Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

https://www.ft.com/content/7e878e72-38b2-427a-a325-6a419d9f1c88

by robbiet480 • 5 years ago

224 455 5 years ago

robbiet480• 5 years ago

Interesting to read that Discord has received higher offers than previously reported, as high as $18 billion, yet Jason refuses to sell and hopes to go public. Good for him to sticking to his guns, I don’t think I could say no to $18 billion!

jtsiskin• 5 years ago

Slack was acquired for $27.7 billion. It will be interesting to see where Discord can exit.

ouid• 5 years ago

I mean, as soon as the platform IPOs, I'm going to move to something else. It is the way.

bagels2• 5 years ago

It's a chat app. I cannot imagine not selling for an offer like that. Your opportunities for what to do next would be unbounded.

twhb• 5 years ago

Not if you’d sell them too :)

Barrin92• 5 years ago

opportunities aren't really a function of money in particular in the software world. You need a good project, good people and whatnot, but you don't need 18 billion dollars for your next company.

In fact if anything I'd honestly say it might be a negative to be that wealthy. A lot of ideas are the products of inventiveness in the face of constraints and a sense of urgency. There is a lot of super-wealthy 30 year olds that have emerged out of the big IPOs and a lot of them have basically retired.

scumcity• 5 years ago

From his perspective: he is set regardless. Much better to ride out the amazing windfall of his own creation than vesting in peace at some mediocre ladder-driven megacorp.

vimy2• 5 years ago

If they find a way to make discord a central part of the (VR) metaverse it will be worth a lot more. I could see them launching a competitor to Facebook’s Horizon. It makes a lot of sense.

Context: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/mark-zuck...

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-bil...

hammyhavoc6• 5 years ago

Matrix or death.

est• 5 years ago

Matrix is a good protocol but the apps were meh!

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

you have unverified logins verify this session please backup your keys D'Arvit!

sodality22• 5 years ago

Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me. It's a good UI but to consider them in the same ballpark is pretty uncomparable to me

awake• 5 years ago

I had very high hopes for matrix because of the bridging capabilities but I was sorely disappointed after spending a couple hours to set it all up. Some of the bridges require violating the TOS for other applications, or going into the dev tools to copy cookies. Basically completely unapproachable for non-programmers. Once you have a bridge it's impossible to start a new chat with someone in another app. You need to start the chat in the other app, wait for the matrix bridge to be notified of the chat, and then you can continue the conversation in matrix.

ls152• 5 years ago

Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me.

In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever.

That's an instant knockout for Discord for me. There is no way that I willingly let companies read my private communication in 2021 after everything that we learned over the last couple of years. No amount of nice productivity features can compensate for that.

hammyhavoc6• 5 years ago

Matrix is a protocol, not a UI. There are many Matrix clients with vastly different UIs and UX. To distil Matrix down to a 'UI' is missing the entire point of Matrix. It is like email, it will inevitably become ubiquitous. 35m users so far: https://element.io/blog/element-raises-30m-as-matrix-explode...

There's a reason that governments, militaries and healthcare systems are choosing Matrix over Discord!

I've bridged all my other messaging apps to Matrix, now I just need a single messaging app. I even get my SMS via Matrix. Can Discord do that? Nope. If it could, would you trust it? Probably not.

AnnoyedComment• 5 years ago

Once again showing that a shitty interface isn't a problem if you can just advertise the right way.

HumanMusic• 5 years ago

That's a complaint I keep hearing. But the reason I switched to discord in the first place was because I loved the interface. Both in terms of usability and aesthetics. Makes me wonder why there is such a gap in how people rate their interface.

keithnz2• 5 years ago

I initially found discord UI a little confusing, not sure why. I use it all the time for work, and the layout is essentially the same as slacks. Admining servers is much nicer with discord.

c0nducktr• 5 years ago

I'm pretty happy with the interface, with a couple exceptions:

1) I'd like to be able to collapse, or reposition, the right panel (the one with the users in it).

2) I'd like to be able to have multiple channels open at once. This one is probably my biggest complaint. It's frustrating having to frequently click back and forth between different channels in a server.

I'm sure I could find more things to complain about if those were resolved, but those two changes would make me content with the UI.

Give me some other themes too, I suppose. Maybe a really dark one.

elefanten• 5 years ago

They won their market share with their early demographics by being a better product flat out. Whether the visual design is to your taste or not, you’re fooling yourself about the reason for their success.

neither_color• 5 years ago

I feel like a boomer when it comes to discord because lots of niche information, utilities, mods, and discussions that I used to google search for and find on forums and subreddits have moved to discord servers and as a non social gamer I find it chaotic and cluttered. I suppose it's different for people who grew up using it to play games with their friends as it became their go-to community tool.

For example if I want the latest info on the state of installing a certain linux distro on macbooks with T2 chips I have to open discord and figure out which unlabeled icon on the left out of dozens of servers I'm in that I visit infrequently has the information I'm looking for. I don't use the servers often enough to memorize their "logo" so it would be helpful if I could see names there. If I want to report a bug in a VR app the only way to be sure the developer sees it is to again dig through those dozens of unlabeled server icons then figure out which of the many text channels I have to put my question in. If I want to be notified when Nvidia cards are in stock at Best Buy I have to find the drop server, find the channel with the pinned message and click on the right "reaction" emoji. I'm not sure why the new generation prefers this format but it is what it is, no harder than digging through IRC channels and usenet but not much of a better experience, personally.

matthewfcarlson• 5 years ago

I quite prefer discord over lots of other solutions (slack or zoom). But their place as a forum is interesting and you make an excellent point for the concern that it pushing lots of good content out of the public web and into private spaces. I wonder if discord could add a feature that publishes chat logs in a way that could be crawled by search engines.

fnomnom• 5 years ago

for me its just like irc. irc was used to organize tech and gaming communities for years and years and was not really more user friendly or organized.

herbst8• 5 years ago

Windows is still relevant too. Average people don't care about UX it seems.

Ekaros5• 5 years ago

And what is the competition there outside Mac? I haven't yet felt at any time that Linux offered superior UX experience. Maybe I'm too used to Windows...

plugger2• 5 years ago

In comparison to Teams, Discord is a godsend. I think the biggest problem in this space is a lack of quality competition.

0des• 5 years ago

How are we approaching 2022 and I still cannot click-to-reply in Teams?

ndespres• 5 years ago

Or alt+tab into Teams on macOS?

AtomicOrbital• 5 years ago

Bravo ... discord client on Ubuntu has never crashed or sat there using 100% of cpu doing nothing unlike Teams

plugger2• 5 years ago

lol, I use Teams in the browser on Debian for work as it only takes a few hours before the "Teams Preview" fat client for linux starts consuming every cpu cycle my host has available.

herbst8• 5 years ago

That may works with the client, but not as a tab which sorrily is the only privacy sensible option

riffic2• 5 years ago

Teams is an abomination, in other words it's a typical Microsoft product.

dimmke• 5 years ago

It really is. It doesn’t even make a casual attempt to adhere to MacOS interface guidelines. Even the notification system is completely custom and doesn’t work with the OS level system.

