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Comment by unpopularopp | Hacker News Reader

Discord "won me" over the voice chat. It's just so easy to use and setup for people. I know it's a hard pill to swallow on HN but NOT everyone wants and/or can run their own TS/Mumble/Ventrilo server. That's the number 1 reason Discord became popular in gaming groups. Want voice chat for your WoW raid? 2 clicks. Going to play CSOG with your friends? Here is the voice chat channel.

Discord is not perfect for sure (the search function is atrocious for example) but more intuitive and easier to use than the other options. And you can also stream, share screen, rich embed things etc.

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You can get just as good voice chat on Signal, and it is miles easier to use than Discord, especially for people familiar with WhatsApp, Viber and other privacy invaders.

And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets glorified over work just as well over [matrix]

It might be easier but I'm not leaking my phone number just to have voice chat with internet friends

So it's better to leak over other personal information? Use Jitsi or something.

What personal information? All you need is a screen name. I don't think Discord even requires an email to join a server (if guests are enabled).

It's nonfree software, so you can only assume that it's spying on you.

I don't care if Discord sees my ip/email, but I really, really don't want other users to see them.

Oh. I thought you were complaining about giving your phone number to Signal.

You do require email and mobile authentication text message on sign up.

But you don't have to sign up to chat, you can open Discord in your browser and join a server as guest. Granted, the server might limit what guests can do.

I just went through the sign-up process and no phone number was required though, only email.

Giving out a phone number to make a phone call. The horror :)

>and it is miles easier to use than Discord

No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an app, not do they need to make an account.

you need to use app to voice chat on discord, and need an account to use anything on discord

Unless this is a new thing, I used to do video and audio calls on Discord on Firefox on Linux without issues. No app.

The app is only needed for a couple features of voice chat like push to talk when Discord is in the background unfocused.

Server owners are able to configure a verification level. When on the lowest verification level (which is the default setting when making a server) new users without a discord account can join by simply typing the nickname they would like to use.

Navigation is horribly broken if you don't login. You're just stuck in a loop typing in usernames.

Several OSS projects that I've seen even have sophisticated bot protection and code of conduct agreement schemes that will hide the useful channels until you apply reactions on verification messages.

IRC channels used to keep public logs. Can we at least have parity with that?

Signal is a pile of crap. Seriously I am in a small chat with four other people and sometimes it just doesn’t sync messages and when it does my phone turns into a vibrating sex toy for 20 minutes.

Does Signal even have some sort of channels? From their website it looks like it's just chats like iMessage/WhatsApp etc? It might be great at what it does but no Discord I'm in would work without channels.

It is exactly like WhatsApp. In fact, nowadays, WhatsApp is Signal (as in, they use the same protocol), but it's the same hierarchy: contacts + groups of contacts, and nothing else.

I feel like Discord is very different than Signal or WhatsApp and target very different use cases.

Signal and WhatsApp are basically replacements for phone, SMS, and MMS while Discord is meant to be more of a community with many people on many topics in many channels.

They are all quite good at what they do, but they do different things.

A more direct alternative to Discord is Matrix.

Discord and signal are completely different apps for very different use cases.

Agreed. They also do some black magic where even with my mic wide open it won’t pick up things I don’t want it to. I could eat potato chips right into the mic and it won’t turn the mic on, but as soon as I speak it does. The vox in discord always amazes me. It seems to always know what I want to transmit and what I don’t.

mmm I don't know, I've found myself needing to reload Discord multiple times. For voice chat with my friends I use Jitsi, it works way better.

yeah how long until they run out of VC funding? no chance this is profitable. i know many people who use discord as their personal cloud storage

Anecdotally, yes, but I doubt most users deliberately make themselves unprofitable. There're millions of kids who just want to use voice chat and share meme gifs. Plus Discord has been gating a lot of features behind Nitro in recent years, and they make a lot of money from Nitro/Boost purchases (it's hard to tell since they're privately owned but they might make close to 200 million this year). I suspect they can stay afloat without VC funding (though they keep getting it anyway). And their valuation is really high.

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