Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamburgerwah | Hacker News Reader

Discord is the classic freemium monopoly trap. They want to capture market share with a walled garden and once they do they will alter the terms to milk out every last drop of revenue they can before everyone jumps ship to the new new thing.

View on HN

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, 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

MSFT Teams, Slack, Google Chat. Hate as much as you want but there's virtually no difference in terms of capabilities among these players.

>MSFT Teams

>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.

Yeah I also find it really weird that push to talk only ever surfaces in gaming focused voice chat. It's useful for any situation with more than a couple of people, especially when they're typing while on the call.

I think corpos and normies are too polite to call someone out for heavy breathing at the microphone.

I remember during my days of wow raiding hearing someone else's background or breathing noise during the raid was not acceptable.

Still, how "corpos and normies" can stand kids as somebody's background? which is something normal during pandemic

The mute button works fine - if your mouse is free to click it, and the video window is foregrounded, and you don't need to interject at a moment's notice.

That doesn't work well for gamers, for obvious reasons.

> someone else's background or breathing noise

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.

Why isn't a mute toggle a solution? I set up caps lock with autohotkey to be a mute toggle in Windows. It works well.

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.

I think if you'd want to use other button than caps, then sometimes you may be not sure whether you're on or off

Anyway, I prefer mouse scroll button (mouse3) instead of caps

It actually overrides caps lock behavior so there's no light. It does mean that sometimes I don't know what state it is in. That's why a 2nd keybind to set it to only mute is helpful because it'll reset the state.

I use toggle mute a lot in Discord, especially on devices where I don't use a mic with a hardware mute, but Teams does not, as far as I have checked, have a customizable keybind for toggle mute that doesn't require you to have the application focused. Which is really annoying, especially when in a meeting and getting asked a question while in another window.

Ideally, Windows would give us a customizable keybind to mute your microphone globally. Sadly, that's not the case so you have to get a script to do it.

I haven't used Google Chat yet, but Teams and Slack just feel very sluggish on my slow-ish work ultrabook. Switching between chats or starting a call takes two seconds while Electron gobbles all CPU and RAM it can get. Discord on the other hand feels almost like a native app.

> Google Chat ... virtually no difference in terms of capabilities

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.

We started using Teams at work and its UI is awful compared to Discord. The worst thing is notifications -- by default you get a popup for every single message that somebody sends. So then you change the settings to only pop up when somebody @s you. Good luck getting all your coworkers to do that; 90% of the time you will get a message and then just not see it for an hour because Teams didn't prompt you.

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.

This is possible in teams by setting yourself to DND. You'll still see the icon in your dock but you won't get popup notifications.

Having said that I also prefer Discord, especially the drop in voice channels.

Would you also like fries with that? Of course you arent going to get the same for $0 (discord is not free, you re just wasting investor money).

Mattermost is the best self-hosted alternative and it works great for the chat part. Dont know about the rest.

> you re just wasting investor money

While it's bleeding investor money, it's also grabbing your data:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...

> works great for the chat part. Dont know about the rest.

Great, so it's not an alternative at all.

I don't know about streaming (have no use for it and it sounds like a kitchen sink), but Telegram has everything else you've listed.

I'm not sure what do you mean by "kitchen sink", but at work we do often share screen with eachothers

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

Chat: Mattermost

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.

Mumble is my currently choice for a F/OSS alternative to group chat. Works fine, especially for having open in the background with push to talk. No chat history or built in tools for sharing videos, code or streaming.

Element[0]: hast everything except probably push to talk.

You can freely choose a real server and can talk to anyone on any other server.

[0]: https://element.io

Second that recommendation. Element is getting very solid as an alternative with channel support and E2E.

With respect to the Element devs (I want to see it succeed) it's UX and polish is night and day compared to Slack. I struggle with Element and I've been using messaging apps my whole life.

> Element

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.

But you don't have push to talk, which is the killer feature for gamers. Proper push to talk will capture key presses even when the app doesn't have focus, the key difference with most other implementations.

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.

Element doesn't have inline video embedding for any link, the emoticon support sucks, and the voice chat leaves a lot to be desired.

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.

When you pile together half a dozen different requirements, of course the number of products in the middle of your resulting Venn diagram is going to be narrowed down to one. Especially if you already had that answer in mind when you laid out your requirements list. The question that needs asked is not, "What is the one product that exactly fits my personal needs?", but "What feature set of a communication platform meets most of the needs of most of the people?"

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.

Discord is a very good answer to that question for gaming communities: its features almost perfectly overlap with the set of different apps each gaming community would inevitably set up. It just so happens this set is also a good match (or a superset of) the features many other communities want as well, and where it isn't, it complements other platforms nicely.

Mumble fits 2/4 of those. Chat with emoji/better drag-and-drop file sharing would be trivial I expect, with full-time developers paid to make it happen.

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.

The chat app treadmill.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com