that Discord has, so you can't just hang in a huddle waiting for someone to talk. There's a constant hiss.
I guess they might change it, but didn't sound like this was something they were even thinking of as an issue when I spoke with a representative.
I do read their tech posts on HN, and they are always fascinating. But it seems to me like a product that the MBAs have taken a over.
You can disable it per application of course... But I just wanted it gone.
Also it makes incessant beeping noises, which again can only be disabled per room.
- It's easy to onboard non-technical users.
- It has a huge existing user-base.
- It's feature-rich but with good UX so it doesn't feel overwhelming.
- Voice calls are consistently high quality, even with people that have bad connections.
Gamers have a history of amplifying each others' displeasure with things; if the platform wasn't better than the alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, etc.) they wouldn't be using it.
Decent chat (file sharing, emojis, support for code snippets), decent voice chat, decent streaming and supports PUSH2TALK button? and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk
Because I'm unable to name and that's why I started using Discord
In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord users don't care about calendar integration and so on.
Modern chat apps are a Venn diagram with a modest intersection.
I can't see how Discord can get more users without losing original users. Basically, a demographic shift. And then you're in the big guys territory where they additionally have 'killer features' already and that's where businesses get bought or fold.
What I think they can successfully do, is rebrand as a new product (Accord is a name that might suit it, given the nature of office communications), disassociate any gamer connections, and link it to Discord by adding an account switcher.
Are you on mostly smaller servers, or is it unrelated to server size?
You can definitely port the crushing silence/violent turmoil dichotomy of a large freenode room to Discord with enough users.
Hence my belief that discord makes people built tiny castles way too stiff.
people dont feel like they own #anxiety on freenode for instance..
For non-programmers, there are cheap turn-key SaaS. Look at Beeper for example: https://www.beeper.com/
You also don't need to start the chat in another app, that's complete and utter bollocks, regardless of whether you use SaaS like Beeper, or your own home server.
I'll check back in with you in 5 years and we can laugh at each other: @hammy:matrix.splitanatom.com :- )
In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever.
That's an instant knockout for Discord for me. There is no way that I willingly let companies read my private communication in 2021 after everything that we learned over the last couple of years. No amount of nice productivity features can compensate for that.
You clearly don't understand Matrix. Dendrite introduces a hybrid-P2P model, ergo home servers become largely irrelevant, and portable identities become a thing.
Can Discord work offline P2P via Bluetooth LE? Nope.
I can only speak as I find it.
I think the average person does indeed care about privacy, otherwise we would use public bank accounts and would get rid of passwords, curtains and summer clothing.
Most likely, most people do not fully understand all implications of all technical details and aren't making fully informed decisions.
Ask someone how much they care that their bank details are known to the machines at Intuit when they setup their Mint account, or how much they care that random bank employees can see & manage their entire financial life when they call customer support or visit a teller.
Ask them how much they care that some machine somewhere in a Google datacenter is running an algorithm on every email they get.
In my experience, most people just want to keep parts of their lives private from people they know. They will upload nudes to iCloud and make jokes about FBI agents finding them.
I actually laughed out loud as I read this.
I mean I'm sure you're not wrong, it's just that vanishingly few people do or will care about self-hosted servers or federation. Hell, if anything those would be anti-selling points, since it almost invariably complicates the UX, especially for initial setup.
There's a reason that governments, militaries and healthcare systems are choosing Matrix over Discord!
I've bridged all my other messaging apps to Matrix, now I just need a single messaging app. I even get my SMS via Matrix. Can Discord do that? Nope. If it could, would you trust it? Probably not.
I use discord to relay in game chat from the game Everquest to my phone. Surely it can relay other types of text, too.
We tried out Slack and other alternatives at the time and the huge advantage of Discord was how simple and playful it was while other solutions were so very enterprise-y.
Plus, Discord offers a great bot API, so it was super easy to write our own integrations. We are very happy Discord was not bought by Microsoft.
Discords voice channels are the perfect replacement for "watercooler conversations" for the remote working age.
I found discord way better for work that involves dynamic collaboration ie where folk are often working individually or jumping into each other’s streams to work together.
To achieve something similar in teams we have an open all day meeting that people pop into but it’s sub par vs the discord model.
Not they are worth $15bn? It is crazy valuation for the chat app that's basically gaming version of Slack. I always thought Slack would purchase Discord and make it its "Gaming division" chat app.
Steam does this too, I can't believe Microsoft allows this behavior.
That said, will discord lose those initial advocates - gamers - in the process? They're already cracking down on NSFW channels, and constantly making things less convenient and more locked down in their pursuit of the general public.
1) I'd like to be able to collapse, or reposition, the right panel (the one with the users in it).
2) I'd like to be able to have multiple channels open at once. This one is probably my biggest complaint. It's frustrating having to frequently click back and forth between different channels in a server.
I'm sure I could find more things to complain about if those were resolved, but those two changes would make me content with the UI.
Give me some other themes too, I suppose. Maybe a really dark one.
For example if I want the latest info on the state of installing a certain linux distro on macbooks with T2 chips I have to open discord and figure out which unlabeled icon on the left out of dozens of servers I'm in that I visit infrequently has the information I'm looking for. I don't use the servers often enough to memorize their "logo" so it would be helpful if I could see names there. If I want to report a bug in a VR app the only way to be sure the developer sees it is to again dig through those dozens of unlabeled server icons then figure out which of the many text channels I have to put my question in. If I want to be notified when Nvidia cards are in stock at Best Buy I have to find the drop server, find the channel with the pinned message and click on the right "reaction" emoji. I'm not sure why the new generation prefers this format but it is what it is, no harder than digging through IRC channels and usenet but not much of a better experience, personally.