How Discord Won(ianvanagas.com)
ianvanagas.com
How Discord Won
https://ianvanagas.com/2020/10/19/how-discord-won/
599 comments
A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins and see no more account data than everyone else on the server. This means people can freely join "hostile" servers and servers with untrusted admins, which is important for gaming, considering the toxicity of many communities.
I dunno how much of a difference it makes... most people don't know that the admins of a slack can see everything, including the histories on unpaid slacks.
This is false. You can read about it at https://slack.com/help/articles/360002084807-View-Access-Log... (which excludes free plans) and/or test it for yourself.
Perhaps it changed in the last year or so-- but I happily have complete history dumps from several slacks which never had anything except free plans.
Compliance exports (inc. private channel and/or DM conversations in which the exporter was not participating) have never been a part of free plans, and that hasn't changed in the last year.
Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.
You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.
Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.
You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.
> A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins
That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.
“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.
Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.
“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.
Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
We called them servers because our early adopters were coming from Ventrillo and Teamspeak (eg: Vent server, Teamspeak server, etc) and we wanted to use familiar terminology.
I don't think it's intentionally misleading. Its roots are in gaming in which "server" is often the term used for an instance and no one misconstrues ownership in that context. Some games let you self-host a server, but it's increasingly rare. More commonly, you reserve/join an instance on the developer's servers and you tell your friend(s), "Come join my server". Whether that be a Minecraft Realm or a WoW shard.
Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
I think it's more that gamers understand the concept of a "server" and not really anything to do with your evil theory.
Assume good faith.
They were originally called "guilds", and they are still called "guilds" in the Discord API.
This isn't true. They wanted a one-to-one language replacement for ventrilo/teamspeak/mumble.
"Hey hop on my mumble server"
"Hey hop on my vent server"
"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"
"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"
"Hey hop on my mumble server"
"Hey hop on my vent server"
"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"
"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"
On the flip side, it makes it difficult to spot dupe accounts or ban evasion attempts. I run a moderate-sized server and I have a suspicion that one of our members has weird conversations with himself across multiple accounts, but I have absolutely no way to verify that since I can't see any IPs or hostnames.
One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.
One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.
FYI if you ban a user, it bans all users with that IP address.
Ah that's good to know. Thanks for the correction.
You can enable phone number verification which makes it massively harder to avoid bans. Its way easier to cycle IP addresses than phone numbers.
This is true, but having a phone number requirement lowers accessibility to the server for users who either don't have a phone or aren't comfortable providing their number.
Catering to people who don't own a phone (Richard stallman and kids in Africa) is a lower priority to most mods than stopping waves of trolls and spammers.
Kind of. Admins can see all channels, and can forcibly insert themselves into any voice channel (even if it's full). But you're right in that their domain only extends to the _server_ and not your user account which is not tied to the server and they have no ownership over.
Discord has so many features that make it feel like it was made by and for gamers. Like the "currently playing" statuses, or "streamer mode" that hides identifying info when you have OBS open. It also works better than anything else for large communities with its roles/notifications system. It has a good design but I don't see it as particularly playful, just really well executed
There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.
Yeah, Discord still impresses me with how clean the interface _feels_ to put it simply. I remember only being on the Discord web client for a long time and remarking how much I enjoyed the interactions despite not being a native app. Then I loaded up the console and was pleasantly surprised to see it was all built in React. I suddenly felt very insecure about my own skill with React :p
Can you be more specific? It seems to that Discord is very similar to slack.
Not at all. Slack is noticably sluggish and has notable delay whenever I click a channel. In Discord those things are instant for me. Slack has a silly Markdown parser, while in Discord is simply works. The list goes on.
The playfulness is endearing, but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me, even after having used it for years now. It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.
It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.
Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.
Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
Calling workspaces for servers is actually a bit of an “aha”-moment for me.
I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)
The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)
The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
Oh man, I HATE that discord ties everything to the same email. I have personal discords, work discords, side project-based discords, and community discords.
I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.
The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.
The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.
The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.
The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.
> FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.
Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.
I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.
I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
> I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.
I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.
Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.
I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.
I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.
Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.
What is the connection between having a single login and disclosing a username to someone you've gone out of your way to hide it from?
There isn't one.
There isn't one.
It's a nickname, not a feature to hide your account name.
I use Ripcord[0] on my desktop/laptop, a Discord client which provides easy switching between accounts. It's lightweight and supports slack, too.
[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
>Not made from a web browser
That gave me a chuckle
That gave me a chuckle
While a perfectly good point, it's also why it caught on. You log in once. Now you just click "Join" on servers you want.
Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.
Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.
You can use PTB(public test branch) as an alt, or Franz or Web for more than 3 accounts, though it’s a workaround than a solution, and neural noise suppression also don’t work for non-official clients.
And I hate how Slack doesn't group everything.
I agree. Discord has one of the most confusing UIs I've used for a while. My first exposure to Discord was when somebody told me to join their Discord server - I was like "where do I put in the address?". Slack calls them "workspaces" which is less confusing. The channel interface is also quite confusing, as you say - joining a voice channel is really weird.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
Yeah that's another thing: in "direct" (non-server) group conversations, the text chat and any voice/video chat for that same group of people belong to a single "conversation" entity. But when it comes to channels on a server, "text channels" and "voice channels" are disjoint categories. There are just lots of little inconsistencies like this that muddy one's mental model.
> joining a voice channel is really weird
Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?
Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?
yes it is. must be something else about it that confuses them. I guess having joining a voice channel be one click could be considered odd if you are not used to initiating a "call" that allows people to hear you immediately like that.
You get used to it quickly, but it is odd. Putting an explicit "Join" button with some relevant icon next to the channel name would be much more intuitive. It would also clarify, for example, how you leave the channel. Once you're in one, a separate "Leave" button appears at a totally different location in the footer of the UI, but I can't honestly be sure whether or not clicking the channel name would also do the job of backing you out.
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
Maybe they have experience with Skype but not used to multiparty walkie talkie radios or TeamSpeak?
It's completely natural now but I remember not realizing it and forgetting how to join the first few times. Also accidentally joining voice channels etc.
I do wonder if they'll rename servers to 'communities' at some point. A recent blogpost[1] referenced Discord as being made up of communities. As someone with a tech background who game to discord through gaming, servers did make sense (in the sense of old multiplayer servers (pre-matchmaking) rather than IRC server hosts).
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...
Discord's "server" language is a throwback to non-centralized voice chats like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, where each group of users really would run their own chat server. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop that language eventually, especially since most of the users who would have recognized it have probably already migrated.
Interestingly, Discord's developer documentation and API still consistently calls them "Guilds", which I find a much better name, personally, but of course is even more of a term with gaming baggage, and "Server" was the eventually official neutral choice after that.
I don't think "guild" has gaming baggage except to gamers? I think of medieval history.
That's part of what I mean by gaming baggage, it's generally not a common word in contemporary English parlance unless you are a gamer or a history buff (and obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram; part of why games use the term so often is how much medieval-inspired fantasy infuses the history of videogaming).
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me
I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)
I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)
Agreed.
For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.
For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.
Did you ever know that you’re my hero?
(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)
(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)
My favorite is shift + alt + up/down arrow to move to the next unread channel. Works between servers too. Super easy way to knock out hundreds of unread messages at once.
Works in Slack too.
Except for threads, which bugs me daily.
Is there a way to swap between two channels/DMs in the same server? Similar to how alt+tab or ctrl+tab would work in Windows?
Looking for CTRL+K?
Ctrl+K just searches for channel. I was looking more for something where I could switch between 2 different channels quickly. Like I'm messaging someone but then have to quickly switch to a different channel to address some issue and then quickly switch back without having to click on or search for the previous channel.
Ctrl-k initially highlights the last channel you were in, so Crtl-k RET will bounce you back and forth.
Couldn't you argue that being in the state of constant learning but never the feeling of being utterly lost keeps you on discord. Like it keeps making things feel fresh and when you want to change mappings or what ever you can move your servers around and what not. I don't know maybe not but I get where you are coming from. I find DM especially can get really mixed but than again I don't hate that. I think the threading idea that something like slack or teams(worst) is to much. I'm just trying to talk to people I don't need a thread the channel already classified what's going on there if need to look something up I can search the channel.
yeah I feel similar... there's a weird bloat factor to discord that never left.
The channel UI is still confusing to me. When I'm watching a stream, I haven't been able to figure out how to stop watching without leaving the voice channel entirely
You press the stop watching button instead of the big red button. I probably do it 50/50 still.
I agree with this.
> It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.
You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!
After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."
You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!
After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there
When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)
https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png
When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)
https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png
Yes, but it's still not business-oriented. Slack still is better from an admin standpoint.
https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b
https://discord.com
https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b
https://discord.com
Yup - Slack is geared for teams, and Discord is geared for groups. Discord has much better moderation tools - permissions, roles, etc; Discord makes it easy to run a server strangers can join. Slack has virtually no moderation tools at all, and even at the paid tiers, it's weak. Slack is a very poor choice for anything but a tight-knit top-down administrated group, where moderation can happen outside the app itself.
Screenshot was perfect, thanks.
I think a lot of enterprise is going to end up on Teams simply because it’s part of your Office365 package. It’s kind of hard to justify paying for something that you already have, and it integrating so well with the rest of the 365 package makes it a lot easier to roll out in a non-tech savvy enterprise.
Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.
The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.
I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.
The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.
I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
I seriously considered trying to move my software team onto Discord (the majority use it anyway in their personal life). The concept of always on voice channels that you can pop in and out of and see who is in is great. I'm actually a fan of Teams (which is what we're using), but that lowering of the barrier of a team member popping in to ask a question or join a chat would have been great.
geese I can't stand the UI. The worst part is dealing with muting servers/channels because most admins don't seem to set up reasonable settings (ex: have the main channel always send notifications to everyone on every message.)
I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.
I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.
I don't think it's possible for community admins to have any control over notifications; Those are entirely under your control. That said, I agree with you; those settings can get messy and difficult to manage.
They're referring to the default notification settings that admins can set. Annoyingly, the Discord default (when you create a new server) is "All Messages" and not "Only @mentions". Sometimes I find another server still on "all messages" for some reason.
It is literally right click mute on channels or servers plus you get the choice for how long you want to mute.
If that is too difficult to manage ...
Sure it's possible to change, but it's not good. It's really a regression from previous group chat applications. The post I was replying to was arguing that discord is popular because it had a good UI.
To me it is good UI at least for that, because "Where do you set the volume for a single user?" Well just right click exactly on that user! Where else? It cannot be in global options and it would be too much info for always displaying it under each user name. It belong in that context menu. Solid UI for me.
Discord's channel system and notifications by default are extremley annoying.
No idea why they made Discord audibly ping whenever someone say anything in any channel on new servers you join.
No idea why they made Discord audibly ping whenever someone say anything in any channel on new servers you join.
Because you can mute any part of it?
compare this to slack - where not every channel on the org will ding by default when you join.
I think sensible defaults are valuable, and I don't think Discord's approach here is sensible.
I think sensible defaults are valuable, and I don't think Discord's approach here is sensible.
Now that Discord has taken such a strong foothold I wish they would offer an "enterprise" skin or something like that because I would love to replace my work's Slack chat with Discord. Discord is miles ahead of Slack in terms of stability.
Switch to light mode?
I keep hearing this but slack always works for me? never crashes, audio always works, I get notification when I should. Am I doing something wrong? I've never used discord, full disclosure.
It's interesting - I think i find the opposite to be true, but that's still the appeal.
I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional.
Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.
I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional.
Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.
Really? As someone who's been using Discord since 2015 the interface is by far the worst aspect of it in my opinion. The desktop client has a minimum width, the channel list is not resizable, Ctrl+K for some reason doesn't prioritize channels in the current server, no tabs, you now need 2 clicks to reach your mentions instead of 1, if you don't have access / don't want to use a scrollwheel the server list is literally unusable (and even then, it feel awful reaching for the last servers), the client lags insanely hard if you're in a voice chat (Linux 5.8.14 with RX 5700 XT), virtually no accessibility features (besides TTS, which admittedly was there from the start)...
These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.
Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.
Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
Threads in Slack suck so hard though (no recursive threads, no way to answer one specific message in a thread making it a subthread) and Slack itself is approximately one fifth as performance as Discord. On a modern machine I have 4 cores 100% usage for 20 after starting plus lots of CPU usage when switching channels or opening threads.
I find playfulness great but it can backfire when a serious problem crops up. Then it starts looking like unprofessionalism.
This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).
I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).
I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.
They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.
They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
+1 it's all about the UX. It's just an incremental improvement against any competitor of the times (infinite logs, efficient search, multi-server, easy bots, audio chat rooms that work better...). It's pretty clear Discord has talented _designers_.
And better UX has made Discord increasingly useful to conduct business on.
$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions? That seems crazy.
I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
As someone who is not by any means a discord power user, and who doesn't generally pay for skins, even I have been tempted to buy boosts just so that I can use emojis from some servers on other servers, because I think they're funny. If discord can tempt even me to buy, I have no trouble believing they can close the deal with many others.
Yeah, cross-server emoji are shockingly valuable to me as well. Some servers just have terrible custom emojii, and having a choice of some non-terrible emoji is worth the price.
