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Comment by LambdaComplex | Hacker News Reader

I really think Discord could pivot themselves to the SMB space if they wanted. Their audio/video call quality is better than anything else I've used, including both Zoom and Skype.

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I think the most compelling feature behind Discord is having text and voice/video channels. By allowing people to just jump into a channel instead of having to call individual people or scheduling a call, it would allow remote teams to function pretty easily.

Scheduled meetings become "here's this persistent channel for our team, this meeting calendar entry just links you to join that channel"

I think part of that is just because people who use Discord generally have good internet and good microphones. It's not Jane from accounting with an 8 year old Dell.

When talking to people with good setups Google Meet is at least as good quality in my experience. Both Discord and Meet are significantly better than Zoom, so maybe they'd have a chance for people that absolutely can't use Google Meet for some reason.

Discord's video quality is laughable. May be it depends on where in the world you are using it but it has the worst video quality in my experience.

I think the GP is referring to the video quality with Discord Nitro (their subscription service), which is not bad.

Discord seems rather good at picking data centers for chat channels optimized for good voice quality, but not always as good at picking data centers for video quality. There's some latency graphs you can discover "hidden" in Discord's desktop interface. (It's a hover over the right part of the call "bar".) You can use that information to manually override the data center for the channel. I've had some good experiences with switching data center to closer to the people experiencing the worst video quality. (Of course, you need to be a channel admin to manually change the data center. It will also kick everyone else and force a rejoin to connect to the new data center, so it is something to add to a tech rehearsal ahead of time if relying on the channel for important meetings.)

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