It’s insulting.

yarky5• 5 years ago

OT but seriously, name one good Microsoft product other than paint.

MarcusE1W• 5 years ago

I have to admit I am almost surprised by this. Microsoft has quite some experience with bad chat software. You would think they learned one or two things that they can do better. I

I have to work with Teams every day and many times I wonder who thought the way it works is a good idea? There are so many other decent products mentioned here like Discord, Mattermost, Slack. Just nick a few ideas from each and set up a not exciting but equally decent chat software. Somehow Microsoft managed to make it worse ..

granshaw• 5 years ago

There’s Teams, Slack, and Discord… what else would you like to see from a competitor? Lemme guess, not Electron based?

falcolas• 5 years ago

Disclaimer - I can't read the article; paywalled(and I don't care enough to bypass it).

That said, will discord lose those initial advocates - gamers - in the process? They're already cracking down on NSFW channels, and constantly making things less convenient and more locked down in their pursuit of the general public.

adamnemecek• 5 years ago

I feel like in order to campfire business users, they would have to rebrand. Discord is a cool name for gamers, but maybe not for your average business person.

MiddleEndian• 5 years ago

At least they're not called GIMP in all caps

bityard• 5 years ago

Slack does not seem like it would be good name for business use as well, and yet tons of businesses use it.

_jal• 5 years ago

What I find amusing is that both of the names, intentionally or not, are related to mock-religions.

handrous• 5 years ago

It's incredible that two of the front-runner chat programs in 2021 are called Slack and Discord, yet neither name is, AFAIK, related to or inspired by the Church of the Subgenius or Discordianism in any way.

noobermin2• 5 years ago

It isn't just the name.

riffic2• 5 years ago

This is the part of the thread where we bikeshed a bit over the name of an app.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

Hey man hop on Discord, let’s go over some brain MRIs!

jamesgreenleaf• 5 years ago

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/uSlv7

nyolfen3• 5 years ago

best description i've heard of discord ux is that it feels like hanging out at a chuck-e-cheese

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 5 years ago

Not sure what that is meant to convey except scorn. Discord's UI works fine for lots of us and I don't see any relationship with Chuck-E-Cheese here.

nyolfen3• 5 years ago

it means it feels age-inappropriate for an adult to use, like hanging out at a children's arcade

Gunax2• 5 years ago

I despise discord. It's bloatware. It has constant popups that are difficult to disable.

I do read their tech posts on HN, and they are always fascinating. But it seems to me like a product that the MBAs have taken a over.

bbellini2• 5 years ago

Mind going into more details about the popups? Ive been using for years and cant say I've ever had a popup besides the occasional changelog.

mehlmao• 5 years ago

This week they've been pushing some new Discord college spaces; asking me to connect my account to a .edu mail address. Believe I've seen the popup twice on my desktop, and once on mobile.

Gunax2• 5 years ago

Yea so if you install it, it will harass you about 'going live' everytine you launch a fullscreen app. Then it puts some box in the corner (sorry cannot remember what it said)

You can disable it per application of course... But I just wanted it gone.

Also it makes incessant beeping noises, which again can only be disabled per room.

noobermin2• 5 years ago

Too bad their users in particular aren't the kind to be open minded to other platforms, they just follow the crowd. As an answer to the headline, they'll fail in their attempts to gain in other avenues because not everyone is a follower like gamers are.

popinman3222• 5 years ago

I can only speak to my own experience here, but I use Discord because:

- It's easy to onboard non-technical users.

- It has a huge existing user-base.

- It's feature-rich but with good UX so it doesn't feel overwhelming.

- Voice calls are consistently high quality, even with people that have bad connections.

Gamers have a history of amplifying each others' displeasure with things; if the platform wasn't better than the alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, etc.) they wouldn't be using it.

tester346• 5 years ago

Could you name at least two other platforms that offer at least

Decent chat (file sharing, emojis, support for code snippets), decent voice chat, decent streaming and supports PUSH2TALK button? and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk

Because I'm unable to name and that's why I started using Discord

arc-in-space• 5 years ago

That's a bit strange. Aside from the rare changelog or new features, I only get any popups when I log into it from a new machine, or through private mode. Mostly using the desktop version, mobile occasionally.

ejj285• 5 years ago

Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.

I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.

m01120893474r• 5 years ago

you don't have to host it

I really wish you could though

ejj285• 5 years ago

A lot of the ease of using Discord comes from the fact that every server just works, and you can join using a link. If people could host their own servers I'd imagine you'd end up with poorly-hosted servers that would degrade the overall experience.

sellyme3• 5 years ago

Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX

Since I started using Discord, they have on three separate occasions moved a button I used frequently, and in its place added a button that attempts to extract money from me.

They've established a pattern of trying to monetise the application by tricking the user into doing something that they didn't want to do. That isn't just bad UX, it's actively hostile.

ejj285• 5 years ago

I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.

swiley• 5 years ago

Discord has taken things that worked in the web client and removed them to force you to download their app.

cfgghsj• 5 years ago

Tried to ask the Matrix devs about room emotes being broken on Android (though they work on web) and they just ignored me completely. Matrix is simply half baked and somehow barely works so that I keep using it. But they aren't even close to the point where things just work.

feanaro• 5 years ago

How are room emotes broken on Android?

DoItToMe812• 5 years ago

Room emotes? Custom emoticons? WTF, what client are you running? That sounds great.

alpaca1282• 5 years ago

What's intuitive about having to click one of the tiniest buttons in a corner of the screen to disconnect voice chat? I literally killed the process a couple times when I started using Discord because I couldn't find it. Why can I double-click to join a channel but not leave with any UI in the same area?

It also took me a while to figure out how to quit the damn thing. The only way seems to be right-clicking the tray icon. Which is nice as long as you have a tray in the first place. Having a "File > Quit" menu wouldn't have hurt. Or a button in the same menu that lets me log out and disable the account.

And judging by the fan noise in my laptop the Discord app seems to be a heavier burden than my Firefox session with over 1000 tabs. Now at least it's not particularly slow, but I don't understand why I should use Discord unless I have to.

bruce3434342• 5 years ago

How about clicking the bright red phone hang up button.

Other than that, most chat apps minimize to tray these days. You can toggle that behavior in the settings.

With your last point, I agree. It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.

TchoBeer• 5 years ago

I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.

You say this like they should contradict, but heavy use of Discord should only make the UX more intuitive to you. Maybe it's less intuitive to less heavy users?

dancemethis3• 5 years ago

It's proprietary and extremely hostile towards user privacy. There is no reason to use it.

hurflmurfl• 5 years ago

There is no reason to use it [if you value open source and privacy above everything else].

Amasuriel• 5 years ago

I’ve used discord for a long time and greatly prefer it to slack, teams and Mattermost (the three competitors I’ve used most often). Ironically the only think stopping me from strongly advocating for its adoption in business is that I’m already a user!

Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.

If I could stay logged into my social discord servers with my gamer handle and be being logged into work servers with work handles, especially on mobile, they would gain traction I think. Add active directory account management as a paid option and would be an easy sell some places.

lillecarl• 5 years ago

I've thought exactly this for years now and I'm so surprised nothing has happened.

returnInfinity• 5 years ago

I have to agree with this. I find discord better than slack and I don't want to mix my gaming life with work.