I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
I wish Slack had better portability of custom emoji. There's no blessed API for adding/exporting emoji.
It's 2020 and I can't believe we're paying for emoji.
I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in.
Emoji are not innovation.
I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in.
Emoji are not innovation.
You're not paying for emoji, your paying for an incredible product that provides a lot of value. Emoji is just one feature they hold back to tempt you to pay for the amazing thing you have been given for free.
It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.
It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.
Emoji are in the sweet spot where if you can’t use special emoji you don’t really care, but some people find them shiny enough to pay for. It’s not innovation, but it’s definitely a perfect target for monetization.
No one said they're an innovation. Just that people value them.
What I find irritating is the absence of what Chinese/Korean/Japanese apps have: a curated sticker market where the platform takes a cut of money that goes to the IP holder (brand or artist).
well - looks like you're in luck https://www.engadget.com/discord-stickers-135019389.html
Is art not valuable? Is it not worth paying for?
Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.
I also like having GIF profile icons.
Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.
I also like having GIF profile icons.
Paying for cosmetic features has been, traditionally, one of the monetization models in gaming (which discord is inherently intertwined with) that ends up the least scummy.
It is nothing compared to the money that flies around inside Twitch broadcast chats. Someone buys everyone a subscription to gain the favor of the host. Someone else donates $xxx to get their name on-screen. And it happens pretty far down the long-tail.
This reads to me as a B2B play.
Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").
Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").
I would say its more organic than intentional, but many streamers encourage fans to join a Discord if they have one, as a higher level of engagement. A chat channel is 'sticky' whereas the chat linked only to a broadcast is ephemeral.
Nitro is a status symbol in some teen circles. Things like animated avatars make you stand out.
In some other teen circles it's a negative status symbol. In the "you wasted your money on that?" sort of way.
That's an equalisation, a way to keep people humble but still acknowledging the status to keep the community happy
Discord has 300+ million users (based on the forbes article). Even if everyone were paying for the cheap $5/mo nitro classic (which is worst case scenario for revenue, but best case scenario for # of paying customers) subscription, that's 24 million paying subscribers, which is less than 10% of their user base. Seems pretty reasonable given that the free tier includes so much.
What does the 300+ million refer to? Yearly active users? Monthly active users? Those two metrics are much different.
Looks like there's only 100+ million MAU[0], the Forbes article just said "300 million registered users".
0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...
0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...
Your number seems off by an order of magnitude.
24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year
24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year
>$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions?
Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?
Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?
Discord does not sell user data. We've stated this many times, unequivocally. Our monetization puts the user as the customer, not say, the product to be sold to advertisers (read: other social networks.) We think that this alignment of incentives sets us up to do the best by our users. Our monetary success depends on how great an experience we can build for our users, such that they convert to a paid subscriber - while not gating everything behind a paywall. Hence why our premium subscription service generally includes cosmetic incentives, that are optional to the core experience of chat, and as well, and unlocks stuff like higher quality streaming (since it costs us more to run, we unlock higher quality once you pay us.)
As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy
> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.
> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.
> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.
And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety
> We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.
As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy
> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.
> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.
> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.
And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety
> We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.
There are probably several other monetization strategies in play, unless a tiger (Jason Citron) can change his stripes
https://archive.org/details/OpenfeintComplaint
Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.
Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.
The free service is really featureful, and people really like the "accoutrements"† that you get from Nitro as well as supporting the server(s) they like.
Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:
------------------------------------------------
† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡
‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.
Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.
The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change
Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:
------------------------------------------------
† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡
‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.
Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.
The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change
It's common in gaming discords, mainly for hi-res streaming. For other communities I suspect the status of boosting and the feeling of "supporting the community" is popular, in a patreon-like way.
I don't think Discord has ever even tried to get me to pay them money. Granted I only use it very casually, but the tab is always open.
293984j29384(8)
As I hyper-casual gamer now, I also like that I can drop into any of the servers I've joined and those communities still know who I am. I maybe play 10 games of Dota a year, and I'm still on first name terms with the people I play with. Disord is just hands down the unifying glue that brings together any type of gaming community, it attacked the problem by always offering a better experience to alternatives, and providing tight integration to the platforms that helped it grow. Every single game chat voice just sucks compared to Discord.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
>every single game voice chat just sucks compared to discord
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
Discord has "good enough" voice audio quality and infinitely easier on-boarding and usage compared to Mumble. Most users, especially gamers who often have higher-spec machines then normal users, don't care about RAM usage.
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
I'm not arguing that the features/ease of use is the reason why its doing well. All of those features are unmatched for average consumers that don't care about their privacy which is their customer/product base. I didn't say anything about the features you mentioned and was talking about voice chat only.
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
That's fair, there is a distinction between the actual process of using voice chat versus the specifications of the voice chat. It seems that I took OP as referring to the former, while you're referring to the latter.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system. None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers. I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system. None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers. I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
250mb for a singleton app is not that big of a deal these days. Most browser tabs use more memory than that these days (which really does make me mad).
was talking about voice chat only
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
A key feature that I never see discord having is nested subchannels with whisper/shout. I play a game where we will have thousands of players in the same shard and need people to be able to communicate with each other in subchannels while still being able to hear and speak up to the entire channel. We did switch from Jabber to Discord for paging purposes though.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
I think in many ways discord hits it's peak when it can separate easily into multiple voice channels each with about 4-10 people each. I really like nested voice channels (like Mumbles linked channels) but really they don't show their benefits until you're deep into more complicated stuff (raids/etc) then the average person hits.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
That's a 'key feature' for a rather narrow niche of players. Which makes a lot of sense - voice chat itself was once a special thing for srscat gaming enthusiasts. The trouble is, the voice chat products themselves got stuck there, even as networking, median hardware and multiplayer gaming itself got a lot more popular. Discord is just a better product, not for 'the mass market' but generally and it's worth studying rather than dismissing its success especially if you want better voice chat tools that also meet your specialized needs.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
Negative, if you get their triggered anti spam response for creating an account fresh, or even logging into an existing account, you literally cannot log into that account anymore without providing a nonvoip phone number. You have to attach a phone number to continue.
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
> Discord has "good enough" voice audio quality
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
Discords voice quality is definitely better then you would expect, but going between a properly set up Mumble server and normal discord voice always shows a bit of a difference to me.
For me and my friends the audio quality is fine, but the latency just kills it. There's like 150-200ms of delay (just guessing based on how it feels, haven't timed it properly). It's as bad as Skype in our testing.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
The server boost graphic mentions boosts increasing call quality from 128 to 256 and higher kbps, would that make a difference?
For simple voice chat? Definitely not. It would be placebo at best.
Indeed, because their codec is already optimised for speech very much.
There are third party Discord clients such as Ripcord (Qt) and Sixcord (TUI IIRC). I dislike bloat, but the UI is great and it ain't running 24/7
There is a part of me that agrees, wholeheartedly, but then there is the other part of me that opted for 64GB of RAM in my gaming desktop because it was trivial in the overall cost of the system.
The majority of discord users would have 16-64gb of ram and don't care if 250mb goes to one of their most useful programs.
I play league and CSGO on my 8gb laptop, but the Discord desktop client was superb glitchy for me. I don’t know if it was ram or what, but it was unusable.
I think he was talking about in-game voice, not alternative voip clients.
> Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
I was not aware that discord had won.
It's a bit premature to declare Discord a winner or loser. Let's at least wait till it stops relying on VC funding to operate.
Who says we require it now ;)
Says the founder of Discord :)
You're replying to the CTO and co-founder of Discord.
[deleted]
It's a winner for the early investors. A winner for later stage investors including the IPO ones? Who knows. People love moving from one social platform to another. Discord might just disappear in a few years just like ICQ disappeared.
That's a title tweak, even as "Why Discord is Winning" would be the same interesting content.
I don't know about everyone else, but I also seem to be moving to different chat ecosystems every two or three years. From Campfire to Hangouts to Slack to Discord.
I miss IRC.
I miss IRC.
Definitely feels like it has stopped in gaming, and that is why I would argue that Discord has won.
They have the market and the network effects, so the game is over, regardless of how profitable they are, if they get acquired, etc.
What network effects?
A user would have a difficult time leaving the platform, even if they preferred an alternative, unless all of their friends and communicates also left, similar to why leaving a platform like Facebook or Reddit can be so difficult.
Discord is mostly small groups, which aren't strongly coupled to each other. It's pretty easy to move a small group. I am part of a couple of small groups which have migrated between platforms several times. I don't think Discord has a network effect anything like Facebook's.
Honestly, I think you would be surprised. Talk to some males aged 14-18 that play video games, and you may find that almost their entire social life and graph is on Discord.
Discord is what social media should have been - a nice place to hang out online without the vanity.
Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
Discord really is a high quality service. I remember a friend of mine in either late 2015 or early 2016 told us to give it a shot instead of Skype. This is the same friend that tried to get us to use Mumble and Teamspeak in the past, but we were dissatisfied with the audio quality. We gave it a shot and never went back.
Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord.
If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord.
If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
Matterbridge[0] is also a good solution for backing up your text chats to a service of your choosing.
0: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
0: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
>Discord really is a high quality service.
-Lots of server downtime -Obnoxious amount of system resource use -Crashing -Bugs -Forced updates -Privacy concerns. (Scans your open processes, etc)
Some of us can agree to disagree.
-Lots of server downtime -Obnoxious amount of system resource use -Crashing -Bugs -Forced updates -Privacy concerns. (Scans your open processes, etc)
Some of us can agree to disagree.
I have literally zero of those issues, so I'm curious why our experiences are so far apart...
From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
I've enjoyed using discord, but I also have all of these issues. You'd have to ask the software why it's nicer to you than us, and why it didn't by default exfiltrate the names of unrelated programs you had open.
I run it on Linux, maybe that is the difference. Discord segfaults for me quite regularly and is in general quite buggy.
I don't know if Skype got better but back when the universal switch to discord began, skype was very bad. It also crashed, it also had bugs, and its VOIP quality was poor (better than Adobe Connect or the stuff you'd see shipping with a AAA game, but still poor.)
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My D&D group and I have been very satisfied with Element/Matrix/Jitsi, YMMV of course.
Man, I kept seeing the phrase 10x better and expected some quantification. It could be 2x better and get 10x the audience because it was sufficiently compelling.
Is Discord profitable? An estimated $120M sounds like a hefty chunk of change, but I wonder what their expenses look like, especially if they're relied heavily on VC money in the past to subsidize having the servers be free.
Probably not, they just raised another $100M in June.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
> How Discord Won
Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
My child uses discord to coordinate play across multiple platforms, Xbox, mobile, and switch.
Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness.
As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for.
Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness.
As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for.
Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
Are there different servers for her games? Is it with friends she made in person in the past or are these friends she made via these online communities?
Yes people she met IRL. I'm not ready for her to go fully out into the wild internet yet
Discord is indeed the shit. Slack is too business oriented, it assumes that I'm a member of one workspace (my place of employment) as opposed to a member of a shit ton interest oriented channels.
I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly.
I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.
I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly.
I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.
Discord has the best chat UI and experience of any similar tool. Slack is a close second, and Teams a distant third. If Slack can figure out their infrastructure issues, and undo many of the poor UX decisions from the past 12-18 months, they can beat teams. However, if Discord decides to move into the business world and offer a competitively priced product, I could see that doing very well. I honestly don't know why they'd do that, but a business version of Discord is very attractive to me at least.
I think there's a lot that could be done in regards to navigation around. Like it works, and it's clear it's inspired from the more mainline chatting interface that's been around for what feels like centuries. But any time I'm using the default client, if I'm not using hotkeys or ctrl+k to navigate across channels, there's just way too much clicking and scrolling. Not to mention you can only have one active chat buffer on display.
There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
I really feel the author could have used the term "10x" a little bit more.
And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
There's a lot to be said for low/nonexistent barrier to entry. But like any large platform, such success comes at a price. Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff.
Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience.
Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes.
Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755
Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience.
Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes.
Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755
Multi billion dollar does not mean revenue, it means valuation, which discord has well surpassed [0].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
Ah, thanks, that makes much more sense.
Really unnecessary edit on an otherwise good comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
Sorry, I've altered my edit to remove the explicit insinuation of astroturfing. I was just a little shocked when I finished my submission and saw the sameness of all the other comments.
People here like Discord. We didn't carefully cultivate accounts for years and years just to blow them on some astroturfing campaign.
> Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
IRC, the famously secure communications platform? [sorry, I couldn't help it: I loved IRC growing up, but something something glass houses?]
IRC, the famously secure communications platform? [sorry, I couldn't help it: I loved IRC growing up, but something something glass houses?]
Arguably on IRC you can use OTR (you need a secure medium to exchange a secret or fingerprints). Its usability is awful so barely anyone uses it, but at least you can.
But... surely you could then also use OTR on Discord?
Their official client doesn't support it. And using third-party clients is forbidden. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...
I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
There was actually a plugin for BetterDiscord that did that that I used (probably 2 years ago now). Can't find it anymore, but it did exist and worked pretty well.
IRC isn’t a glass house when it comes to lack of a central censor/arbiter of the protocol.
