Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

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> Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would they?

There are several reasons, based on personal experience with discord's limitations, why some gamer would switch.

1) Lack of accessibility. It is very hard to include deaf people in voice chats.

2) Lack of advanced voice capabilities. There is no way to setup channels where there talkers that are only heard by a subset of listeners. If you are using discord voice to coordinate large groups of players it can be extremely hard to manage.

3) Lack of Bot developer support. There are significant issues with how Discord has developed their APIs and how they treat 3rs party developers.

4) Censorship. Many gamers are irreverant / bot PC and the centralized nature if Discord pretty much guarantees that Discord will eventually face issues with moderation and censorship that will drive people elsewhere.

If Fosscord can keep (feature complete) client interoperability while adding additional features for self-hosted servers, there is a decent chance that a significant minority would move to Fosscord.

I would expect that if such starts to actually happen, Discord will do everything they can to put legal and technical roadblocks in the way of Fosscord.

Forgive my ignorance, but how could Discord accommodate deaf users in voice chats?

There are a number of services that provide speech-to-text services. Being able to hook a voice chat feed into one of them for live transcripting would be pretty game changing for conferences in general.

Side-tangent, but when i saw it introduced in MS Teams (for recorded meetings, there is now a transcript tab that you can watch in real time as the meeting goes; sorta like live captioning written in a format of a legit transcript that you can read later too), it blew my mind with how useful it was. Not that i need it, but it is super helpful to keep track of who said what and when (nice when you accidentally get distracted for 5 seconds and dont want to get halfway lost), and the transcript even assigns names to what was said.

In the specific example I have experience with, our deaf person had access to a live translation service but only if there was a way for the translator to access the Voice Chat via phone. We spent a while looking for a solution but weren't able to find one.

In the end, we were able to find and setup a bot and some other software to get transcription working but it was far from easy.

#2, they've enhanced voice channel services for large events and there's been a "god mode" voice button (ie everyone else is turned down and God is full volume)

#3, there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful

#4 is pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have a lot of child porn, right-wing political extremist and white supremacist groups - including servers that exist for the sole purpose of coordinating attacks on LGBTQ community servers - and Discord has just shrugged and said "we don't have the resources to police it."

> there's been a "god mode" voice button

That doesn't accomplish what I am describing. For example, suppose you want several squads that can coordinate among themselves but also still hear the overall commander, there is no way to accomplish this.

> there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful

There's also been a lot of developer goodwill that's been burnt over the years and a thus reason to believe that 3rd party developers could help accelerate the move to an open source discord compatible ecosystem.

> pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have...

Which is precisely why more and more moderation from a centralized provider like Discord is inevitable.

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