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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

I despise discord. It's bloatware. It has constant popups that are difficult to disable.

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.

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Mind going into more details about the popups? Ive been using for years and cant say I've ever had a popup besides the occasional changelog.

This week they've been pushing some new Discord college spaces; asking me to connect my account to a .edu mail address. Believe I've seen the popup twice on my desktop, and once on mobile.

I actually did get that too on desktop. It is a bit annoying but not enough for me to call it bloatware.

Yea so if you install it, it will harass you about 'going live' everytine you launch a fullscreen app. Then it puts some box in the corner (sorry cannot remember what it said)

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.

Um, what? I don't think either of those things have ever happened to me (unless you're talking about join/leave noises on the rooms?). Are you sure you're talking about Discord?

Too bad their users in particular aren't the kind to be open minded to other platforms, they just follow the crowd. As an answer to the headline, they'll fail in their attempts to gain in other avenues because not everyone is a follower like gamers are.

I can only speak to my own experience here, but I use Discord because:

- 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.

Could you name at least two other platforms that offer at least

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

That's a bit strange. Aside from the rare changelog or new features, I only get any popups when I log into it from a new machine, or through private mode. Mostly using the desktop version, mobile occasionally.

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