IRC users certainly experience arbitrary censorship by petty tyrants. Of course they can move to a different IRC server (or start their own), but that's not really any easier than moving from Discord to IRC or vice versa.
It’s trivial to connect to multiple IRC servers with any of the popular clients. I don’t think it makes sense to compare that to switching to an entirely different protocol/software stack.
> Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.
To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.
I want to like IRC. Discord is great for gaming or chatting with friends and random people casually, but certain IRC channels tend to have extremely knowledgeable, helpful people you can't find much elsewhere. But IRC clients are just so frustrating. Just today I open the IRC client on my phone and the IP I'm currently assigned is banned from one server? I also tend to have random connection issues to certain servers and trying to Google errors messages shows me forum posts 15 years old that are vague and not helpful in diagnosing the issue.
You'd probably be better off by using a service like https://www.irccloud.com/
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
This is the great irony, isn't it? You want to escape Discord, because it's centralized, so you jump to a decentralized service, whose user experience sucks, so you sign up for another centralized service, just so you can use the decentralized service that was supposed to get you away from centralization in the first place.
That is why I literally said in my second paragraph that "hosting [...] your own server would probably be the best choice". Also, I was replying to somebody who complained about connection issues on his phone. He probably doesn't want to have a random timeouts when he travels from one place to another and potentionally miss important messages...
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
Using a centralized IRC service like IRCCloud is an option, but not one I would opt for personally. There are also other options, ZNC and The Lounge both come to mind. You can self-host these or find an instance hosted by somebody else.
Self-hosted Matrix works fine and great. You can host either just a server, Riot (Element now), or both. You can then use any client you want with your server or any other.
IRC has a objectively better user experience, since I didn't have to dox myself to some shady corporation to start using it.
If IRC had an objectively better user experience, objective usage numbers would show that. It has a better user experience /for you/ because it caters to the things that /you/ care about.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
>It is not a viable option for secure communication
Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services.
I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff.
Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common.
All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord.
Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization.
Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself.
Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services.
I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff.
Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common.
All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord.
Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization.
Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself.
Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it's my number-one most hated software program in my life. Exceeding even the sins of Adobe and Microsoft.
It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC.
And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude).
That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc.
---
The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology.
Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days).
That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC.
And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude).
That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc.
---
The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology.
Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days).
That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
> Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
> Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff.
Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.
If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.
If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
The censorship angle is likely how discord shuts down servers used to organise gatherings that are borderline terrorism and servers used to share anime under age content.
Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.
Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.
I've been trying to figure out if Discord is actually a competitor to Slack as I've never seen anyone use discord for anything but gaming.
That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out.
The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom.
I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out.
The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom.
I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
I can’t comment on Teams vs Slack, or on its other productivity features but I’ve been using Teams on a daily basis for some fairly large meetings and it’s never faltered - way more reliable than Skype was at least.
My issue is more with how information is presented and data is stored. I think Teams just has too many ways to do things and obfuscates too much at times... finding old docs or old conversations can be tedious and sending messages to wrong "teams" mistakingly is an easy thing to do.
I can't even go fullscreen in a Teams meeting anymore after a "recent" (read: months and months ago) update. My small laptop has 1/4 of the screen taken by UI and taskbar, even in "focus" mode.
I use Discord for mostly non-gaming interests. I'm part of a bunch of music specific discords for example. Lots of specific genre subreddits (/r/rnbheads, /r/popheads, /r/hiphopheads, etc) use Discord.
As-is I don't consider Discord a competitor to Slack without massive fundamental changes. Chat and content is heavily censored, you risk permanent bans, incredibly privacy invading, unencrypted, all that.
It is pretty much fluff chat en masse the way it is now without huge contractual and infrastructure modifications.
It is pretty much fluff chat en masse the way it is now without huge contractual and infrastructure modifications.
I'm an academic mathematician who has used Discord professionally, in at least two contexts:
1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebraic Geometry Syndicate" and "Modern Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry".
The activity includes: technical math chat; people giving each other advice (e.g. on the job market or online teaching); advertisements of online conferences; some other stuff.
2. I've also been on Discord forums attached to weekend online conferences. These were sort of similar, but short-lived -- and we also encouraged everyone to introduce themselves. We had a "math memes contest" and organized a board games night for all who were interested. Basically, it was an attempt to replicate some of the social aspects of conferences.
It seems like Slack is designed for groups of people who all work at the same company. Discord worked well for us -- where participants work/study all over, and where it's super easy to join.
1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebraic Geometry Syndicate" and "Modern Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry".
The activity includes: technical math chat; people giving each other advice (e.g. on the job market or online teaching); advertisements of online conferences; some other stuff.
2. I've also been on Discord forums attached to weekend online conferences. These were sort of similar, but short-lived -- and we also encouraged everyone to introduce themselves. We had a "math memes contest" and organized a board games night for all who were interested. Basically, it was an attempt to replicate some of the social aspects of conferences.
It seems like Slack is designed for groups of people who all work at the same company. Discord worked well for us -- where participants work/study all over, and where it's super easy to join.
I don't play video games at all, and I'm on a dozen or so Discord servers for various open-source projects, meetup groups, private projects, Reddit subs, groups of friends, etc.
we swapped from slack to discord at work. It's been good. It pretty much is the same as slack, the UI, if you compare side by side is very similar ( but look different ). Discords easy voice channels was a deciding factor. The downsides, without paying, is screen sharing is 720p, which Slack doesn't have, and file uploads are small ish, where in slack you can upload relatively big files
Anecdata, but I find Discord great if you're dealing with a big group of people that need to be moderated; it's got great tooling for that. There's multiple access levels, permissions, etc. exactly geared for that. When you're dealing with a trusted, invite-only group, you don't need many (if any) moderation features. Then, Slack shines for its ability to have organized, opt-in discussion. I really hate that you can't leave text channels on Discord.
I've been trying to move friend groups more towards Slack and it's been a huge improvement over group texts / Facebook chat / etc.
(of course, for our gaming group, discord voice chat is still superb. But, we only use it once a week and all the rest of our chatter/discussion happens in our new Slack team)
I've been trying to move friend groups more towards Slack and it's been a huge improvement over group texts / Facebook chat / etc.
(of course, for our gaming group, discord voice chat is still superb. But, we only use it once a week and all the rest of our chatter/discussion happens in our new Slack team)
My main nit with Discord over Slack is lack of threading. After that, the voice/video did not feel suitable for a business setting - the PTT format works for coop play but it's annoying to have it on constantly at work. I prefer explicitly scheduled video calls there.
Beyond that, there is a somewhat long tail of little features like integrations, LDAP, etc.
Beyond that, there is a somewhat long tail of little features like integrations, LDAP, etc.
> the PTT format works for coop play but it's annoying to have it on constantly at work
You can switch to "open mic" with a mic threshold (with an "auto" option), which would probably work well in a meeting situation where keyboard noise isn't an issue.
You can switch to "open mic" with a mic threshold (with an "auto" option), which would probably work well in a meeting situation where keyboard noise isn't an issue.
There is slight overlap but for personal use Discord is far better (family, friends, gaming). It's fun to have a Discord family room where people can drop comments and share stuff as opposed to Facebook using that data for their evil machinations.
Discord (and matrix) is often used as a support/comms channel by more "gritty" software projects: blockchain and that neighborhood.
I'm a founder of a company making Jira/Trello competitor [0] and we actually just released a Discord integration this week (we've had a Slack one for ages) because we had a number of customers and potential customers ask for it. So a small N, but it does seem to be gaining in popularity inside companies, at least smaller ones.
0: https://kitemaker.co
0: https://kitemaker.co
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do have a few nitpicks:
> Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process.
> Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow.
To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server.
> Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching.
> Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly).
How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
> Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process.
> Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow.
To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server.
> Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching.
> Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly).
How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
> Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated,
This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.
The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.
For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.
The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.
For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
I've had a lot of success telling people "just click next" for every button in the Mumble setup, but Mumble doesn't make things simple for the non-enthusiastic end user.
The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.
IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.
IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
That's my thought too, Mumble's text chat is terribad, the UI looks like crap. The onboarding is typical of non-hipster F/OSS. The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".
Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.
But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).
TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.
I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.
But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).
TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.
I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
> The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".
Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.
Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.
Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.
Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.
Point taken, although I did say "based on my experiences inviting folks to our server." :) I do think it is quite different than infamous Dropbox thread, however, where the top comment mentions mounting an FTP server with curlftpfs on Linux.
Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.
I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.
Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.
Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.
I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.
Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.
This will all be entirely anecdotal, but Discord has provided great value to my group.
> Setup
How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link.
> Paid hosting
While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it.
> Unclear benefits
Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho).
> Weird ideological reasons
It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
> Setup
How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link.
> Paid hosting
While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it.
> Unclear benefits
Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho).
> Weird ideological reasons
It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
Thanks :)
How many other chat apps have support for custom emojis that can be used cross-server. Thats half the fun of nitro.
On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
One thing I don't see mentioned is marketing. All of that investment allowed discord to purchase an obscene amount of advertisement. Heavy advertisement of a 'free' product targeted toward children seems like a prerequisite for adoption, but I'll admit that this take is as light on actual analysis as the parent blog post.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
> currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number
I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
Try it out, I don't think there's any way now. And it's really easy to get completely locked out of your account if you connect from a low-reputation/datacenter IP, like through VPNs or Tor.
IIRC discord also requires phone numbers when you connect through services like VPNs or TOR or something. Basically makes pseudonymity really hard.
Also regularly I can't log into discord without first filing out a captcha and receiving an E-Mail from them even though my password is valid.
Also regularly I can't log into discord without first filing out a captcha and receiving an E-Mail from them even though my password is valid.
Discord also has great communities that aren't just for gaming. Personally, I'm part of several discords that are for music, specific technology (thinkpads), etc.
To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
Discord won because they found a unique purpose and focused all of their efforts on it while, making sure that all secondary features were also well crafted.
What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.
Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.
Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.
However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.
Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.
Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.
However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
I agree. The core reason to switch for me (and I assume many others) was because the core features were better than competitors and it was free.
On exposure outside main demographic: servers that are gaming adjacent like anime, content creators, and programming already see large numbers of members. A promising sign.
I actually switched away from Discord to Mumble, for higher audio quality & lower latency.
Don’t they both use Opus? I use both regularly and the audio is identical to my ears (as opposed to pretty much everything else).
Funny thing is, I've seen a lot of people complain about Mumble's audio quality.
But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years.
As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years.
As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
Mumble maxes out at 96kbps + overhead (which brings it close to 128kbps total) (enforced client-side, though the server can set a lower bandwidth), and I find it's a noticeable difference over Discords 64/kbps.
Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency, which again is a noticeable difference (the average person can detect latency over 50ms, for example, audio and video can be out of sync by 30ms and it's pretty much undetectable during playback).
Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency, which again is a noticeable difference (the average person can detect latency over 50ms, for example, audio and video can be out of sync by 30ms and it's pretty much undetectable during playback).
> Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency,
The USA is around 2,500 miles wide (+/- 200 miles depending on latitude), which is around 4000 km. If you live on the west coast and connect to a server on the east coast, you're looking at 50 ms minimum based on laws of physics alone. Real world latency is usually 60-70 ms.
Of course, that's a worst case scenario of connecting between the coasts. Honestly I don't know what Discord's voice latency is. I suppose I could measure it, but it's already low enough to be good.
Besides, it's a voice chat service. Even if latency was a ridiculous 200 ms, how would you even notice, other than when you hear your own voice coming from someone else's microphone?
The USA is around 2,500 miles wide (+/- 200 miles depending on latitude), which is around 4000 km. If you live on the west coast and connect to a server on the east coast, you're looking at 50 ms minimum based on laws of physics alone. Real world latency is usually 60-70 ms.
Of course, that's a worst case scenario of connecting between the coasts. Honestly I don't know what Discord's voice latency is. I suppose I could measure it, but it's already low enough to be good.
Besides, it's a voice chat service. Even if latency was a ridiculous 200 ms, how would you even notice, other than when you hear your own voice coming from someone else's microphone?
Should note that discord defaults to 64kb/s but goes up to 96kb/s for free, it is just a slider in the voice channel settings. and then depending on the "Boost" level of the server you can go up to 128/256/384 kb/s.
People treat me like I'm crazy when I say I like the audio quality/ latency on Teamspeak more but in my experience it's been day and night.
With the impending sunset of Google Hangouts, I've been using discord for family communication. It is nice that the barrier of entry is low enough that you can actually get people to use it, and that you can use it on desktop (otherwise you'd just use SMS)
Pretty much every single subreddit out there has a discord server at this point. Still very tech-related but much more broad than just gaming at this point.
I really like Discord for coding related "servers". Just the ability to use three backtick (markdown) code blocks makes it amazing for sharing snippets. I'm active in about 10 different servers, none of them game related.
IMO one of the core innovations that Discord brought was the way voice works. There's no "calling" or any sort of "person A would like to talk to person B, person C may or may not be welcome" sort of thing. People just click on a voice channel and they're in.
Other services have tried the same thing I guess (Hangouts did something kind of similar), but everything adds up to a completely different feeling around voice chat. It feels more like walking into a room with people hanging out than it does dialing someone's number and all the low-level anxiety that goes along with it.