ComodoHacker2• 5 years ago

I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix

Looks like the only one who support this is Telegram. Might be because they (supposedly) don't mine your data.

afiori• 5 years ago

I am curious now can you explain more? As far as I know Telegram requires a unique phone number for every account on registration.

nottorp2• 5 years ago

Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.

This. It's pretty much impossible to run several identities on Discord. If we ever move work to it i want it separate from my gaming discords.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

I don't understand why is it impossible to run several identities? I have one account for work and one personal account for gaming. It is possible for me and I did not have any issues.

skybrian• 5 years ago

Do you mean on the web? You should use separate browser profiles for home and work.

(Speaking generally. I haven’t used Discord, but I don’t trust websites to keep multiple logins straight.)

Similarly for mobile, look into keeping apps separate at the OS level or carry two phones.

gotbeans• 5 years ago

Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.

I think there are quite other social networks that tried to retain the "universal identity" idea while completely and entirely missing this point.

southerntofu11• 5 years ago

And that's why you want federated, pseudonymous networks and not a centralized walled gardens who gets to decide who you are and what you can do.

midnightGhost• 5 years ago

Discord now lets you change your username and avatar per server. Though to have a different avatar on different servers you need nitro.

capableweb2• 5 years ago

Still doesn't solve the problem. In Discord you only have one account, loose access to that account for some reason, you loose access to both private and work related matters.

Instead, if Discord want to be taken seriously, need to allow multiple accounts on the same device, so people can switch between things.

deerIRL• 5 years ago

As far as I know this is still in A/B testing as well, and not a fully rolled out feature. I've had a friend with it for the better part of the year, yet I have yet to get the option on any of my servers.

hnick• 5 years ago

People can still click your name and view your account name#number. They can also view mutual servers and friends. I don't necessarily want people in two communities to know or care that I am the same person.

I'm by default a private person, I feel uneasy sharing my preferences with people (even basic things like music that I like) and I don't like these broadcasted social features. The first thing I did when installing Discord was turning off the feature that says what game I am playing.

dalmo32• 5 years ago

I've switched to Jami and was pleasantly surprised that I was be able to create multiple accounts in seconds. You can even have a video conference between your multiple accounts!

It's now my first choice chat app, but there's no social features so it's nowhere near a full replacement for Discord.

SmooL• 5 years ago

I've used discord for a number of years, and use it almost daily with my friends. Arguments over UX will always be opinionated, but one thing where discord absolutely shines is voice chat. There's just no competition to any other voice chat system out there; it's fast, it's high quality, and most importantly, it filters out non-voices. Clapping, water faucet, vacuums, crunching chips, coughing, breathing, desk noises, none of it comes through and all of it gets filtered out. It makes for a significantly better experience when I don't have to deal with someone else's "voice chat etiquette" incompetence/ignorance.

rightbyte• 5 years ago

There's just no competition to any other voice chat system out there

Steam's voice chat is nice. Somehow low latency VOIP where you don't interrupt eachother due to lag is something only gamers need ...

Skype used to be good too. Somewhere down the line they switched to some high latency mess.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

I hope not, I don't like the tiny realm vibe I get on discord servers. I find it too stiff and less friendly than most webirc sites (i know irc is not 10% of discord in terms of features but even then I find the added bonuses aren't worth that negative feeling.)

popinman3222• 5 years ago

What do you mean by "tiny realm vibe"?

Are you on mostly smaller servers, or is it unrelated to server size?

You can definitely port the crushing silence/violent turmoil dichotomy of a large freenode room to Discord with enough users.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

So often on discord i feel a vibe of "its our place our rules" something I never sensed on irc. People kick you blind at the first polite disagreement. IRC doesn't breed this to this extent even on the worst Channels I ran into. And o irc, kicks happen if someone abuses others a lot. Not if you voice a different opinion (again politely)

Hence my belief that discord makes people built tiny castles way too stiff.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

to add a little, on IRC i often have a feeling I'm joining a topic, on discord I feel like joining a brand

people dont feel like they own #anxiety on freenode for instance..

gogs• 5 years ago

If they wants everybody else, let's start by adding the "hide my cam/stream" option, and adding a background blur feature.

sadness34• 5 years ago

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.

Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.

It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.

TulliusCicero3• 5 years ago

I'd say it does more than one thing well, but yeah it's always sad to see every company chase forever growth and often ruin their core product in doing so.

mihaifm• 5 years ago

Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.

themacguffinman3• 5 years ago

This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.

konschubert• 5 years ago

Maybe that's okay.

Be THE product for half a decade, make your money, close up, next venture.

sadness34• 5 years ago

It takes significant evolution to just keep doing what you set out to do well. Running a successful mechanics business to repair cars means continuously updating your skills and tools. Eventually you become a flying car repair shop. It doesn't mean you have to grow to encompass every aspect of the automobile industry and compete with Repco and Mobil.

zelphirkalt• 5 years ago

I would not confuse the need for further developing ones tech, with the need for growing (in employees, customers, and whatever else). A product can stay relevant, if it keeps up with the tech, but does not necessarily need to capture every possible customer on the planet, not even as a goal.

lmm4• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.

michaelt2• 5 years ago

The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight.

Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.

On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.

So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)

vodkapump2• 5 years ago

My main recent annoyance is that they removed the mentions tab on mobile, and replaced it with some weird feature called stage (some sort of clubhouse ripoff where you do... livestreaming?) It placed the mentions in under the search(?!?!) tab, which adds 2 clicks, and also added significant time delays sometimes when the search tab has to load for 3-10seconds........ I have a server with lots of discord "OGs" back from 2015, and it's the most complained about change that has been discussed in that server, by far.

square_usual4• 5 years ago

Th thing I hate the most about the mentions-under-search bit is that it's so unintuitive. I had a couple of pings and I looked around everywhere trying to find them, and the removal of the very helpfully labelled "@" button pissed me off. I only found out the pings were under search after I read the changelog.

And for what? Discord stages are an absolute ghost town. The top ones are all "Talent shows" in bait servers. I don't mind changing UX as much as most people on HN, but changing UX to chase a fad that has already died out really grinds my gears.

lloydatkinson3• 5 years ago

I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.

Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content

southerntofu11• 5 years ago

Blame capitalism for aiming for profit, not actual service to people.

hhsbz2• 5 years ago

I use discord only for gaming but the entire app was full of text strings that made me cringe. I'm glad they have got rid of them.

southerntofu11• 5 years ago

Do you have a few examples, for someone who's never used Discord?

sadness34• 5 years ago

It didn't matter to me that half of the loading messages weren't funny. I could tell from the moment I opened the app that they understood who I was and why I was there. I was there to have fun, and they got me. Now they have started the journey to be all things to all people, and I will not be surprised if they end up as nothing to anyone.

leshenka• 5 years ago

and becoming a bloated mess

too late

danuker3• 5 years ago

Discord has done some shady stuff for quite some time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...

speedgoose• 5 years ago

I use Discord in a web browser for these reasons. The web sandbox has benefits.

ohgodplsno• 5 years ago

Discord enumerates processes to discover OBS to turn on streamer mode, as well as being able to display what game you're playing. Disable the "share my current game" feature and there is no longer any ptracing

stared• 5 years ago

I have the same feeling.

