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Comment by CerealFounder | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.

I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.

Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful.

But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.

Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.

Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?

The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.

And not Reddit video? At least you can avoid chat.

A close second. The secret here is to just not engage with any video content.

Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more.

They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at.

Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.

Have you heard of Tildes? They are trying to make a better reddit-like thing.

I feel like every year in the past decade there has been some new Reddit clone. Reddit itself was open source for a while, so it used to be really easy. They never catch on.

I’m hoping some of these catch on but it seems those who are entrenched with power over social communications keep deplatforming these or character attacking them as some kind of extremist haven when most aren’t: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/...

Tildes has been around a few years now I believe. I tried it in its early days, and checked it out again just now. Both times I’ve been impressed - it tends to have higher-quality comments and feel less… generally vapid that modern Reddit.

How does one get an invite to tildes? I'd be interest in trying it out.

I used tildes for the better part of a year, unfortunately for me the cliquish nature and the fact that there are 12-15 power users with half the posts, who also congregate on the offsite discord, really ruined the website for me. I respect deimos and his goals greatly, but his community quickly became stressful to deal with.

I keep running into niche areas where the discussion group is on Facebook. Which annoys me to no end as I hate Facebook, but that's where the action is. It's not obvious to me that Facebook couldn't eat reddit's lunch.

It does sort of make me wonder what community need Reddit fulfills - discoverability/searchability? Single login? - because it's sort of a weird halfway house between forums (differing in that not searching, and duplicating an old thread is somewhat necessarily okay) and chat.

in my experience, the people active on subreddit discord's are mostly people not as active on the sub itself

and that most active & upvoted redditors on a sub mostly don't use its discord

What I mean is, Reddit to me seems a step closer to something like Discord. And yet Discord is apparently still necessary; so why Reddit, and not traditional forum + Discord?

I added 'single login' as an after thought, because it didn't occur to me at first, but I think that must be a big reason. But even then there's Discourse, with not single but much easier and OAuth (signup/)login.

The default state of a Discord is hidden. You need an invite link to join a "server." It is set up in a way that your meeting point is outside of Discord, usually real life, at least per their marketing material (irl groups are probably the most value in terms of ad revenue).

So, yeah, reddit is the searchability.

But again, it has nothing to add there over a classic forum.

Reddit has a standardized layout, you don't have to learn a new interface. It has single sign on, so you don't have to create a new account to participate in a community (low friction) and it has the people. Also, it has the voting concept which helps filter content so you aren't having to do that yourself by scanning topics.

A "classic forum" trying to get off the ground would be competing with all of that. You could also argue, "why Discord? Why not IRC?" for much the same reasons.

Yes, that is exactly what I suggested in comment previous to (up-thread of) the one you replied to.

As I said there, there is also Discourse, with only slightly more multi-community friction really, making it far easier and more standardised to do initial sign-up.

Reddit is (or has been):

1. Relatively easy to create a subforum. 2. Someplace you can post [pseudo]anonymously. 3. Has a critical mass of people. 4. Is accessible to anyone on the web.

There's a subreddit for all sorts of topics, and if there isn't one, it's fairly easy to just start one. You don't have to deal with setting up forum software or paying someone for it, and if you want to you can create a post with a pseudoanonymous throwaway account. It's really easy to come and go, and there's enough moderation that it hasn't in general devolved into a *chan-style environment, but not so much it's alienating.

Pseudoanonymity is maybe underappreciated in social networking I think. It's really a key feature. Once you reach some mainstream critical mass, having that feature really moves things along.

If you could replicate those four things in a decentralized way, it might take off. But there's a chicken-and-egg issue with network effects.

I think Reddit addresses the same needs that Usenet once did. It's not a very good replacement, but it's the closest thing we have today.

I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way.

2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction.

Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people."

I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord.

Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.

Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.

Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.

The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.

How are reddit and discord related?

Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'.

You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.

This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits.

Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.

They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.

They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.

They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.

That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example.

The difference is purely branding.

>The difference is purely branding.

If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.

Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you.

If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.

But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen.

I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.

But at the same time, Discord is also built with Ventrilo-like features, which I think helped them gain foothold among many gamers. Lots of people are on voice chat in Discord while playing games together, just like people used to use Ventrilo. And Discord is more like IRC than like Reddit, except unlike IRC it has native rich text and media embeds. But what I mean by how it’s more like IRC is that it’s rooms with text conversations happening in a timeline, instead of mainly threads with comments. Reddit sorts comments by votes by default.

Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits.

And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.

Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.

> And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.

Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts.

"More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.

> "More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website.

Sorry if that part was unclear but I was saying that Discord and IRC are more suitable to real time communication than Reddit is.

That's weirder. IRC is still a transport protocol. Discord and Reddit are both websites.

I think you are not getting what I mean still..

When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.

Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.

People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there.

Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.

Fairly different apps/use cases.

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