Other services have tried the same thing I guess (Hangouts did something kind of similar), but everything adds up to a completely different feeling around voice chat. It feels more like walking into a room with people hanging out than it does dialing someone's number and all the low-level anxiety that goes along with it.
Do keep in mind with Discord's original market (gamers), a lot of existing software worked just like that, including teamspeak and ventrilo.
But that wasn't an innovation. Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, they all work that way.
The innovation was building something that anyone would use or even incidentally use. Like you're already in a Discord server to talk about something, and all of those people have global voice chats that they can drop in and out of even just out of curiosity. It's a powerful (and essential) community-building fundamental.
Polar opposite of Ventrilo. Discord is the community, not some chat widget on the side. Kind of like a modern MMORPG vs a MUD's `telnet 107.141.162.82 4500` to point out that World of Warcraft didn't innovate much because you're still just connecting to a server.
For some reason people always make the mistake of thinking that "a UX/experience that the mainstream will use/love" isn't hard nor innovation. In fact, it's the engineering that's the easy part.
Polar opposite of Ventrilo. Discord is the community, not some chat widget on the side. Kind of like a modern MMORPG vs a MUD's `telnet 107.141.162.82 4500` to point out that World of Warcraft didn't innovate much because you're still just connecting to a server.
For some reason people always make the mistake of thinking that "a UX/experience that the mainstream will use/love" isn't hard nor innovation. In fact, it's the engineering that's the easy part.
I've never used Ventrilo, but it sounds just like Mumble.
> There's no "calling" or any sort of "person A would like to talk to person B, person C may or may not be welcome" sort of thing.
There is, actually -- you can call a user who you're friends with, or create a call for a group DM. It's just separate from group voice chat.
There is, actually -- you can call a user who you're friends with, or create a call for a group DM. It's just separate from group voice chat.
Discord wins in a lot of ways. A few that jump out to me as important are :
* Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications
* Excellent group voice chat quality and controls - Every user can control the volume for each chat participant(You control your own mix.) This is something Teams doesn't have and god I wish it did...
* It's Slack for friends. Discord basically does everything Slack does (rich-media real time chat with a specific group of contacts.) It's far easier to crank out a new discord for your friends and you don't get slammed with the "Free Organization" restrictions that come with Slack.
There are lots of things it does right, but these were major selling points for me.
* Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications
* Excellent group voice chat quality and controls - Every user can control the volume for each chat participant(You control your own mix.) This is something Teams doesn't have and god I wish it did...
* It's Slack for friends. Discord basically does everything Slack does (rich-media real time chat with a specific group of contacts.) It's far easier to crank out a new discord for your friends and you don't get slammed with the "Free Organization" restrictions that come with Slack.
There are lots of things it does right, but these were major selling points for me.
> Excellent group voice chat quality and controls
Discord is still miles behind Ventrillo for this. There are still participants on every server I've been on who can't be heard at 100% boost on my end. On vent, I could just set up a compression/normalization chain and never have to worry about any participant being too soft or too loud ever again.
Maybe sound plugin chains are an advanced feature, but I really, really wish it was offered in Discord.
Discord is still miles behind Ventrillo for this. There are still participants on every server I've been on who can't be heard at 100% boost on my end. On vent, I could just set up a compression/normalization chain and never have to worry about any participant being too soft or too loud ever again.
Maybe sound plugin chains are an advanced feature, but I really, really wish it was offered in Discord.
I'm all for more functionality!
yea that would be considered an advanced feature.
The killer feature for me is TeamSpeak's "raid leader". You can assign someone to be able to instantly mute everyone else on the call while holding a key. It seems very convenient in, well, raid settings. No idea why Discord doesn't have that.
Discord does have priority speaker [1], is that close enough?
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011876531-S...
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011876531-S...
This feature has extremely limited usability. If there's one group medium-sized group (2-10; and 10 is being generous, I'd say 2-7 is more realistic[1]) and the conversation is chaotic, it is a great feature. However, if you're playing a game that requires coordination across multiple squads, Ventrilo or TeamSpeak are the definite winners.
We tried really really REALLY hard to make a shift to Discord[2]. We even tried writing bots that mimic some TS features. We ended up using Discord to include the more casual gamers from the guild, but most of us still use TeamSpeak, with a few people who're on both to help coordinate the less tech-savvy folk.
Discord always seemed to target a much broader "gaming" audience. It's simple, it does what it does in a mediocre way, but that's okay, because it's a casual product and nobody cares (evidently). You need to be a bit more tech-savvy to connect to set TS/Vent up, but if you're serious about multiplayer gaming, then it's worth the extra effort.
I'd (and a lot of my friends probably) use Discord fulltime if they started catering just a bit more to non-casual gamers too.
[1]: I wouldn't be surprised if Discord's aimed at small gaming groups and that the feature was designed with small/medium sized groups in mind. I'd guess the average room size on Discord probably falls within that range.
[2]: Most people had it already, so adoption wasn't the issue, it was the usability. However, the fact that most people already had it speaks volumes about Discord's conversion strategy/onboarding.
We tried really really REALLY hard to make a shift to Discord[2]. We even tried writing bots that mimic some TS features. We ended up using Discord to include the more casual gamers from the guild, but most of us still use TeamSpeak, with a few people who're on both to help coordinate the less tech-savvy folk.
Discord always seemed to target a much broader "gaming" audience. It's simple, it does what it does in a mediocre way, but that's okay, because it's a casual product and nobody cares (evidently). You need to be a bit more tech-savvy to connect to set TS/Vent up, but if you're serious about multiplayer gaming, then it's worth the extra effort.
I'd (and a lot of my friends probably) use Discord fulltime if they started catering just a bit more to non-casual gamers too.
[1]: I wouldn't be surprised if Discord's aimed at small gaming groups and that the feature was designed with small/medium sized groups in mind. I'd guess the average room size on Discord probably falls within that range.
[2]: Most people had it already, so adoption wasn't the issue, it was the usability. However, the fact that most people already had it speaks volumes about Discord's conversion strategy/onboarding.
Whoa, that's great. Seems to be a new feature though, as it's only supported on Windows. Thanks for letting me know though, I'll definitely make use of it.
I think it was just forgotten about, it's been in the options page for a while (first archive snapshot is from december 18, 2018[0]).
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229093058/https://support.d...
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229093058/https://support.d...
There's "Push to talk (Priority)", which doesn't mute everyone but does lower their volume while you hold it down.
> Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications
Until there's a client update. When the client detects that an update is available, it asks to apply the update without any way to start without the update. So far, I had 2 weeks this year without the desktop client, waiting for the update to appear in the package repositories.
Until there's a client update. When the client detects that an update is available, it asks to apply the update without any way to start without the update. So far, I had 2 weeks this year without the desktop client, waiting for the update to appear in the package repositories.
Yep, I ran into this a few times and now my `~/bin/discord` is just `chromium --app='https://discord.com/app'`.
Only missing push to talk, which I don't need on Linux. One of these days I hope browsers come up with a way for a webapp to request access to capture a particular key, in the same way it can ask for your mic.
Only missing push to talk, which I don't need on Linux. One of these days I hope browsers come up with a way for a webapp to request access to capture a particular key, in the same way it can ask for your mic.
That's not a cross platform issue but your packages being outdated. At least on Arch I haven't run into this issue once, it can self update just fine on linux.
I personally use Flatpak for Discord and Slack. I used to have issues with my package repositories not being up-to-date too, but this is much more convenient.
> Discord basically does everything Slack does
Except message threads and drawings while screen sharing. Two features we use in Slack a lot in my current team.
Except message threads and drawings while screen sharing. Two features we use in Slack a lot in my current team.
> It's Slack for friends. Discord basically does everything Slack does (rich-media real time chat with a specific group of contacts.) It's far easier to crank out a new discord for your friends and you don't get slammed with the "Free Organization" restrictions that come with Slack.
This is what I often point to in Discord's favor. Slack's business model is at the "team"/"group" level and makes the most sense for organizations with a strong cohesive identity over time, whereas Discord's business model is at the individual user level and allows for a lot more ephemeral friend groups to flow in/out of "servers" (teams/groups/what have you) as makes sense to them.
This is what I often point to in Discord's favor. Slack's business model is at the "team"/"group" level and makes the most sense for organizations with a strong cohesive identity over time, whereas Discord's business model is at the individual user level and allows for a lot more ephemeral friend groups to flow in/out of "servers" (teams/groups/what have you) as makes sense to them.
> Discord basically does everything Slack does
There is a simple reason why we are on slack. Drawing on someone's screen. And it doesn't even work on linux, but we are still on it until someone makes a voice chat app that lets us type threaded messages and draw on someone's screen.
There is a simple reason why we are on slack. Drawing on someone's screen. And it doesn't even work on linux, but we are still on it until someone makes a voice chat app that lets us type threaded messages and draw on someone's screen.
> Discord is a successful company.
I'm bearish on Discord (as I was last year). Discord didn't win, it's burning money and nitro is (currently) not saving them -- just how their previous attempt at monetization (the store) didn't either. Alternative narratives won't make this fact true. People seem to conveniently forget about XFire, and the many other "gaming chat apps" that preceded it. Why Discord appears to have won is because it's free.
We'll see what happens when the money dries up.
I'm bearish on Discord (as I was last year). Discord didn't win, it's burning money and nitro is (currently) not saving them -- just how their previous attempt at monetization (the store) didn't either. Alternative narratives won't make this fact true. People seem to conveniently forget about XFire, and the many other "gaming chat apps" that preceded it. Why Discord appears to have won is because it's free.
We'll see what happens when the money dries up.
I've been thinking of using Discord for the NPO project I'm working on.
I am not a huge fan of Slack.
I am not a huge fan of Slack.
Origin was one of the earlier companies to switch to using Discord as an alternative to Slack. As a blockchain company, we wanted a place where our team could collaborate & interact with our community at the same time. We found Discord to be far better designed for large communities of people that don't really know or trust each other. We made the switch back in 2018. Today, most crypto companies are using Discord. Honestly, it's a great product for anyone who is fed up paying for Slack. I can't imagine ever switching back.
Our story on why we switched from Slack: https://medium.com/originprotocol/moving-from-slack-to-disco...
Our story on why we switched from Slack: https://medium.com/originprotocol/moving-from-slack-to-disco...
I've never liked neither Discord nor Slack. Besides them being Electron apps that throw every single system UI idiom out the window and behave like they're something else, they are just too easy to misuse and suck tremendously if they aren't something you use every day but only check occasionally.
One thing that I don't like in Discord in particular is that if you haven't launched it for a month, you're in for a bad time. First, it's going to update like 7 times. Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
Also message replies are about as awkward as one could've made them.
One thing that I don't like in Discord in particular is that if you haven't launched it for a month, you're in for a bad time. First, it's going to update like 7 times. Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
Also message replies are about as awkward as one could've made them.
> First, it's going to update like 7 times.
I just use the website versions. No installs, no updates. Also means no global keybinds for voice chat, no automatic "currently playing ...", and no electron-specific XSS bugs - but that's fine by me.
> Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
The per-server notification settings in Discord can let you mute these. The defaults are admittedly annoyingly permissive, resulting in a repeat annoyance that will eventually crop up every time I join a new server.
I just use the website versions. No installs, no updates. Also means no global keybinds for voice chat, no automatic "currently playing ...", and no electron-specific XSS bugs - but that's fine by me.
> Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it.
The per-server notification settings in Discord can let you mute these. The defaults are admittedly annoyingly permissive, resulting in a repeat annoyance that will eventually crop up every time I join a new server.
No, it's existed for 5 years. It has consolidated larger parts of the Skype/Teamspeak/Mumble users but VC has swallowed discord whole before it meaningfully replaces old FOSS communities. The future is probably (still) going to be IRC with Matrix somewhere for federation, while discord users has moved over to the next competitor.
I’m truly amazed at how well discord got down their invite-to-server flow. It’s honestly the best I’ve seen. I get annoyed when I have to join a separate slack org, but joining a discord server has practically no barrier at all. It means that setting up individual servers per person is totally viable. Joining someone’s server feels like going over to their house to hang out.
It's also truly amazing how bad Slack messed their server joining flow. Not sure it's different now, but back when I was joining Slack servers everyone was using a free-tier Heroku app to host a textfield that would send you an email.
A server joining flow so bad that people have to host another server just to let people join it.
A server joining flow so bad that people have to host another server just to let people join it.
> Discord requires nearly no setup. Starting a server on Discord takes two clicks. Creating channels is two clicks. It works instantly and all the time.
What? I just tried, and it took about 4 recaptcha challenges just to create an account, 12 clicks (excluding the clicks on recaptcha challenges), and 4 more clicks to create the server
What? I just tried, and it took about 4 recaptcha challenges just to create an account, 12 clicks (excluding the clicks on recaptcha challenges), and 4 more clicks to create the server
Compared to IRC, where do I start?
For example, https://webchat.freenode.net/
One click + a captcha
One click + a captcha
Right, but now my username gets taken and I don't get any notifications or can send images on this service???
Any big service will require multiple security checks, after you sign up to Discord, you can login with a QR code on a new device. No captchas. and get the above for free.
