How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet

https://www.protocol.com/discord

by elsewhen • 6 years ago

27 19 6 years ago

davidn20• 6 years ago

Discord can be special, but at least for me, I find it hard to feel like a part of a community. Maybe it's because I'm older, maybe I'm nostalgically remembering how awesome the internet was back in the day. But, I find it extremely hard to make friends online and be a part of a community now. I tried searching out topics I'm interested in but I rarely engage with it. I find this to be true for 95% of the users.

Somewhere along the line, the switch from "these are people" to "these are random strangers on the internet" took place.

okatsu• 6 years ago

Same. I'm sure Discord is special to people today in the same way that AIM, IRC and phpBB forums were special to me growing up.

Darmody• 6 years ago

Yes and no. The massive use of the internet makes communities very different now than they were 15-20 years ago.

I don't see the same level of fascination with Discord that we had back in the day with IRC. Maybe because we're used to it now and having a chat with thousands of people.

nmfisher• 6 years ago

I grew up with IRC (and still idle on various channels, and Discord is definitely the closest anything has come to replacing that community feeling from the 90s and early 2000s.

They're all very niche servers - I'd say about 10 daily active users - which definitely helps cultivate that same intimacy (for want of a better word).

nikivi2• 6 years ago

Discord can be something special once they increase the limit of only 200 servers you can connect to.

BurritoAlPastor• 6 years ago

I can’t imagine being in 100 Discord servers. Could you share your use case?

nikivi2• 6 years ago

Just lots of communities I am part of. Some I am active in, some I joined but still want to be part of like IFTTT (don't use it but people share some interesting automation ideas there I can replicate in another system).

lazyant• 6 years ago

"invented the future of the internet" If you change the skin I could barely tell the difference with Slack. This is just showing my ignorance but I don't get what's special about any of these chatroom tools, as in they all seem interchangeable.

andreilys• 6 years ago

It’s just a clickbait headline, don’t read into it too much.

Financial incentives for these media companies necessitates the need to make outlandish clickbait claims to drive eyeballs.

bredren• 6 years ago

I also clicked assuming I had missed something about Discord.

It is bad for the brand of the publication to do this. I would have been interested in just a good overview of the company.

I did not know the founders did openfeint. I remember that product and considered it for an iOS app I was working on at the time.

What I’m not sure about is how to penalize publications for essentially false advertising in editorialized headlines. They want attention to show ads, they have to go about garnering it ethically.

capnorange• 6 years ago

My company chat is completely on Discord. It is definitely an upgrade from Slack.

naikrovek• 6 years ago

Once Discord gets threading it will be unstoppable.

RasmusSoerensen• 6 years ago

Started to really like discord. Feels a bit more like a community compared to Slack I would say

upofadown• 6 years ago

But Vind said one feature particularly stood out: "Being able to just jump on an empty voice chat, basically telling people, 'Hey, I'm here, do you want to join and talk?'"

Can anyone explain how that is different than, say, Mumble?

p0nce2• 6 years ago

Discord originally sold itself as an alternative to Mumble. We've tried Mumble during lockdown and the comparison was heavily in favour of Discord, it's simply much better.

rakoo• 6 years ago

I'm curious, would you care to expand ?

dancemethis• 6 years ago

Sounds like a very bleak future.

One where all user data and metadata are at the hands of a company that not only is able to do the same... not-quite-nice things as others did and were proven to do so by Snowden, but whose founder already had a product ending with a privacy lawsuit scandal on its bag.

banger180• 6 years ago

Too bad it is a completely proprietary walled garden and that they do not care about privacy or security.

I would love for matrix to eventually replace discord, but ATM discord is still a better user experience.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet

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