If they succeed, they will become Slack 2. If they don't, they will sink their ship.

perryizgr84• 5 years ago

If they don't, they will sink their ship.

Why would gamers stop using it?

globular-toast4• 5 years ago

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.

IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.

jeltz2• 5 years ago

No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.

thiht• 5 years ago

Are you kidding? IRC doesn’t let you update or remove your messages, doesn’t have a permanent history, doesn’t even properly handle accounts and chan owners, doesn’t support any kind of rich text by itself, has netsplits, … what does it do well exactly? The protocol is simple and I had fun speaking on IRC through telnet when I was younger but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it

oriki2• 5 years ago

IRC does one thing and does it well.

Unfortunately, the one thing that it does well (chat, and nothing else) is supported by a dozen things that it does terribly, and support for them has been hacked on top of the chat features in most places.

Bouncers, persistency, rich media (youtube/twitter/image embeds come to mind), mobile accessibility, presence, the ease of channel ownership... these are all things that IRC lacks. Users don't want to switch from their chat app to their imaging sharing app to send a friend a picture inline. IRC works great where people are willing to put in the work to make it great for themselves individually, but the people Discord appeals to aren't really like that.

d3nj4l• 5 years ago

Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.

This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.

rb6662• 5 years ago

You must know a lot of people who take themselves too seriously.

petre2• 5 years ago

Not using Discord but I always compile my pure-ftpd with the --without-humor and --with-boring flags. Funny is relative.

gchamonlive2• 5 years ago

They should just have a separate platform mode.

Like Discord Businesses. Discord B8s.

blackearl• 5 years ago

I'm definitely in the camp of "don't patronize me with being a 'silly' corporation". I don't believe you, you're trying to make money, trying to be pals with me grosses me out.

lynndotpy2• 5 years ago

This was my impression as well.

By coincidence, I recently stumbled upon this 'Discord for Business' support post from 2018 (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600302...) that generated almost 200 upvotes and 100 comments. I

The post starts as follows:

My company is presently evaluating alternatives to Slack internally. Turns out, Discord is one of the most feature rich alternatives, with a relatively smooth UI and voice/video/screenshare capability. I couldn't even get half of about 10 people on the testing committee to try it.
The reasons:
-The logo in the tray is a video game controller
-The home screen shows a listing of games
-The chat bot addressed a female employee when she joined as "love"
-Touchpoint emails aren't asking for feedback, they're talking about the journey for users to share gaming experiences
Except the third one above, none of these are "bad" per se. And the product is really solid. There's a market there that could certainly use it as is, but perhaps an even bigger (and more lucrative one) that will be turned off to the current state. We're not moving forward with Discord because we don't feel it really has us as a high value audience. But some tweaks to modify the UI/UX to meet these differing needs based on license type may be worth exploring.

gambiting• 5 years ago

>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs.

It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?

da_big_ghey• 5 years ago

In chat app this is not so much an option because network effects. Nobody will use 17 chat app with a different for each thing, only 4 or 5.

antris4• 5 years ago

It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.

I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers.

It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down.

We need a systemic change.

nhumrich• 5 years ago

blind to the needs of their customers

Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.

darthrupert2• 5 years ago

What does it do well? I'm genuinely asking.

DownGoat2• 5 years ago

Voice chat. It is superior to any other platform on this aspect other than TeamSpeak. We regularly have 40+ people in voice channels without people suffering from connection issues, bad audio quality, and lot's of noise.

dancemethis3• 5 years ago

The one thing it does really well is getting personal user data and metadata while convincing people to defend it.

jstummbillig• 5 years ago

Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well.

This perception of games is pretty outdated and I assume that is what Discord has come to realize as well. Video games (and gamers) are approaching to be as varied as music (and its listeners) and the only reason they have not achieved parity yet is the difference in how long each has been around as a mass medium.

Games have intrinsic qualities that set them apart from music, movies or other mediums – but being "fun" is certainly not it, and "gamery" would, at best, serve as a tautology.

p0nce• 5 years ago

the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal".

It may be worse for you, but it feels way better to me. It has been very annoying to introduce Discord in work/casual settings and see it labelled as "a gamer thing". Right call by Discord.

kwanbix• 5 years ago

Honest question here. What is so good about discord? It reminds me more if IRC than a modern chat app. I really don't get it. Maybe I am missing something?

MatthewMob• 5 years ago

Voice, video and text chat with unlimited bandwidth, streaming resolution and storage space all for free, and all much, _much_ easier to use for the average user than any other voice and video communication client ever made.

andrei_says_2• 5 years ago

That’s why I use basecamp - they’re explicit and clear about staying small and profitable enough, with zero ambition for infinite growth.

G4BB3R• 5 years ago

The company I work use basecamp and I love it! The only thing I wish it had is subcomments like slack.

sfg• 5 years ago

Growth and change is why they exist. Its why they might replace things in other sectors and so make those sectors better.

Its why they might fail and make things worse, at which point, it is why someone else will come along to try and make things better.

Sometimes things are best left alone, but if this is attempted generally, then it'll probably lead to a stagnant pond, rather than a pleasant lake. Fresh flowing water is key.

Also, not sure how many agree with you on the cutesy humour. Maybe, it was just time for that to go.

kaonashi• 5 years ago

If you take any investment money, then you're beholden to investors and investors want growth.

dcow6• 5 years ago

The casual brand is great, but those loading antics are dumb. Nobody actually likes them. This is great news, Discord really, badly, needs multi account support, screen-share and video in stage channels, an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits), sso support, and possibly server DMs instead of global DMs (possibly addressing associated data segregation issues). Otherwise their product already works awesome for smaller more open minded businesses. We replaced Slack with it this week and I don’t see us going back.

Also I want to point out that nothing in the article indicates a shift to b2b. It sounds more like they are going after parteon, onlyfans, consoles, twitch, etc. I just kinda assume they will develop some more mature user management and server payment options along the way.

lynndotpy2• 5 years ago

Multi-account support is extremely important. Professors at my university have started hosting accounts on Discord, and people have been unable to make second accounts without second phone numbers.

The result being that peoples personal and professional lives have started to overlap, which (naturally) results in dangerous positions for some people.

I'm especially concerned if something like disc-cool starts up again, or the data from it gets leaked. (Disc-cool was a group that used self-bots to create a database of harvested messages, letting you search up any users message history.)

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

multi account support

That would be great even without any business features. Some open source projects are starting to use discord and it would be nice for some users to link and use their github names and identities for these servers.

Sohcahtoa828• 5 years ago

an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits)

What's stopping an organization from buying multiple server boosts from a single account to unlock these features? If you need the level 3 perks, you can have a single account, owned by the organization, purchase the 30 server boosts to get there.