It is going to be a mission to get a bunch of friends to use this 'Freenode' service.
Any big service will require multiple security checks, after you sign up to Discord, you can login with a QR code on a new device. No captchas. and get the above for free.
It is going to be a mission to get a bunch of friends to use this 'Freenode' service.
I've been becoming increasingly concerned that Discord is winning a little too much, and will basically end up becoming the Facebook of the next generation if things go right for them. Right now they're still in the fun phase - they've built a product that users love, have extreme growth, have a lot of money to spend, and are agile and young.
Generally the fun phase of a consumer-facing social company does not last forever though, and I'm not looking forward to the phases that often seem to follow. We can look at anything from Reddit to Youtube to Facebook to see the types of issues that lead social products to become increasingly user-hostile over time, and I'm not confident that Discord can avoid the pitfalls that have led to the decline in quality of most similar products.
The issues that often lead to the increase in user-hostility have many different causes and manifestations, but they often start with an increase in monetization, often with vast troves of user data, of which Discord is obviously not lacking in. As the platform grows and controls the social lives of hundreds of millions, there becomes increased demands for censorship, not just of political and ideological nature, but also for the purposes of copyright and IP, and the from multitude of governments that they must work with (obviously including, but not limited to the US). Discord already has very strong network and gate-keeping effects in many communities, and social ostracization is faced by users that contemplate not using it; losing network effects once you have them is generally not very easy, so it will likely be the dominant player in its area for a long time.
I don't want to just sit here and spread negativity about potential issues, but seeing an entire generation of people use yet-another-social-product, it does have me concerned from time to time. I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies sitting in between users, reading and storing their logs, every click they make, and gate-keeping access to begin with. We've seen some of the places this can lead, and many of them aren't very pretty.
Regardless, Discord has made a great product that strongly beats its present and past competitors (which is what I'd add to the full article above - competitors like Skype were really bad! From excessive ads to laggy calling to leaking user IPs, which it still does), and for that I'm grateful that there's such a better software alternative for communities and friends to get together with. But I would definitely love to see pro-active work and assurances from Discord that help to convince me that they will be a unique force of Good in the consumer social space rather than regress to the mean that we see exists today.
Generally the fun phase of a consumer-facing social company does not last forever though, and I'm not looking forward to the phases that often seem to follow. We can look at anything from Reddit to Youtube to Facebook to see the types of issues that lead social products to become increasingly user-hostile over time, and I'm not confident that Discord can avoid the pitfalls that have led to the decline in quality of most similar products.
The issues that often lead to the increase in user-hostility have many different causes and manifestations, but they often start with an increase in monetization, often with vast troves of user data, of which Discord is obviously not lacking in. As the platform grows and controls the social lives of hundreds of millions, there becomes increased demands for censorship, not just of political and ideological nature, but also for the purposes of copyright and IP, and the from multitude of governments that they must work with (obviously including, but not limited to the US). Discord already has very strong network and gate-keeping effects in many communities, and social ostracization is faced by users that contemplate not using it; losing network effects once you have them is generally not very easy, so it will likely be the dominant player in its area for a long time.
I don't want to just sit here and spread negativity about potential issues, but seeing an entire generation of people use yet-another-social-product, it does have me concerned from time to time. I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies sitting in between users, reading and storing their logs, every click they make, and gate-keeping access to begin with. We've seen some of the places this can lead, and many of them aren't very pretty.
Regardless, Discord has made a great product that strongly beats its present and past competitors (which is what I'd add to the full article above - competitors like Skype were really bad! From excessive ads to laggy calling to leaking user IPs, which it still does), and for that I'm grateful that there's such a better software alternative for communities and friends to get together with. But I would definitely love to see pro-active work and assurances from Discord that help to convince me that they will be a unique force of Good in the consumer social space rather than regress to the mean that we see exists today.
Agree with all your points. Couldn't be express it better myself. Just recently I tried to access reddit from my phone while being logged out, and got a "community preview, view this in app" kind of screen. Terrible. On a similar note, Github is slowly auth-walling off parts of its website. I can't access github actions logs on my phone, nor can I access "hidden" outdated etc. comments/discussions without an account, even though I'd like to view what is inside.
For the real time chat space, my personal hope is that Matrix will eventually take off. Currently it is still in a phase where there is lots of development and technological improvements, but I hope that eventually there will be an ecosystem of compliant clients as well as a large user base. Another good alternative to matrix is zulip, although it's hard to maintain which discussions one wants to stay up to date with vs which discussions to ignore.
For the real time chat space, my personal hope is that Matrix will eventually take off. Currently it is still in a phase where there is lots of development and technological improvements, but I hope that eventually there will be an ecosystem of compliant clients as well as a large user base. Another good alternative to matrix is zulip, although it's hard to maintain which discussions one wants to stay up to date with vs which discussions to ignore.
I think you're right but you're wrong.
The thing that Discord is missing and is failing at is that it doesn't have any sort of a friend graph or social structure. Discord users want this sort of Reddit anonymity where people are semi-social but not really.
Discord isn't a social app and Reddit looks like where Discord will grow to, not mass market, not super data heavy because there's no friend graph and structure.
The thing that Discord is missing and is failing at is that it doesn't have any sort of a friend graph or social structure. Discord users want this sort of Reddit anonymity where people are semi-social but not really.
Discord isn't a social app and Reddit looks like where Discord will grow to, not mass market, not super data heavy because there's no friend graph and structure.
> I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies.
It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.
Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.
Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.
Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.
And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.
It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?
It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.
Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.
Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.
Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.
And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.
It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?
I often have similar thoughts to this - there's very few areas where decentralized software has had a better UX than centralized alternatives, and that is why they haven't had as much success.
I think compromises can be made, and in practice, perhaps have to be, in order to attain a large user base (large enough for common network effects, too). I don't want the minimum requirements of all software to be perfect decentralization, censorship-resistance, 10 different client implementations in Rust, and so on. Just, better than what we have. Nonprofit companies could do a good job of it imo, similar to how we see Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as such forces of good that will not become corrupted by ads, selling data, and the likes.
I think compromises can be made, and in practice, perhaps have to be, in order to attain a large user base (large enough for common network effects, too). I don't want the minimum requirements of all software to be perfect decentralization, censorship-resistance, 10 different client implementations in Rust, and so on. Just, better than what we have. Nonprofit companies could do a good job of it imo, similar to how we see Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as such forces of good that will not become corrupted by ads, selling data, and the likes.
> It is easy to switch to Discord. Inviting people is two clicks and a paste. Joining a server (once you have an account) is two clicks.
This is kind of missing an elephant in the room.
Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing. Put in an username and you're good to go.
This might look particularly weird to some of the HN community who are fond of optimizing the conversion rate of their pointless landing page -> sign up flow and like to subscribe people to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
I've been doing a similar thing to discord on a site I run where users don't even have to choose a name. They get a randomly assigned name which they can change later if they want. A new user needs to perform 0 clicks to begin using the product.
This was especially helpful in the beginning, because the first few people who stumbled upon the site immediately became users and started interacting with each other. By adding stupid landing pages, sign up flows, analytics (which then requires me to get permission from my users), and whatnot the site probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground half as fast.
This is kind of missing an elephant in the room.
Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing. Put in an username and you're good to go.
This might look particularly weird to some of the HN community who are fond of optimizing the conversion rate of their pointless landing page -> sign up flow and like to subscribe people to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
I've been doing a similar thing to discord on a site I run where users don't even have to choose a name. They get a randomly assigned name which they can change later if they want. A new user needs to perform 0 clicks to begin using the product.
This was especially helpful in the beginning, because the first few people who stumbled upon the site immediately became users and started interacting with each other. By adding stupid landing pages, sign up flows, analytics (which then requires me to get permission from my users), and whatnot the site probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground half as fast.
100x this. It's so annoying to join a slack channel. Discord feels much more free-flowing, like IRC (yes, yes, I know).
Slack also makes no sense. I need a different login for different channels?
Slack is huge in the corporate world more than a gaming or casual chatting tool and I assume separating identity / login credentials between different channels makes some sense in that case for both security and privacy reasons, but also just conceptually.
The upside of doing this way for Slack is that it's one way to not expose your account ID to every member in every channel you're in, the way that Discord does. Better for privacy compliance.
You can still have multiple accounts on Discord to achieve the same separation if you want.
From another comment:
> Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
> 1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
> 2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
> 3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
> 4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
> Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
> 1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
> 2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
> 3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
> 4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
It makes sense for versatile use cases. Discord's single account system is maybe fine for gaming but it's pain for other use cases.
This. it feels like entering a room, speaking with like-minded people, getting the information you want and walking out. No one asking anything and trying to reel you back in after.
Seconded. We've made a product in fitness&health niche when all of our competitors (and so we did) think it's essential for users to create an account, fill long questionnaires etc, yet we managed to skip all those things making them optional. Conversion rate skyrocketed on iOS - now we are making same switch on Android app.
Oh my god that sounds wonderful. Can I ask what the product is called? I'd like to check it out.
You can check it out here: aidlab.com/market/aidlab
It's an app for our wearable (but our wearable is also optional, haha). As said: account is no longer required on iOS, but we are also working on that feature on Android as well.
It's an app for our wearable (but our wearable is also optional, haha). As said: account is no longer required on iOS, but we are also working on that feature on Android as well.
Thanks!
I'm using the same strategy for my very first product. I noticed the competitors ask way too much information when first signing up. Unfortunately for my product it's not possible to do away with sign ups entirely, but I think I can get close.
It's been a long time since I was a new user to Discord, so I didn't remember what steps I had to take to get started.
The process you described sounds super similar to the low friction involved with getting started on IRC!
The process you described sounds super similar to the low friction involved with getting started on IRC!
I don't understand why people even ask for account creation. Now days the devices are personal, you don't have to have accounts to be identified, they are only good to sync between devices(like multiple devices and account restoration). Especially with apps, the moment you install the app you have your details there for good and they don't go away accidentally like with the browsers.
I assume it's about tracking but now I'm beginning to suspect that it's simply a cargo cult mentality where no body asks why are we doing this.
I don't proceed with anything that requires a form to be filled without having a good reason. I'm actually positive that I have a bank account that doesn't have a login info, when I need to sign in from another device I would simply scan a barcode from the app to let me in.
Yet, there are apps asking me more questions than an immigration officer to let me use it.
I assume it's about tracking but now I'm beginning to suspect that it's simply a cargo cult mentality where no body asks why are we doing this.
I don't proceed with anything that requires a form to be filled without having a good reason. I'm actually positive that I have a bank account that doesn't have a login info, when I need to sign in from another device I would simply scan a barcode from the app to let me in.
Yet, there are apps asking me more questions than an immigration officer to let me use it.
To be fair, I think there are some smart app developers clueing on this. I've sank pretty significant hours into some mobile games without ever creating a proper account. I only created an account once I cared enough to not lose the data. This is super smooth mobile UX especially for consumer facing apps, primarily those which have no immediate need at all to be cross platform.
Duolingo is one that stands out for this.
> I'm actually positive that I have a bank account that doesn't have a login info
I don't know where you are, but in the US it is actually illegal for a bank to offer financial services without collecting a significant amount of personal data from the customer. This exists for a few reasons but I think the most significant one is that the government does not want to give up the ability to block financial transactions for those they deem unacceptable. (Like terrorists.)
I don't know where you are, but in the US it is actually illegal for a bank to offer financial services without collecting a significant amount of personal data from the customer. This exists for a few reasons but I think the most significant one is that the government does not want to give up the ability to block financial transactions for those they deem unacceptable. (Like terrorists.)
I don’t have login info but the bank definitely collected the necessary personal information.
It all makes sense, they are required to know me for AML reasons, so the account creation step collects this data.
The bank is mobile first, so the account is activated through the app when my card arrives. Why would I have a username and password for the app that is used to create the account in first place? The app can keep it for me without exposing it to me ever. I can’t be phished for something that I don’t know and it is one less password to remember or take care.
It all makes sense, they are required to know me for AML reasons, so the account creation step collects this data.
The bank is mobile first, so the account is activated through the app when my card arrives. Why would I have a username and password for the app that is used to create the account in first place? The app can keep it for me without exposing it to me ever. I can’t be phished for something that I don’t know and it is one less password to remember or take care.
What's the process for if your phone dies or you lose it?
re—activation through scanning documents and taking a selfie. The process is initiated by entering your e-mail address.
Thanks for answering - not sure why someone would downvote someone directly answering a question!
I think it's the people that made reddit... reddit (and digg before that) slowly coming over here, moderation has kept them at bay mostly, but quality has definitely dropped in hacker news
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Which bank is this? Are there others in this space?
Not OP but I use Monzo and they have a very silmilar from to this. You have to enter an email address for account recovery and they send you a "magic link" that opens the app and logs you in, if you ever get logged out.
You then have to record a video selfie saying something like "I am NAME and I want to recover my account" and then send a pic of an ID. Same process (the selfie+ID part) for if you want to display your card PIN reminder.
You then have to record a video selfie saying something like "I am NAME and I want to recover my account" and then send a pic of an ID. Same process (the selfie+ID part) for if you want to display your card PIN reminder.
