I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.
There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P
As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.
My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.
This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.
1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.
2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.
3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.
4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.
Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.
I mean, what do you want, it's only been around for 50 years.
Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.
It's not quite so easy anymore, partly because when you reach a certain size, it's all about controlling bots and whatnot.
I bet there’s even one related to using the word literally as hyperbole…
Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.
And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.
Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.
I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.
I don't remember marketing, though.
In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.
Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them
This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)
It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.
If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.
Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.
Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.
It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM) targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28 welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors openly selling "content".
Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.
Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do.
Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they are ethically obligated to stop bad things happening on their platform. Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform, beyond banning users in response to legal orders.
So they need to get rid of that capability
Why draw the line there? Why don't those platforms have an ethical obligation to build the features that would allow them to stop bad things happening on their platform? Especially if they knowingly developed the current implementation specifically to avoid ethical culpability?
So I am glad that software like Signal/Whatsapp exist that allow secure communication [1]. And I would take the harms causes by them being unmonitored rather than the harm of future dystopian governments. Due to how crypto works, I don't think there is much middle ground here.
[1] I would prefer open source, more community owned platforms take over than these two.
Phone and email aren't more private than Discord either. Arguably less. Difficult to get a phone these days without buying it on camera. And a phone company will give up all your messages.
Whatsapp/Signal are as close to (1) as possible by design, can't actually do (2) at all. Phone/Mail are somewhere in the middle, but quite close to (1). In most countries in the world, there is no mass recording of phone calls or mail, despite it trivially easy to do so. Moreover, due to long long historical legal precedent, I don't think phone/mail companies have any freedom to do things differently. They are pretty much constrained to do exactly what the government tells them to do.
Discord on the other hand, does not respect (1) at all. In fact, it very intentionally records and reads everything for profit. And it hands over any info requested by law enforcement. So, ethically, either they rewrite Discord to respect (1) or they should do (2). I don't think they are. As others have noted in this thread, it is trivial to find servers that are clearly criminal.
One might argue that it is impossible to do so because there are so many servers. My second political position is that if your public platform is so large that you can't effectively moderate it, that is not an excuse. You are culpable. Simply stop your platform from growing past the point where you can't effectively stop bad things happening. You don't have the right to profit while enabling bad things.
Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.
Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)
"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.
I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years
And how out of touch with teenagers are you that you think cartoons in the UI (whatever that means) are why they use it. What is a kids hobby? Gaming? You cannot call that a kids hobby.
What does that mean?
I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
chat rooms are cliques, almost always
choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online
An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.
Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.
As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.
And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.
We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.
I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.
GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.
They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.
They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc
The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.
As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.
Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.
And that whether in the ascendency or the fall, the moderators trying to maintain complete opaque control will fight to the death to keep it that way.
And where moderation is done more by feel than by rules people start self censoring and then disengage entirely.
But then you go to a discord that has moderation figured out, and its just... a nice place to be?
I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...
You wouldn't stick a kid in the pilot seat of a real Boeing 747, would you?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167147/discord-gaming-f... (2024)
EDIT- Second hint: To summon Galrog the Destroyer, say "Live. Action. Role. Playing." and clap your hands 5 times.
But fear not what is ahead; the entire moderation team's activity status has shown "Playing Roblox" for 8 hours. Luckily, it's just a simulation, and none of this is real.
I'm frankly wondering whether I should ask if you're okay. Idk if you have a legitimate dispute with Discord or some people on there (I dislike Discord as much as the next self hosting open source non walled garden fan, but this is next level), or if it's something else. Wild guess / legitimately concerned: do you have a heater that can leak carbon monoxide? Or maybe I am just extremely bad at understanding what I've just read
The moderators pretend they are vastly more important and significant than they are.
to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).
Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.
discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.
the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.
Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago
As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.
Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.
At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.
Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.
But also LinkedIn. GitHub.
Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)
I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
The biggest selling points of Discord are 1) unified login and 2) phone access.
I, personally, consider these to be negatives. However, the majority of people do not.