Or am I misunderstanding the problem?

kulahan• 5 years ago

What does discord do really well? I’ve had channels mysteriously become inaccessible until whoever posted something deletes it. The “stay on top” feature for watching a stream never seems to work very well. For some stupid reason, chat and streams aren’t integrated, so you have to chat in an associated channel which is different from where you’re watching the stream. All kinds of icons are hidden until you happen to mouse over them, which is objectively bad design. If you receive an @ and the chat continues on significantly before you see it, clicking on that channel doesn’t take you to the mention, but rather some other, seemingly random location in chat history (sometimes I don’t find it and just give up).

Discord doesn’t seem to do anything well except sign users up quickly.

dcow6• 5 years ago

There are UX quirks to solve for sure but those are entirely solvable. Discord does private audio chat really well.

screye• 5 years ago

I wonder if discord could straight up sell/separate a 'fork' of their platform that targets a completely different audience.

The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus.

Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (enthusiast) Supra profitable, was to build it on the same platform as the (normie) BMW Z4. The Z4 gets some of the spice of the Supra, and the Supra owners don't feel cheated out of a place in the industry. Effectively, both cars maintain the same back end, but completely different front ends. Maybe discord could do the same. If reddit was run by competent people, then they'd know to continue supporting old.reddit.com for the same reason.

Some aspects of Discord's platform are incredibly useful and class leading. However, their users are a very particular kind of internet person, and the complete un-intuitiveness of the platform highlights that. You can't preserve the 4chan-esque spastic wonder of a platform while still appealing to normies, businesses and older folks.

A platform as funny/productive as 4chan and as sanitized as Teams is the holy-grail. Alas, like all holy-grails, it seems entirely unattainable.

dcow6• 5 years ago

Yeah this has been my hope too. The fact that you can’t separate the two right now is holding the platform back. I also wish for a business grade frontend that can be sold as a digital office (we have been experimenting this week with using discord as such), but in lieu of that I think simply supporting multiple accounts in the client would go a really long way. The problem is avatars are account bound so you can’t separate your work persona from your social persona, which matters when your social persona enjoys nsfw hobbies or even simply when you want a punk avatar for one and a headshot for the other. IMO having separate personas is the only way to allow the platform to retain its good qualities while expanding into markets where the masses preside. If people have to use one identity for everything then that identity becomes sterile, and Discord’s biggest success is that it fosters private communities where you can shitpost and trash talk with your close friends while breaking some sweat in <game>.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus.

Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...

NoSorryCannot• 5 years ago

Discord doesn't even do its one thing all that well.

The client is buggy and slow.

It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem.

Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.

It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really.

Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.

oriki2• 5 years ago

Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.

I agree from a moral standpoint but because of the general use of emoji in servers, it really doesn't prove to be that much of an issue. People also enjoy using their own emoji, which is generally good for communities.

I think you'll find that as users find platforms to coalesce and try and build communities on, they'll want those customizations. Being able to use them anywhere on the platform is just a bonus - unpaid users can still use those emoji within the servers they come from.

ulimn• 5 years ago

Is nobody concerned about privacy?

I don't like this: https://www.tosdr.org/en/service/discord

ajkdhcb2• 5 years ago

I logged in to write the same.

I have never installed Discord because its privacy policies are scary

herbst8• 5 years ago

Obviously a bloated UI for chatting is more important than privacy. At least for their audience

saladuh3• 5 years ago

(So this turned into a log rant... sorry)

Nope, sadly not! People are complacent and unwilling to make a change due to the convience of it. Most people are unwilling to leave the online friends behind that refuse to join you on more ethical platforms. People become tied to communities, of which most are on Discord, and are unwilling to leave them out of fear of feeling alone, or because they require whatever feelings of happiness/dopamine they get from those communities.

I used discord primarily for a large friend group, on one guild/server, but of course was in a bunch of other servers for things that were ultimately useless. Leaving Discord made me feel less controlled by the dopamine effect of interacting with 'communities'. My friends barely use discord for anything other than our friend group, but are unwilling to move off of it because 'pretty UI', or 'emojis', or 'bots', etc. Some of them "don't care about privacy" because "no one at discord cares about your messages/data", " I have nothing to hide", the usual fallacies regarding privacy. The last reason is "laze"/"don't care".

My friends are all in the tech/software space, have careers or are aiming for careers in the space. Some of them even share posts from Hacker News on the regular. Some use Linux, one of them even uses it partly out of privacy concerns. Point is, they're not oblivious to this stuff. If anyone begins to start trying out other services with me like Matrix, they're immediately disuaded because someone else in the group doesn't want to and says they're never going to leave Discord.

I've since just been using a Matrix bridge to continue being part of the group. I've decided though that I will have no part in Discord's increasing monopoly in the chat message space, with their walled garden practices. Once Matrix native voice and video chat rolls out, I'm done with the Matrix-Discord bridge. If my friends don't want to make ethical decisions and put themselves back in control of their online lives and data, then I lose my online group chat. So be it. I'll still see them out in the real world. Friends (for better or worse) come and go every decade. Sucks but I'm so done with no one caring and having to jump through hoops for people who don't care.

kome• 5 years ago

I really dislike discord (slack for zoomers) and slack (discord for boomers). They are so bloated, messy and ugly. I still prefer email. The good side of discord and slack is that they are SO easy to ignore, and it was awesome when some of the groups i work with switched to them: the quantity of my email decreased significantly. By never checking them, I might miss a couple of things, but nothing worth the hassle.

hendry• 5 years ago

Sworn off Discord since I discovered it's really hard to get your chat logs out https://youtu.be/wA1aaIA27Iw

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

Discord is the classic freemium monopoly trap. They want to capture market share with a walled garden and once they do they will alter the terms to milk out every last drop of revenue they can before everyone jumps ship to the new new thing.

tester346• 5 years ago

Could you name at least two other platforms that offer at least

Decent chat (file sharing, emojis, support for code snippets), decent voice chat, decent streaming and supports PUSH2TALK button?

and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk, but it's not must have.

and is e.g F/OSS?

Because I'm unable to name and that's why I started using Discord

dudus• 5 years ago

MSFT Teams, Slack, Google Chat. Hate as much as you want but there's virtually no difference in terms of capabilities among these players.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

Would you also like fries with that? Of course you arent going to get the same for $0 (discord is not free, you re just wasting investor money).

Mattermost is the best self-hosted alternative and it works great for the chat part. Dont know about the rest.

5e92cb50239222b2• 5 years ago

I don't know about streaming (have no use for it and it sounds like a kitchen sink), but Telegram has everything else you've listed.

danuker3• 5 years ago

Chat: Mattermost

Voice chat with push-to-talk: Mumble

Streaming: OBS

and I personally prefer when it is not self-hosted due to DDoS risk

Only let your friends connect via Wireguard.

gefhfff• 5 years ago

Element[0]: hast everything except probably push to talk.

You can freely choose a real server and can talk to anyone on any other server.

[0] https://element.io

codingdave• 5 years ago

When you pile together half a dozen different requirements, of course the number of products in the middle of your resulting Venn diagram is going to be narrowed down to one. Especially if you already had that answer in mind when you laid out your requirements list. The question that needs asked is not, "What is the one product that exactly fits my personal needs?", but "What feature set of a communication platform meets most of the needs of most of the people?"