The nice thing about this flow is that I only need what I already have: my face and my ID. Even my (elderly) parents can manage this process when needed.
I am sure that his bank did collect a lot of information upon account creation; that has nothing to do with their app login process though. Every bank adheres to 'Know Your Customer'.
The most significant reason is preventing your identity from being stolen.
No it's not. "Know your customer".
Cargo cult is an early stage of development, this is evolved to the point of having a logic of its own.
It might just be a matter of boilerplate. The permissions and usernames are (in code, in legalese, etc) may be tied to the concept of a signup. They might have investors, advisors or whatnot asking about weekly registration trends or somesuch. They may have a regulator, and the regulator assumes that you have info.
Even banks are increasingly getting regulator-ish. You may need to produce a "know-your-customer" policy.
Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
It might just be a matter of boilerplate. The permissions and usernames are (in code, in legalese, etc) may be tied to the concept of a signup. They might have investors, advisors or whatnot asking about weekly registration trends or somesuch. They may have a regulator, and the regulator assumes that you have info.
Even banks are increasingly getting regulator-ish. You may need to produce a "know-your-customer" policy.
Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
> Even banks are increasingly getting regulator-ish. You may need to produce a "know-your-customer" policy.
That's an understatement, if I ever saw one.
> Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
When was banking anonymous? In the days of Bonnie and Clyde? :-)
That's an understatement, if I ever saw one.
> Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
When was banking anonymous? In the days of Bonnie and Clyde? :-)
I mean operating anonymously at all, not banking anonymously.
[deleted]
>Anonymity just isn't done anymore.
Passive voice alert! By whom? Site/app producers can, with certain exceptions, choose to allow anonymity.
Passive voice alert! By whom? Site/app producers can, with certain exceptions, choose to allow anonymity.
I believe their point is that site/app producers are increasingly pressure not to allow anonymity by investors.
If you want to not be an insanely easy target for DDOS attacks, requiring customer signup is pretty useful... not sure why this is not being mentioned.
You're assuming a lot, especially about the willingness to install an app at all. I won't install an app unless it couldn't actually have been a webapp and I use it really often.
Give me a proper website with a proper email/password/WebAuthN & SSO signup. I don't want the app, I don't want any of it.
Give me a proper website with a proper email/password/WebAuthN & SSO signup. I don't want the app, I don't want any of it.
He's assuming a non-tech savvy user. Catering to the 1% wouldn't really make for mass market appeal.
Sure, I’m talking from my perspective.
Websites are simply apps installed in the browser without asking for permission. Notorious for tracking abilities, data storage tied to the browser, performance lower, capabilities limited to browser api, data consumption unpredictable, identification tied to web technologies.
Some people may want just that, I don’t judge.
Websites are simply apps installed in the browser without asking for permission. Notorious for tracking abilities, data storage tied to the browser, performance lower, capabilities limited to browser api, data consumption unpredictable, identification tied to web technologies.
Some people may want just that, I don’t judge.
> Websites are simply apps installed in the browser without asking for permission
That actually work on the platforms I choose. There are many apps that only work on iOS/Android that I want to run on my desktop or a more pure linux phone. I just want to be able to consume a service from a platform that clearly have the technical capabilities to do so, but no, it has to be a "app".
> Notorious for tracking abilities
And a lot easier to chose/disable them. This summer many apps (including stuff like spotify) would not even start on iOS because the facebook SDK crashed. On the spotify web player I can choose to block calls to recaptcha, facebook and similar with umatrix. Do you think that apps on average have less tracking or just that you tend to pay for apps but not for webapps and therefore get higher quality apps?
> data storage tied to the browser
Great! Data storage on the client should either be treated as unreliable or the only storage (for stuff where there is no "cloud" or privacy is critical). Tying storage to a single vendor (like icloud or google drive) is a very, very bad idea. Web browsers also have a well defined interface for you to inspect the data saved locally if you want.
> performance lower
For the majority of apps this does not matter. The reason webapps are usually slow is not that the platform is slow, it's that companies copy websites that are stuffed with tracking (if you block that they tend to be much quicker). They suck because the people who made them made them suck.
Most chat, mail, news, or any other form of text/image/video app could easily be performant enough as a webapp. Hell, amazon even made their real time game streaming service a webapp. The platform is not the problem.
> data consumption unpredictable
Not sure what is different here from native apps? Both can auto-update, both can download assets at-will, right?
> identification tied to web technologies
Yes please! That means it's portable and not tied into google/apple!
That actually work on the platforms I choose. There are many apps that only work on iOS/Android that I want to run on my desktop or a more pure linux phone. I just want to be able to consume a service from a platform that clearly have the technical capabilities to do so, but no, it has to be a "app".
> Notorious for tracking abilities
And a lot easier to chose/disable them. This summer many apps (including stuff like spotify) would not even start on iOS because the facebook SDK crashed. On the spotify web player I can choose to block calls to recaptcha, facebook and similar with umatrix. Do you think that apps on average have less tracking or just that you tend to pay for apps but not for webapps and therefore get higher quality apps?
> data storage tied to the browser
Great! Data storage on the client should either be treated as unreliable or the only storage (for stuff where there is no "cloud" or privacy is critical). Tying storage to a single vendor (like icloud or google drive) is a very, very bad idea. Web browsers also have a well defined interface for you to inspect the data saved locally if you want.
> performance lower
For the majority of apps this does not matter. The reason webapps are usually slow is not that the platform is slow, it's that companies copy websites that are stuffed with tracking (if you block that they tend to be much quicker). They suck because the people who made them made them suck.
Most chat, mail, news, or any other form of text/image/video app could easily be performant enough as a webapp. Hell, amazon even made their real time game streaming service a webapp. The platform is not the problem.
> data consumption unpredictable
Not sure what is different here from native apps? Both can auto-update, both can download assets at-will, right?
> identification tied to web technologies
Yes please! That means it's portable and not tied into google/apple!
> Notorious for tracking abilities
A native app has every opportunity a webapp has to track you and much more.
> data storage tied to the browser
So? Browsers make it as easy to clear the storage of a webapp as it is to clear the storage of a native app. If you are talking about PC apps it is even easier to clear webapps' storage than native apps. If you mean it is bad because the stored data can disappear from the users device, that is what the localstorage API is for. Browsers will only delete that data if the user tells them to. This isn't any different from native apps having to deal with users deleting their files.
> Performance lower
While I have to admit that for raw computation webapps are slower than native, most apps don't need that much raw computational power and WASM should bridge the gap to native performance for apps that do need it. If your webapp is slow it is by far more likely you did a poor job programming it, not that you are limited by web performance.
> capabilities limited to browser api
Browser APIs are expanding all the time (except on iOS Safari but Apple has a vested interest in crippling webapps). And again, most apps don't need deep access to a system and the few that do shouldn't be webapps anyway.
> data consumption unpredictable
This has absolutely nothing to do with if an app is a webapp or native. Native apps can suck down data like crazy while webapps can use almost none and vice versa.
> identification tied to web technologies
Not really? Name one form of widely used identification that webapps don't support. You can use emails, usernames, 2FA, security fobs.
edit: remove snark at the end, it didn't add anything.
A native app has every opportunity a webapp has to track you and much more.
> data storage tied to the browser
So? Browsers make it as easy to clear the storage of a webapp as it is to clear the storage of a native app. If you are talking about PC apps it is even easier to clear webapps' storage than native apps. If you mean it is bad because the stored data can disappear from the users device, that is what the localstorage API is for. Browsers will only delete that data if the user tells them to. This isn't any different from native apps having to deal with users deleting their files.
> Performance lower
While I have to admit that for raw computation webapps are slower than native, most apps don't need that much raw computational power and WASM should bridge the gap to native performance for apps that do need it. If your webapp is slow it is by far more likely you did a poor job programming it, not that you are limited by web performance.
> capabilities limited to browser api
Browser APIs are expanding all the time (except on iOS Safari but Apple has a vested interest in crippling webapps). And again, most apps don't need deep access to a system and the few that do shouldn't be webapps anyway.
> data consumption unpredictable
This has absolutely nothing to do with if an app is a webapp or native. Native apps can suck down data like crazy while webapps can use almost none and vice versa.
> identification tied to web technologies
Not really? Name one form of widely used identification that webapps don't support. You can use emails, usernames, 2FA, security fobs.
edit: remove snark at the end, it didn't add anything.
> A native app has every opportunity a webapp has to track you and much more.
Nope, an iOS app can’t leave a cookie that other apps can use to identify me.
Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
Nope, an iOS app can’t leave a cookie that other apps can use to identify me.
Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
> Nope, an iOS app can’t leave a cookie that other apps can use to identify me.
Maybe not directly, but by using something like the Facebook SDK the same effect can be achieved by shipping your advertising identifier off to Facebook who then does the tracking server side using events generated by the Facebook SDK. This is in tons of apps and you have no way of knowing it as an end user without reading the privacy policy or reverse engineering the app.
> Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
This is just as much of an issue on native apps as it is with webapps, browsers wont clear local storage for a website unless the user requests it just like how a native apps storage won't be cleared unless a user requests it.
> The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
Just because the App Store download size is predictable doesn't mean the final download size is, lots of apps download a bunch of extra assets on first launch or even regularly as you are using them. I also couldn't find a way to check data usage of apps or websites on WiFi on my iPad so that isn't really a point either way.
Maybe not directly, but by using something like the Facebook SDK the same effect can be achieved by shipping your advertising identifier off to Facebook who then does the tracking server side using events generated by the Facebook SDK. This is in tons of apps and you have no way of knowing it as an end user without reading the privacy policy or reverse engineering the app.
> Clearing storage is not the issue, making sure that the storage is not accidentally cleaned is.
This is just as much of an issue on native apps as it is with webapps, browsers wont clear local storage for a website unless the user requests it just like how a native apps storage won't be cleared unless a user requests it.
> The data consumption of an app is predictable because the download size would be listed in the appstore. On a website, it could be anything and the only way to find out is to load it. You can check out the data usage after install in iOS but there’s no easy way to do it for websites.
Just because the App Store download size is predictable doesn't mean the final download size is, lots of apps download a bunch of extra assets on first launch or even regularly as you are using them. I also couldn't find a way to check data usage of apps or websites on WiFi on my iPad so that isn't really a point either way.
A number of apps like the Chick-fil-A one explicitly advertise these as features:
> - Advanced Persistent Device Identification: Identifies individual mobile devices for both iOS and Android platforms, even if they have been reset or if the application has been reinstalled.
> - verifies the integrity of the application in which it is embedded to ensure it has not been modified or infected. It also analyzes all other apps installed on the device, and reports their reputation and the presence of any malicious code.
> - Advanced Persistent Device Identification: Identifies individual mobile devices for both iOS and Android platforms, even if they have been reset or if the application has been reinstalled.
> - verifies the integrity of the application in which it is embedded to ensure it has not been modified or infected. It also analyzes all other apps installed on the device, and reports their reputation and the presence of any malicious code.
> It also analyzes all other apps installed on the device, and reports their reputation and the presence of any malicious code.
There is no iOS API that allows them to do this. Apple removed it years ago: https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/24/apple-expanding-u...
There is no iOS API that allows them to do this. Apple removed it years ago: https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/24/apple-expanding-u...
You are pretending that apps don't do any of that? The only difference is you have control over your browser(you can filter tracking sites etc) but for an app you have none.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I favor the Apps more that websites because of what the web has become.
Being able to know in what I am getting in and tapping install is much, much better experience than tapping on a link to the unknown then trying to figure out how to reach the thing I am looking for when the website tries to track me, monetize me, make me sign up all at the same time.
A website would usually load about the same size data of a native app without a warning and would report me to facebook, google and others.
That’s not something I am thrilled about.
Being able to know in what I am getting in and tapping install is much, much better experience than tapping on a link to the unknown then trying to figure out how to reach the thing I am looking for when the website tries to track me, monetize me, make me sign up all at the same time.
A website would usually load about the same size data of a native app without a warning and would report me to facebook, google and others.
That’s not something I am thrilled about.
> load about the same size data of a native app without a warning and would report me to facebook, google and others
Why do you think native apps are not like that?
Many apps load SDKs from google and (especially) facebook. They often load a lot of assets from servers.
Why do you think native apps are not like that?
Many apps load SDKs from google and (especially) facebook. They often load a lot of assets from servers.
I can see what is the required download size for install and I can track how much data an app is using on iOS.
For websites, this is not an option.
For websites, this is not an option.
You can see the installed downloaded binary, sure. And you can see usage after the fact, but there is no reason to assume that the app store size is the only download it will use, most major apps I've seen use a lot more even when not downloading media.
It’s still much better than not having a clue.
So:
Option A: Only runs on one platform, can only be published on that platform with the blessing of the manufacturer of your device and little-to-no insight into data usage
Option B: Cross platform, can be interfaced with using open standards and block parts of it that you want (not just on a DNS level, but on a resource level)
I really don't see why you would prefer A?
Option A: Only runs on one platform, can only be published on that platform with the blessing of the manufacturer of your device and little-to-no insight into data usage
Option B: Cross platform, can be interfaced with using open standards and block parts of it that you want (not just on a DNS level, but on a resource level)
I really don't see why you would prefer A?
