why?
- Their clients are fat and hungry
- Third party clients get removed
- The CEO was owner of a data collection and selling company before.
- Tencient owns to much ownership
- They don't even claim to provide any kind of Privacy
- DM Spam is horrible
- Sometimes enforcing a phone number but don't even support some major carriers.
- Some scams are using the same URLs for years. discord doesn't care.
- Personally I find the UI confusing and unproductive.
I never understood why it even got relevant outside of gaming. It's basically just a closed source, Chinese owned, privacy disrespecting IRC on steroids.
That last part is all that matters. It's not "just IRC", like many HNers claim. It is the most advanced evolution of IRC currently available. People use it because it can do anything they want and more, all in one very convenient package. Nobody cares about externalities like who owns it and what data it collects. It works - extremely well. And it's free!
Maybe some platforms have some of these features, but I'm pretty sure no one platform has even half. That's why Discord won.
I am not even a fan of slack and have no need for a group IM like this at all. However discord was everything but revolutionary.
Like it or not (and fwiw, I don't - trusting most of my communications to a highly over-valued VC-funded startup sounds like a recipe for disaster), Discord is damn good software!