Is Discord the best answer to that broader question, to handle many different use cases for many different audiences? If so, it makes sense for them to expand their market. If not, stick to what they are good at.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

Mumble fits 2/4 of those. Chat with emoji/better drag-and-drop file sharing would be trivial I expect, with full-time developers paid to make it happen.

Seamless video streaming is harder. And like others said, Discord is pretty much spyware freemium software. Your incredible experience is being subsidized by investors and your own data.

bee_rider2• 5 years ago

The chat app treadmill.

Every couple years a new chat app with the same basic features as the last one (and slightly better background noise filtering) will crop up. However, the new chat app won't contain the legacy contact information of people you don't really want to talk to anymore, but feel awkward about deleting. And the old chat app will have started to do annoying things for monetization purposes, having run out of VC money.

And of course, you use the new chat app. You will try, but fail, to convince your friends to use the open source alternative. It requires self-hosting and IP addresses.

scanr• 5 years ago

I use teams at work. I hadn’t used discord much but then did for a hackthebox CTF.

I found discord way better for work that involves dynamic collaboration ie where folk are often working individually or jumping into each other’s streams to work together.

To achieve something similar in teams we have an open all day meeting that people pop into but it’s sub par vs the discord model.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

There is a huge wave of transitions from reddit/ forums towards discord because it offers voice chat / image uploads for free. It's not gonna last at that, chat is a bad format compared to hierarchical replies, hard to search etc. Gaming is their niche but at some point games will want to stop bleeding their community to them. There is also a proliferation of communities which leads to a lot of activity because it's a new platform, but as always, very few of them will survive. Then at some point they 'll also block all NSFW content and more people will leave. The value of their offering is that they re free, but money runs out, and slack already exists. Another case of overfunding for unsustainable growth.

toxik• 5 years ago

Block all non-NSFW? Are you saying it'll turn into PornHub but without the educational videos?

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Reddit also provides image uploads for free, and most people on discord never use the voice chats as far as I can tell.

It's mostly real-time vs less than real-time communication. Discord for what is worth isn't that hard to search, and I wouldn't mind if they gave the option to some servers to have their logs automatically go to a crawlable page so they'd be indexed by Google. Of course, that won't work everywhere as real-time chats are often also used as they feel more ephemeral.

foxpurple2• 5 years ago

No one uses voice chat in public servers. You use voice chat in private friends servers. You get home turn on your desktop and see 3 friends on a chat and join in.

Ekaros5• 5 years ago

I see it as complementary service. Reddit and forums aren't really suitable for chatting. Where as discord wills that niche very well. So communities will consist of forum/sub-reddit and a chat on Discord. One is more permanent and one is more ephemeral...

lloydatkinson3• 5 years ago

Many software development communities are on Discord. General purpose ones as well as specific ones. There's one for Vue and a wannabe-official C#/.NET one (that's also pretty toxic unfortunately), and ones for other big frameworks and languages.

hocuspocus• 5 years ago

Discord can thank GitLab there. Gitter had pretty much conquered that entire space before its acquisition.

lloydatkinson3• 5 years ago

Interesting I didn't know this

haunter• 5 years ago

True sign of success: HN doesn't get the appeal of the product and they wonder why people are using it.

This have happened so many times, it's actually a good indicator.

Dowwie• 5 years ago

Are you remembering the negative anecdotal evidence and disregarding the predictions that were right?

Has anyone conducted a study of HN sentiments?

stackbutterflow2• 5 years ago

Not a study but there was an article about this on the frontpage yesterday. Can't find it now.

Ekaros5• 5 years ago

Also I see nothing about Discord trying to compete with Slack or Teams. I see it to expanding other communities like sub-reddits, forums and Facebook. Offering a different service from them. And for such purpose it's perfectly good product. Managing and allowing largish communities a chat platform.

jillesvangurp2• 5 years ago

They should compete, they have most of the features already. There's no rational reason to say no to all that SAAS money given that the products are so similar.

As far as I'm concerned it's pretty much a drop in replacement for slack. There's very little that slack does that I need that discord can't do. Slack however does lack the nice/easy to use UX for talking to each other or sharing screens.

Where they lack is enterprise features that have nothing to do with the UX which would include things like auditing and security, billing for a team, ensuring everyone in the team has the premium features, etc. That's probably hard to fix because the way discord is setup, only individuals pay for getting premium features such as high resolution video for sharing. That makes more sense for gamers than for corporate usage. Likewise, you have one account on discord for every community and slack has a one account per community thing. I have about 10+ accounts with them. Really annoying actually. Discord could do something like Github did which is allowing Github members to be added to any team and managing premium features on a per team basis.

buro9• 5 years ago

A killer use of Discord... push-to-talk audio connection to everyone else in the room.

If your team is on-call and incident management could be improved, just try putting your team in a Discord room and see what happens. Don't put managers in there, just the engineers.

It works great.

dewey• 5 years ago

A killer use of Discord... push-to-talk audio connection to everyone else in the room.

Slack just added this recently: https://slack.com/intl/en-de/help/articles/4402059015315-Sta...

5e92cb50239222b2• 5 years ago

Telegram also added this a few months ago.

retor• 5 years ago

I experience them as very different.

Huddles are more like the audio calls Slack already had, but without the channel notifications.

It lacks the auto silence that Discord has, so you can't just hang in a huddle waiting for someone to talk. There's a constant hiss.

I guess they might change it, but didn't sound like this was something they were even thinking of as an issue when I spoke with a representative.

sdflhasjd• 5 years ago

I'd hardly call it a killer feature when it's something Teamspeak, etc have had for ages. The killer feature, i.e that which sets it apart from the rest, is the rich text chat and that it's free.

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

I thought the killer feature is that it is free and convenient. No one has to do any work to setup a server like with Teamspeak or Ventrilo. It has been a long time since I played video games, but back then those were the two popular options.

omot• 5 years ago

Hello!

This is the HN comments of Facebook’s latest valuation in 2007:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057

I wonder if HN will ever be bullish on a product that’s targeting the general audience. We seem to only be able to see technical expertise as the only moat. I guess this is why product managers that can’t code get paid the big bucks. Anyone know if there’s a HN made up of folks with astute product sense?

Or even better: Anyone know of a Discord server I could join. ;)

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

I wonder if HN will ever be bullish on a product that’s targeting the general audience.

Sure. I don't think anyone is doubting Discord will pump a ridiculous valuation and make boatloads of money. That's not really impressing anyone here, not anymore.

In more general terms: that you can impress the general audience with shiny trinkets, shepherd them into a walled garden, and then milk them for all they're worth - it's a well-known, common pattern. It's not interesting, except in terms of what we're losing as a society and as an industry because of it. So it's the latter things that get disproportional attention on HN.

xupybd• 5 years ago

We're using it for work. It's serving us better than Team or Zoom did and it's free.

sadness34• 5 years ago

As a personal user, I'd give Discord more money if high-resolution streaming and higher bitrates etc. were a bit cheaper, and I could buy credit which using these features ate through, instead of having to pay an overly expensive subscription.