You prefer option A because it’s much better experience.
If you’re building a service that’s not suitable for option A then you use option B. It’s not really a discussion at that point.
I’m glad that there’s an option B the way that I am glad that there’s frozen pizza in the fridge. Good to have it but I’m not gunning for it if a proper restaurant pizza is available.
If you’re building a service that’s not suitable for option A then you use option B. It’s not really a discussion at that point.
I’m glad that there’s an option B the way that I am glad that there’s frozen pizza in the fridge. Good to have it but I’m not gunning for it if a proper restaurant pizza is available.
> but for an app you have none
There are a number of pseudo vpn like apps that give you similarish control over native apps just the same as an extension on a web browser that uses hostname blocklists.
There are a number of pseudo vpn like apps that give you similarish control over native apps just the same as an extension on a web browser that uses hostname blocklists.
> Websites are simply apps installed in the browser without asking for permission.
I don't believe a website can upload your contact list, upload a list of apps on the device, log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
I don't believe a website can upload your contact list, upload a list of apps on the device, log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
> I don't believe a website can upload your contact list
Requires an opt-in permission on native, for browsers with support, it would also be an opt-in permission
> upload a list of apps on the device
Not possible on iOS for a native or web app. Depends on a number of factors on Android.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone.
Possible for native and web apps, but only after explicit opt-in permission.
End result, no meaningful difference between native and web for any of your examples.
Requires an opt-in permission on native, for browsers with support, it would also be an opt-in permission
> upload a list of apps on the device
Not possible on iOS for a native or web app. Depends on a number of factors on Android.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone.
Possible for native and web apps, but only after explicit opt-in permission.
End result, no meaningful difference between native and web for any of your examples.
You can let the website do all these things however they would have to ask for an extra permission to access these API just like the native apps have to ask for extra permissions to access these API.
> I don't believe a website can upload your contact list, upload a list of apps on the device,
True AFAIK.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
Depends on what you mean. This is fully possible on many phones and only needs approval from the user.
Then again approval from the user seems to be becoming the standard in installed apps as well.
That said, I much prefer web pages for things that need cloud or apps/desktop applications that works offline for the rest.
True AFAIK.
> log your GPS location or record using your camera or microphone. Is this no longer true?
Depends on what you mean. This is fully possible on many phones and only needs approval from the user.
Then again approval from the user seems to be becoming the standard in installed apps as well.
That said, I much prefer web pages for things that need cloud or apps/desktop applications that works offline for the rest.
> you have your details there for good and they don't go away accidentally like with the browsers.
But when it does go away (app reinstalls, phone upgrades, phone breaks etc), it causes a disproportionately catastrophic event: complete loss of access. Providing a simple email address would prevent this, but expecting the common user to have the wisdom on account recovery strategies is too optimistic. That's why many apps ask for email during registration.
That can be tolerable for Discord, because your loss is just your friends list and access to some servers, which can be recovered easily through social means. That's not possible or feasible for every kind of app.
But when it does go away (app reinstalls, phone upgrades, phone breaks etc), it causes a disproportionately catastrophic event: complete loss of access. Providing a simple email address would prevent this, but expecting the common user to have the wisdom on account recovery strategies is too optimistic. That's why many apps ask for email during registration.
That can be tolerable for Discord, because your loss is just your friends list and access to some servers, which can be recovered easily through social means. That's not possible or feasible for every kind of app.
I currently use an email based signin for a site I maintain, which doesn't require a password. (Scheme described here - http://sriku.org/blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/ ) I don't think I understand the full consequences of reducing the steps for this even more, but am very curious to consider. I do need to maintain a sense of continued identity across machines and need to communicate with the users outside of the site, as my users expect that (and email serves that well). I think it is already fairly simple (relatively). What would be an approach to simplify this even more?
Hmm not sure I am a fan of custom logins everywhere...you say as a user it is 'simpler' but its simple like fast food is simple - low effort but I still have to take out the digital trash persay.
Probably better if the browser started to come with an e-mail set in it - then web admins can query for that and users have the option to change the email when they so choose...
Probably better if the browser started to come with an e-mail set in it - then web admins can query for that and users have the option to change the email when they so choose...
From layman’s perspective it’s easy to reason that deleting an app or loosing the device will result in loose of data.
You can easily offer an optional data safeguard feature for account restoration.
You can easily offer an optional data safeguard feature for account restoration.
So you'd assume this but older members of my family regular seem to not understand this. Either they just assume that their phone number is their "account" or in some cases make no distinction between the app and their account. They installed the app so where did their data go?
This is especially pronounced now that application sync between devices is more or less universal on iOS and (to a lesser extent) Android.
To the layman, the intuitive perspective is that it "just works" and is exactly how they left it previously, regardless of whether they have wiped their phone or replaced it. This isn't a dig at tech illiterate people but it is just how things are for the normal person. Hell I have been almost burned by this in the past when I moved phones and a certain app(FGO)'s data didn't transfer over.
TLDR The most intuitive thing is working out of the box and seamlessly transferring to a new device. The easiest way to do this is to allow it to be bound to a user's Google account, Microsoft account, and Apple ID.
This is especially pronounced now that application sync between devices is more or less universal on iOS and (to a lesser extent) Android.
To the layman, the intuitive perspective is that it "just works" and is exactly how they left it previously, regardless of whether they have wiped their phone or replaced it. This isn't a dig at tech illiterate people but it is just how things are for the normal person. Hell I have been almost burned by this in the past when I moved phones and a certain app(FGO)'s data didn't transfer over.
TLDR The most intuitive thing is working out of the box and seamlessly transferring to a new device. The easiest way to do this is to allow it to be bound to a user's Google account, Microsoft account, and Apple ID.
Japanese phone carriers had carrier specific mechanisms that plain HTTP requests invoked from link in HTML with certain parameters gets captured by a proxy to include subscriber ID for authentication.
Those little security-by-securing-all-handset mechanisms kind of worked while there weren’t any publicly known rooted phone, in the wild, that can establish a session on featurephone APN, but emergence of iPhone and Android extinguished it.
Those little security-by-securing-all-handset mechanisms kind of worked while there weren’t any publicly known rooted phone, in the wild, that can establish a session on featurephone APN, but emergence of iPhone and Android extinguished it.
This (partly) exists for some mobile carriers.
I know of at least one carrier, but is only usable for their own customer self care portals/apps. There it is possible to auto-login to their app if it is accessed via their network and not via Wi-Fi. For security reasons only a limited amount of functionality is accessible. Neither customer data can be changed nor can any actions resulting in additional cost (buying packs / options) be performed without additional authentication mechanism of a higher security level (auto-login via SMS or use of a password).
The MSISDN is only added to the HTTP request internally in their secure network and never exposed externally.
I know of at least one carrier, but is only usable for their own customer self care portals/apps. There it is possible to auto-login to their app if it is accessed via their network and not via Wi-Fi. For security reasons only a limited amount of functionality is accessible. Neither customer data can be changed nor can any actions resulting in additional cost (buying packs / options) be performed without additional authentication mechanism of a higher security level (auto-login via SMS or use of a password).
The MSISDN is only added to the HTTP request internally in their secure network and never exposed externally.
Actually, that sounds kind of a good idea to me.
Like, have http://my.number/ return the phone number for identification (though it would need some permission, I don't want every app to have access to it).
Make a HTTP POST with some data to http://my.number/validate and have it signed by the carrier, validate it against a list of public keys per carrier. Not sure why that wouldn't work today? It could even be a private/reserved IP address routed by all carriers to their auth service.
Edit: obviously, it wouldn't work over Wi-Fi without some cooperation at the OS level.
Like, have http://my.number/ return the phone number for identification (though it would need some permission, I don't want every app to have access to it).
Make a HTTP POST with some data to http://my.number/validate and have it signed by the carrier, validate it against a list of public keys per carrier. Not sure why that wouldn't work today? It could even be a private/reserved IP address routed by all carriers to their auth service.
Edit: obviously, it wouldn't work over Wi-Fi without some cooperation at the OS level.
so you mean registering with your phone or email?
For games, there’s Game Center in iOS. If that’s not an option, you can provide an option for the user to enter their e-mail, phone number or use “sign in with” service. Usually you can put it in the settings together with a badge seeking their attention.
The idea is that, they already created an account by launching your code, so you don’t have to ask for account creation. Just ask for the information that is necessary to run your services and you can provide an optional method for account recovery.
The idea is that, they already created an account by launching your code, so you don’t have to ask for account creation. Just ask for the information that is necessary to run your services and you can provide an optional method for account recovery.
As a user who has switched back and forth between iOS and Android multiple times, Game Center isn’t gonna cut it for me. But I see how it could be enticing in some use cases.
Lots of apps that don't require a sign-in just give you a code that allows you to re-attach to all your saved data. It does require the user to save the code, but that's not super hard.
Nobody said it was hard. But what's your percentage of people that will "save the code" in a document and remember where it is X months/years from now?
But everyone will still have their email for the most part.
Saving the code for some random app? No way. I'm too lazy to save a restoration code for my gmail account...
Alternative you can link an email without it being a necessary condition.
If its opt in 90% of people wont do it and near 100% of users will change their device in 1-4 years. 90% of your users will end up losing access to their account and 50%+ will stop using your service in frustration because of creators design flaw. Sign in with google is already almost as easy you don't have to have an actual account creation flow just a button click and a screen where users browser autofills their password and they click login. 2 clicks and 10 seconds.
I don’t know about android but on iOS, restoring the new device through an iCloud backup will bring back the app data too.
So, the users who switch from iphone to an iphone don’t loose anything if they follow the default upgrade process.
So, the users who switch from iphone to an iphone don’t loose anything if they follow the default upgrade process.
How many services do you use even if occasionally and how much toleration do you have for cleverly different things like magically knowing who you are based on device with some way to link an account after the fact. I have zero. I want things to work like other things work. I don't have time nor desire to figure out the non obvious way things work just because the dev is confused about how special they are.
That’s not the case here. Think of this as each app having a folder in your iCloud disk without being able to see other apps from different developers. As long as you don’t delete the app, the folder comes with you as you move from device to device so the apps installation is not required each time.
Also, lockin...
Sounds great while iCloud is up/you use iOS...prepare for the shitestorm when its not or the user decides to leave Apple... 'Easy' and 'Convenient' won't be the terms anyone is using.
Sounds great while iCloud is up/you use iOS...prepare for the shitestorm when its not or the user decides to leave Apple... 'Easy' and 'Convenient' won't be the terms anyone is using.
That indeed sounds great for people using ios but 90% of users aren't
I'm pretty confident you could change those numbers with a few reminders to link your email/whatever for a backup. My WA account is extremely aggressive about setting backups, so clearly it works (but you don't need to be that aggressive. You can still respect users and remind them of things.)
I'm pretty sure that if you learn the basics of stitching you will be able to close up the wound after you shoot yourself in the foot.
Give them a popup like "link your email to keep your data even after you switch devices"! Don't give them a cancel option though. Give them a "I want to lose my data" option. That will make them think.
Yep and this could be enhanced further by provide a code retrieval service by email, plus facilities to change the code.
You can always let the person in and let them get started (you know, the valuable stuff that actually causes retention), and then prompt them 24 hours later to enter an email address or phone number for account recovery purposes.
Or give them a choice to create an account if they want to but not needlessly bug them about it.
Discord basically copied IRC and added voice chat. One didn't need an account for IRC why should they need one on Discord? Maybe to retain their nickname but that's it. And it was just a password, no email no phone number no nothing else.
I really liked the temporary and anarchic nature of IRC. No one was really in control.
Discord basically copied IRC and added voice chat. One didn't need an account for IRC why should they need one on Discord? Maybe to retain their nickname but that's it. And it was just a password, no email no phone number no nothing else.
I really liked the temporary and anarchic nature of IRC. No one was really in control.
I don't see the similarity you draw between IRC and Discord, other than the fact they both have text chat. If you think nobody was really in control of IRC then you must have missed out on some of the structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_operator#Operator_types
IRC is federated. Most of the ops were volunteers. They were technically in control of the network until troblemakers launched DoS attacks and caused a split in order to take over channels. Discord has a very similar interface to most IRC clients.
I'm in the other camp on this one. I think the best thing to happen to IRC were the services that let you keep your nick or your channel without needing to maintain an army of bots. Channel takeovers on EFnet were a fact of life and it made things pretty unpleasant imo.
You created another nick or another channel and moved on with life. I liked EFnet, although the conversation got disrupted by troublemakers all the time, I met some really interesting people on it. Freenode was also too nice with nick registration and nicer people and no stinking IRC network task force on the channels like on UnderNet. You totally had the option to be a nomad or register a nickname or a channel.
The next logical step would have been to make it encrypted and add p2p voice chat via DCC or some other method. SILC tried the former but failed to gain traction, people either stuck with IRC or moved on to AIM and Yahoo Messaneger.
The next logical step would have been to make it encrypted and add p2p voice chat via DCC or some other method. SILC tried the former but failed to gain traction, people either stuck with IRC or moved on to AIM and Yahoo Messaneger.
If nag me with providing personal information afterwards I will stop using your app/website. Not being upfront about the kind of information you require comes off as extremely scummy.
