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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

The removal of cross app communication was a UX improvement for the average person. When Discord rolls out a new feature, you can trust it to work for everyone on day one. There is no querying available features for the other side, it just works. And you know it shows up how you imagine on the other side every time.

IRC spent most of the last decade rolling out the V3 spec which came with hard hitting features like logging in to accounts (SASL), away notifications, showing the time a message was sent rather than the time it was received by your client.

Still working on signing up for a new account on the todo list.

The glacial pace of open standards like IRC is the reason proprietary tools which can just get things done took over.

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Being an open standard certainly slows down progress of IRC; but the main reason IMO is that barely anyone is paid to work on it.

This is were Element excels: they managed to get investors on board, allowing them to get hundreds people paid to work on Matrix, allowing Matrix to move fast. (Too fast if you ask me, as other clients and servers struggle to keep up with the flagship implementations; but that's another discussion.)

> Still working on signing up for a new account on the todo list.

We even have a draft spec with three implementations, now! :) https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/account-registration.html

What hindered previous attempts for years was trying to cover every use case, which suffered from feature creep before even getting implementations.

> And you know it shows up how you imagine on the other side every time.

For years syntax highlighting hasn't shown on discord mobile, but does on discord via browser.

Do users really care about those shiny new features? For me most of it was stupid stuff. Stickers, shaking windows..

The ability to turn that crap off is entirely why I'd want a different client.

And it's not really like you can have your feature available everywhere on day 1 really, even on a proprietary client. People often lag behind updating their apps on their devices.

I managed a fleet of 60k mobiles of which 40k byod (personally owned). and we often ran into issues with people not updating even included apps like chrome for years and we'd have to email them and even ban them when a serious vulnerability was found in the wild.

The stupid stuff is all important to someone. The stickers on telegram are the main reason furries use the platform over discord for example.

And mobile platforms auto update now so while it’s possible there could be an old version out, not much effort is put in to making it work. Telegram shows a basic text showing the message is not supported on your version and prompts you to update.

Even the stuff that is hardly a feature but more a UX prompt is important. Discord voice channels are not that much functionally different to traditional group calls, but that way they get used is dramatically different because the UX is.

Imagine if someone bridged discord to some other IM app and when someone joins a voice channel, it starts a group call on the other app which opens a ringer on that persons phone. The compatibility is close enough right, but that minor difference is enough to make users very upset.

Given that Discord and Telegram are the go-to chat clients for a huge number of people, I suspect shiny new features are important to them.

Even if they don't technically end up using them or really need them, it clearly helps get people using the platform.

I use Telegram because of the stickers and generally great UI experience on both mobile and desktop. Even though I know Signal or Matrix are a better choice from a privacy/security standpoint.

>When Discord rolls out a new feature, you can trust it to work for everyone on day one.

If they have a supported up-to-date browser, yeah...

>There is no querying available features for the other side

Right. If your browser isn't on the short list, it just isn't supported. Want to access discord from a tty over ssh? Go fuck yourself, not supported. Want to access it through your custom text-to-speech system? Go fuck yourself, not supported.

> Right. If your browser isn't on the short list, it just isn't supported. Want to access discord from a tty over ssh? Go fuck yourself, not supported. Want to access it through your custom text-to-speech system? Go fuck yourself, not supported.

Are you seriously mad that a company selling a commercial product doesn't support tty support for their browser app?

This demonstrates why a company selling a commercial product is a poor substitute for an open standard.

Indirectly, the issue is rather that they will ban you if you don't use their client, even if it comes at no cost to them (setting aside losing the ability to run spyware on your device). It doesn't need to be a tty client, it could be a client for a older phone, a native client for GNOME, a client with more features and extensibility, or whatever. They do not know best what every person's wants or needs are. And until this issue is overcome (which I don't expect it to be), the service is unfit for general usage.

> setting aside losing the ability to run spyware on your device

I think you're underestimating how lucrative spyware is.

Remember, Google is basically funded entirely by spyware and 'spyservices'. Data is the new gold. Unfortunately it's your data and someone else's gold :(

I think it would have been conventional to add a "\s" to the end of that sentence?

I missed that, sorry :)

I don't know why you're bringing my emotions into it.

I don't think Discord should exist, and the fact that it's a commercial product shaped by the economic self-interest of one company is the reason it's so bad.

You talk about it like the commercial motives actually justify the negative properties. "Someone's making money! How can you object??"

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