DrBazza• 5 years ago

I can't remember where I read it (likely Joel Spolsky, or Paul Graham), but there was an article about businesses that thrive in the shadow of FAANG + MS and others because even though they're in the same business they don't compete in a way that's worth the big guys chasing.

In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord users don't care about calendar integration and so on.

Modern chat apps are a Venn diagram with a modest intersection.

I can't see how Discord can get more users without losing original users. Basically, a demographic shift. And then you're in the big guys territory where they additionally have 'killer features' already and that's where businesses get bought or fold.

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the 'Law of Line Extension'[0].

What I think they can successfully do, is rebrand as a new product (Accord is a name that might suit it, given the nature of office communications), disassociate any gamer connections, and link it to Discord by adding an account switcher.

[0] https://ericsink.com/laws/Law_12.html

lmm4• 5 years ago

I actually care a lot about calendar integration. For about two years I've been saying that our best hope for calendar software that doesn't suck is if Discord gets into it, and it's a natural fit - most of the discords I'm in have some sort of regular scheduled activity, gamers want to schedule when they can game together.

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

You might want to check Guilded (https://guilded.gg)

Ekaros5• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be entirely sure. Discord communities are much more isolated than on other social media sites. Outside discoverability, which is pretty poor you don't end up seeing what is going on even on other public servers. So if they continue to deliver good enough product to gamers and then entice other communities to join it could work very well.

basisword• 5 years ago

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it.

Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

lugged2• 5 years ago

Because its free. Slack is not.

blensor• 5 years ago

It's the easiest way for me to connect with the community, and basically every VR developer or VR project can be found there so it's easy to connect with like minded people.

There are also a lot of bots you can add for different tasks.

It kind of feels like a realtime social network.

Where it's really lacking is to structure information that should be available to anyone, but I guess that's not what it's meant for anyway

jillesvangurp2• 5 years ago

Slack is free as well. Or at least, like discord, it has a freemium layer. We use both and we pay for neither.

perryizgr84• 5 years ago

Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

It offers a couple of gamer-y features that Slack doesn't like voice channels. But make no mistake, the main reason is because it is free.

Mengkudulangsat• 5 years ago

I don't use Discord for gaming, but I do (reluctantly) have to use it for volunteering work. One day I discovered Discord sets my status as "currently playing Game X" for everyone to see, to my horror!

What an absurd privacy violation.

rb6662• 5 years ago

This is a bit ridiculous. It's a gaming platform before anything else. In that scene it's very common to share your gaming status with others.

Not to mention that you can obviously disable this.

jpindar• 5 years ago

But it only does that if you have "display current activity as a status message" selected.

thrwyoilarticle• 5 years ago

You're angry because you connected your game account to it?

Dobbs• 5 years ago

Its voice capabilities are light years ahead of slack. Which is why gamers use it.

Lvl999Noob• 5 years ago

I feel the opposite. I used slack for sometime and I felt it to be bloated. Discord feels much better to me.

morrbo• 5 years ago

From my experience:

Free

Able to hop servers/channels extremely easily (for a game it's just hey join this discord server/channel -> click and you're able to start speaking immediately)

Search is good, as it @ing someone to get their attention. Private messages also good

Share screen really easily

The bots are phenomenal. I use it to play world of Warcraft, we have a "raid bot" which is fantastic to organise stuff, and also have several music bots where everyone can hang out and listen to the same Spotify/YouTube playlists at the same time. I'm sure there are plenty of other bots but these two are just what I use.

Inline images, GIFs, videos etc are really smooth, as are reactions/replies

Drawbacks I've found:

App isn't the best. If I close it in the background as I do with most of my apps, I don't get a push notification so if someone PMs me I don't see it until I open the app again to check

Channel notifications can get overwhelming quite quickly, but tbh I'm not sure there's anything they can do about that other than maybe add an option to default mute everything and then only get notifications for what you want on joining a server.

Macha2• 5 years ago

Have you used the slack client with more than one server? Last time I did the whole UI would reload when you switched.

Discord took off because:

* The message search is much better than free tiers of slack

* You don't need to set up a separate account per server

* It didn't have the user limits of Teamspeak

* It didn't have the ads of Skype

* A big inflection point was Skype launching their desktop client that was basically Web Skype in a window and sucked

* For a server with your gaming buddies, a drop in drop out perma voice channel is really a better model than distinct calls for slack. Also for public servers. And if you want to VC with your friends 1:1, the option is still there.

* Link sharing to invite users to a server vs having to set up a server/bot to give out invites as running a public slack used to require. Also used to not even require an account so was great for that pick up player you found for one night

* For the large server setups, discord's permission/moderation setup is way more flexible than Slack's. Slack basically has admin/not admin. (though discord does need to separate pinning from deleting other user's messages)

---

For a summary, Slack is targeted at the business case. In a workplace chat, there should be no need to moderate, since bad behaviour can be taken to someone's boss/HR. And the sign up/multi server flow was not optimised for this usage model as Slack didn't care (at least when I last tried public Slacks, these days the only Slack I use is my employer's).

Discord is actually optimised for consumer use cases, and consequently built up such a network effect that even if Slack did invest heavily in their UX there, would be quite behind.

DownGoat2• 5 years ago

One of the things I really miss in more business focused apps is the radio style push to talk. It is so much more intuitive than muting.

Slartie2• 5 years ago

It is free, and it has always had good push-to-talk voice chat using a permanent "room" concept (and not a "call" concept as is common with business-focused tools) suitable for gamers, towards which it actively marketed itself. This stuff has been in use by gamers for decades, but previous solutions either depended on paid servers or required one person to set up their own server on their own (or rented) hardware. Discord simply offered the same good voice chat, but without the server setup hassle or the costs associated with it.

The rest is network effects. If your entire gaming guild or clan or group of friends or whatever is using Discord, you are also using Discord.

If you mean "why is anyone besides gamer groups using Discord?", that is because most gamers are not just gamers, but also people working in day jobs, or open-source contributors, or active in NGOs, or have non-gamer friends with whom they needed to chat lately due to COVID restrictions, or whatever else. They knew Discord from their gaming life, so they just tried applying the tool that they already knew well to the (slightly different) job. With varying success, but with some success nevertheless in some cases.

lmm4• 5 years ago

It's free, has much better voice/video calls, but also has a much nicer UI IMO. It feels smoother and more lightweight, and dark mode is more first-class. The multi-server experience is much better - you can actually be part of conversations on two separate servers at the same time. The servers feel a lot more inclusive because the channel lists are visible by default, instead of having to search for a channel that might be there. And allowing replies but not threads made for a much better conversation experience

Sohcahtoa828• 5 years ago

The fact that so many people on HN seem to hate the Discord UX is baffling to me. I don't get it. Discord's UX is just fine, IMO.

Maybe it's because Discord was targeted towards gamers, and I'm a gamer that had no problem understanding its UI?

If you join more than a dozen servers, yeah it can be a bit overwhelming, but Discord lets you put servers into groups, similar to how phones let you put apps into groups.

raspyberr• 5 years ago

  Hi ***, 
  
  This is a just a super quick notice that we will be closing your open support ticket and I will be eating it shortly. 
  
  Hopefully we solved your issue with such grace and finesse that you didn't need to respond. If that's the case, great! Meal for me.
  
  Otherwise, please respond and we will sick our support team on the problem like a dog on some marbled wagyu. And then I'll find something else to eat, I guess.
  
  Thanks,
  Eater of Support Tickets

Gosh, I really feel like I've spoken to professional support. Considering they didn't fix my issue, this sort of response is pretty annoying.

mrkramer• 5 years ago

They refused $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft?! That's brave.

Not they are worth $15bn? It is crazy valuation for the chat app that's basically gaming version of Slack. I always thought Slack would purchase Discord and make it its "Gaming division" chat app.

lvl100• 5 years ago

Discord is OK. Nothing groundbreaking. But the tech stack is rock solid.

delaaxe• 5 years ago

Discord has also won most crypto development/support communities.

epaga• 5 years ago

FWIW one data point - we had begun beforehand but especially when COVID started, the small company I work at moved nearly all our company communication into Discord.

We tried out Slack and other alternatives at the time and the huge advantage of Discord was how simple and playful it was while other solutions were so very enterprise-y.

Plus, Discord offers a great bot API, so it was super easy to write our own integrations. We are very happy Discord was not bought by Microsoft.

_raoulcousins• 5 years ago

I love that I can adjust individual people’s volume in discord. Afaik I can’t in zoom.

MisterTea3• 5 years ago

Discord is easy to use which is why its so popular. Install, pick a name and go. I don't even remember creating an account, just typing in a nick name. Even on Void Linux Musl you can install it via flatpack, scan the qr code and you're logged in with all your servers and channels already there. You couldn't setup an IRC client that fast.

My great gripe? No 3rd party clients. It's also massively bloated for my need of sending a few bytes of text. For this reason I use it for just one server and to communicate with two friends and my brother.

Otherwise I use IRC where I'm on three networks and 26 channels. IRC is much less convenient for sure in terms of nick registering (some SOB took my name!) "back scroll" and persistence across clients/systems but it does 99% of what I want from a chat client: chatting via text.

SevenSigs• 5 years ago

No 3rd party clients.

I use a web browser to access Discord. But I would not use Discord for anything personal, only for public channels.

BeefWellington• 5 years ago

You couldn't setup an IRC client that fast.

You can't today, there's no reason you eventually couldn't.

MisterTea3• 5 years ago

I know there are some attempts to fix those issues in IRC but at this point I'd rather Matrix as it already exists, works, open, is not user hostile (e.g. banned for using an alt client), and bridges to IRC and XMMP.

63• 5 years ago

Technically there are third party clients, they just break tos and can get you banned if you're not careful. Ripcord has a lot of cool features, I just wish I could risk using it.

MisterTea3• 5 years ago

That's just it, they're so hostile they ban people for trying to use their service. Plus their API changes often enough to make it an annoying game cat and mouse for the devs. There are two discord clients for plan 9, both at one point worked, both are now abandoned. It's not at all worth it.

brettermeier• 5 years ago

Nowadays you have to create an account with you e-mail for using Discord.

bastardoperator• 5 years ago

While discord supports text, the entire purpose of discord from a gaming perspective is voice chat, screen sharing and bot/server automation for players.

Isthatablackgsd• 5 years ago

Discord is easy to use which is why its so popular.

I found this phrasing subjective because I don't find it easier to use. I tried Discord Web, Desktop & mobile, frankly they are not easier to use for me. I found it confusing because I suddenly need to have a role assigned to me. For that, I have to go through loops and hopping on subchannels to get myself a role for me to be able to have a conversation. One server that have like 5 different subchannel and I have to go through each of them to get a role. After trying to get figure out how to get that for half hour, I gave up. Simply too much work for trying to ask for a help. Discord is not designed AND substitution for general forums. I seen several game developers/publishers trying to tell their Steam users to go on Discord for any issues, requests, anything. I found that convoluted because Discord is not easier to use for first timer and plus there is Steam forum for this.

One thing I can't do in Discord (Slack & Signal included as well) is that I can't have multiple chat windows in my desktop like we can do in Trillan, Pidgin, AIM, ICQ, etc. My work is using Slack and it is a pain in the ass to go back and forth with various channel than having multiple windows for easier access. I prefer Slack over Discord because Slack don't make it complicated when it come to channels.

Sohcahtoa828• 5 years ago

I found it confusing because I suddenly need to have a role assigned to me. For that, [...]

Not every Discord server is configured like that. With many, you just add the server and start chatting. Some servers use the "role" thing to slow down spam and force an acknowledgement of the server rules.

sneak• 5 years ago

The desktop client is spyware, and the chats aren’t e2e encrypted.

Grakel2• 5 years ago

I just wish it would close when you click the X. Instead it minimizes.

Steam does this too, I can't believe Microsoft allows this behavior.

zerot_• 5 years ago

Then open the settings and turn off Minimize to Tray?

Grakel2• 5 years ago

No such option on Steam.

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

Programmers like Discord too. There are many great programming communities there.

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

Discord is big tech, and a decentralized solution is better.

amarant• 5 years ago

I kind of like this, assuming they don't change their software too much(or at all).

Discords voice channels are the perfect replacement for "watercooler conversations" for the remote working age.

fouc• 5 years ago

If Discord wants to win me over, they need to adjust their layout & themes. The default dark mode and the light mode both are not comfortable to me, and I'm someone that likes the default Slack theme or irssi/weechat in terminal on a black background.

honksillet• 5 years ago

Discord has also joined the ranks of tech companies censoring speech. Which essentially means they can and have eavesdropped on various groups and closed groups. No thank you.

bwship• 5 years ago

Yea, it would be refreshing for a company to say, we nailed this product, we are going to now just refine it more and more perfectly to streamline it even more. But instead everyone wants to cram more things into it. The old saying was that a SAAS product isn't complete until it has it's own email server baked into it.

irrational• 5 years ago

Having never use Discord - what is the elevator pitch for why I would want to use it?

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

Forget about using Discord if you use a wireless carrier that uses VOIP (like Republic Wireless, for example). Discord will not let you authenticate. Their answer is "change carriers", but I don't need Discord all that much.

0xBA5ED• 5 years ago

As a frequent user of the PC client, I think it's a bloated mess which gets slower by the day (with poor UX to boot). And they're talking about expanding their market? It's clear what their priorities are.

tristor• 5 years ago

I've never used Discord for gaming, but I've used it extensively in the maker hobby for various groups. I don't see it as being well aligned for business use, and any changes to make it better aligned for business use would damage it's ability to serve hobbyists (and gamers). I don't think this is a good move.

jetsnoc• 5 years ago

They have a lot of issues if they "want everybody else on Discord" They cancelled an account of mine because it shared a phone number with a secondary account of mine. (1 for work; 1 for personal use.) Support said "Account ban is valid - FRAUD/SPAM" with no ability to have a conversation with them or escalate. My cellphone number is now blacklisted for SMS validation. Incredibly weird. No support for their products, not really.

Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

Related Stories