Lots of mobile games do this, you get a device tied account and then after you've played a bit they ask if you want to link to a real account to avoid losing progress.
The assumptions you usually have to make with that approach is:
- The app is used on one device
- Only one user has access to a device
- There is a convenient or reliable way to identify a device for all platforms you target
Plenty of apps can live with those, and plenty can't. email address is one of the least bad ways to do it.
- The app is used on one device
- Only one user has access to a device
- There is a convenient or reliable way to identify a device for all platforms you target
Plenty of apps can live with those, and plenty can't. email address is one of the least bad ways to do it.
How can you prevent Sybil attacks?
You can check for real device. You can have rate limiters. You can request e-mail/phone validation before providing a valuable service. I guess depends on the nature of the situation.
Apple Anonymous Attestation is the only thing I know about and it is just now available. And still rich people can afford toms of apple devices but at least it has a large cost.
Well because many services aren't just a mobile apps, and people use multiple devices, and devices have to be replaced from time to time, there are a lot of legit reasons for accounts. There are a lot of ways to mitigate having to make accounts, but many are less secure, more work, and most users at this point are use to creating an account.
Accounts don’t have to be explicit. Ask only for the info that is necessary to provide your service and store it in auto generated account and provide a way to tie this account to some other account like e-mail or phone number for account restoration purposes.
I mean that sounds like a normal account registration process for most things that exist?
what more are you typically putting in, other than an email address, maybe a username for uniqueness, etc...?
what more are you typically putting in, other than an email address, maybe a username for uniqueness, etc...?
The main difference is that the user can start using the service right away and can secure the account some time later.
You can use firebase accounts to manage that. Start with the anonymous account which will create an account with a random UID and use the mechanism to convert the accounts into “registered”. Pretty easy, you don’t even have to create your own custom solution.
You can use firebase accounts to manage that. Start with the anonymous account which will create an account with a random UID and use the mechanism to convert the accounts into “registered”. Pretty easy, you don’t even have to create your own custom solution.
>I don't understand why people even ask for account creation. Now days the devices are personal, you don't have to have accounts to be identified.
Why would I want every single thing I do online to be directly linked to one physical real world device?
It's not so much about data loss for me but I don't want anything real world linked to me to be used to authenticate me in any way other than monetary transactions or things with tangible physical value.
Other than that, I have a range of email addresses and usernames I use depending on the nature of the site and the amount of personal information i'm willing to disclose.
I have a fairly fine grained system for managing my user accounts accross various platforms and i'm personally finding it more and more aggravating the amount of places that require some kind of google or facebook sign in, let alone the idea that my phone should be my universal user account/name.
The internet should be like the rest of public life. For the most part, in my day to day life, I get to choose the amount of personally identifiable information I disclose to others. Managing multiple user accounts with differing levels of personal information is the internet equivalent of this.
I do not wish to be linked to one 'universal digital me' my real life interactions are not like that, why should my internet interactions be forced to be that way?
I have different groups of friends, acquaintances, coworkers etc. I don't act the same way with all of them, I don't talk about the same things with all of them, they don't all have the same level of information about my life, yet increasingly, online interactions are being pushed into this 'one you for everyone and everything' paradigm that is completely antithetical to the original values of the early internet and human interaction in general.
Why would I want every single thing I do online to be directly linked to one physical real world device?
It's not so much about data loss for me but I don't want anything real world linked to me to be used to authenticate me in any way other than monetary transactions or things with tangible physical value.
Other than that, I have a range of email addresses and usernames I use depending on the nature of the site and the amount of personal information i'm willing to disclose.
I have a fairly fine grained system for managing my user accounts accross various platforms and i'm personally finding it more and more aggravating the amount of places that require some kind of google or facebook sign in, let alone the idea that my phone should be my universal user account/name.
The internet should be like the rest of public life. For the most part, in my day to day life, I get to choose the amount of personally identifiable information I disclose to others. Managing multiple user accounts with differing levels of personal information is the internet equivalent of this.
I do not wish to be linked to one 'universal digital me' my real life interactions are not like that, why should my internet interactions be forced to be that way?
I have different groups of friends, acquaintances, coworkers etc. I don't act the same way with all of them, I don't talk about the same things with all of them, they don't all have the same level of information about my life, yet increasingly, online interactions are being pushed into this 'one you for everyone and everything' paradigm that is completely antithetical to the original values of the early internet and human interaction in general.
> they are only good to sync between devices
As an occasional discord user: yes, exactly. That's how Discord syncs communities and read messages between my phone, tablet, and computer, either via app or web client.
This is a huge convenience over say IRC where (last time I looked) the way to get any client-side consistency is to run a personal 24/7 relay on your own server and use special clients to connect to that instead of the main IRC server.
Which is the setup equivalent of not wanting a Dropbox account because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
As an occasional discord user: yes, exactly. That's how Discord syncs communities and read messages between my phone, tablet, and computer, either via app or web client.
This is a huge convenience over say IRC where (last time I looked) the way to get any client-side consistency is to run a personal 24/7 relay on your own server and use special clients to connect to that instead of the main IRC server.
Which is the setup equivalent of not wanting a Dropbox account because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
So. Much. This.
For non technical users, the friction involved in setting up new accounts is a bit too much.
Anecdotally: my tech-handicapped friends all used hangouts. I suggested discord, but everyone wanted to continue using something they were familiar with. Once they did get Discord and discovered how easy it was to start conversations.... nobody went back to hangouts.
For non technical users, the friction involved in setting up new accounts is a bit too much.
Anecdotally: my tech-handicapped friends all used hangouts. I suggested discord, but everyone wanted to continue using something they were familiar with. Once they did get Discord and discovered how easy it was to start conversations.... nobody went back to hangouts.
Not anymore unfortunately, at least not reliably. I picked it because of this ease of use, but I was forced to enter and verify an e-mail before it let me use it. And they reject mailinator.
Unfortunate side effect of their success. Most bigger servers I'm on require having a verified account otherwise all you can see is a single message asking you to verify.
I tried this in a private tab just before writing my response. It asked me for an username and a date of birth to make sure I'm 16.
It will then bug you to "claim" your account (add e-mail address etc.), but you can already use discord normally.
It will then bug you to "claim" your account (add e-mail address etc.), but you can already use discord normally.
That's a per-server controllable setting. The admins can set it such that only users with a verified email (and phone number if they desire) are able to send messages.
Yes, but if you create a new account and the risk algorithm flags you I think you may still be required to verify regardless of the server setting.
Maybe that was also because I started by signing up instead of following an invite link (not sure about that).
Maybe that was also because I started by signing up instead of following an invite link (not sure about that).
>Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing. Put in an username and you're good to go.
What are you talking about? I've tried to create an account before it and would not let me without giving them a non-voip phone number.
YMMV should be included in that statement.
What are you talking about? I've tried to create an account before it and would not let me without giving them a non-voip phone number.
YMMV should be included in that statement.
actually this is the default on creating a new server:
https://support.discord.com/hc/user_images/p4prIch_rOOP4zr7M... German Picture: https://imgur.com/a/qYLf7On
so if you join servers with the default setting you won't be asked for anything. most bigger communities need a validated email tough.
https://support.discord.com/hc/user_images/p4prIch_rOOP4zr7M... German Picture: https://imgur.com/a/qYLf7On
so if you join servers with the default setting you won't be asked for anything. most bigger communities need a validated email tough.
No, he was referring in fact to account creation. I have been unable to create an account without a non-voip phone number at times.
This is a non-default per-server setting, the admins chose to enable this
Its a fairly logical anti spam method. If its a private discord server for your friends there is no need but if the invite link is public then the anti spam protection becomes pretty important.
I agree!
I just created a new account on Discord a few hours ago, and the first thing it asked me for was an email address or non-VOIP phone number. So no, not if you're creating an account. Creating a server is a different thing.
I run a small mentorship program for students. We use Facebook Messenger for all of our communication. This is despite quite a few valid complaints (privacy, not everybody has Facebook, lack of custom rooms, etc). Why? Well currently the onboarding process is this: person expresses interest, person gets added to Messenger group. With another platform, it becomes person expresses interest, we give person a form to create an account. The difference is push versus pull.
Facebook is nobody's favorite platform and yet it's the one most people have.
Facebook is nobody's favorite platform and yet it's the one most people have.
Maybe Facebook is nobody's favorite platform because it's the one most people have.
It's great that you're offering a mentorship program, but I would have been one of those students complaining. In a business setting I understand the need to optimize onboarding, but in an educational setting I think inclusiveness should rank higher.
In our student organizations (at university) we've settled on Teams, which is what's available through our university accounts. I'd guess most universities have an equivalent, but let me know if I'm wrong. This has the benefit of requiring no sign-up, and separating work and personal life.
If you're talking about HS students, then I'd be surprised to hear that they're unwilling to install your preferred chat app to join the program.
In our student organizations (at university) we've settled on Teams, which is what's available through our university accounts. I'd guess most universities have an equivalent, but let me know if I'm wrong. This has the benefit of requiring no sign-up, and separating work and personal life.
If you're talking about HS students, then I'd be surprised to hear that they're unwilling to install your preferred chat app to join the program.
You bring up some good points. I could use something like GChat, although idk if that works with my school's GSuite setup. That being said, I've tried spinning up chat apps like Slack/Rocket/etc. and faced serious issues.
A. Nobody checks Slack. In the beginning everything's great and people are engaging on slack, but after a few weeks engagement drops off.
B. The number of people without Facebook has been precisely 1. If there were more people without FB accounts, I'd 100% consider another option.
C. Begrudging use is better than no use. It's not that students are boycotting my program because they have some hatred of Slack. It's more that they're confronted with a form, which they put off and then forget to do.
A. Nobody checks Slack. In the beginning everything's great and people are engaging on slack, but after a few weeks engagement drops off.
B. The number of people without Facebook has been precisely 1. If there were more people without FB accounts, I'd 100% consider another option.
C. Begrudging use is better than no use. It's not that students are boycotting my program because they have some hatred of Slack. It's more that they're confronted with a form, which they put off and then forget to do.
You've clearly thought about this, and certainly begrudging use is better than none. My first thought would have been to go with Signal, if GChat through your school doesn't work. I've had no issues with group chats on there.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" -- you're making the right decision by focusing on good mentorship offering instead of blocking on the perfect chat solution. Good luck!
"Perfect is the enemy of good" -- you're making the right decision by focusing on good mentorship offering instead of blocking on the perfect chat solution. Good luck!
I would be hesitant to join a facebook group as a student and young people increasingly don't have an account. The only reason to make one these days is for HR checks, millennial rituals, government etc.
> With another platform, it becomes person expresses interest, we give person a form to create an account.
Couldn't you create the account for them ?
Couldn't you create the account for them ?
I've seen all sorts of problems with services that don't require a validated email address in the past.
Seems like a great idea... until a few years down the line you run into an issue for which you need to send a message to your users. And you can't.
These are often legal issues. Needing to forward on take-down notices, changing privacy laws (remember all of the emails that were sent out when GDPR came into effect).
Legal issues aside, the killer challenge is account recovery. People forget their passwords. How are you going to give them back access to their account without a verified communication mechanism?
Seems like a great idea... until a few years down the line you run into an issue for which you need to send a message to your users. And you can't.
These are often legal issues. Needing to forward on take-down notices, changing privacy laws (remember all of the emails that were sent out when GDPR came into effect).
Legal issues aside, the killer challenge is account recovery. People forget their passwords. How are you going to give them back access to their account without a verified communication mechanism?
Discord often solves this by showing an alert when you login. Product updates and other news often shows up there. You have to close it to get into the app.
The mindset around account recovery would be: if you value your information in your account, add an email. Otherwise, you can start again if you lose it. Doesn't work in all situations.
The mindset around account recovery would be: if you value your information in your account, add an email. Otherwise, you can start again if you lose it. Doesn't work in all situations.
This is quite wrong. To log in to Discord, I have to provide my e-mail address, be logged into a Google account (because of reCAPTCHA), and possibly even open my mail box to confirm to Discord that I am, in fact, me.
This is the Web experience at least, on mobile they presumably already have all of this (or the equivalents) right after installing their app.
EDIT: to add to this, I once created a Discord account associated with a fake e-mail. After a while they presumably figured that out, but instead of, e.g., letting me log in and change the e-mail, they just locked me out.
This is the Web experience at least, on mobile they presumably already have all of this (or the equivalents) right after installing their app.
EDIT: to add to this, I once created a Discord account associated with a fake e-mail. After a while they presumably figured that out, but instead of, e.g., letting me log in and change the e-mail, they just locked me out.
You're talking about the login flow. OP is talking about onboarding.
Go to discord.com right now, click "Open Discord in your browser", enter a random username, and hit enter.
Go to discord.com right now, click "Open Discord in your browser", enter a random username, and hit enter.
That's a pretty recent change though. Not long ago they used to require a non-temporary email, often a phone number (no prepay phone numbers allowed, ruling out most of many countries), and maybe a bunch of captchas to top it off.
I actually remember this being a thing back in 2015-16 when they first launched and before the "boom" happened. Back then it was only possible when you actually got an invite from somebody to join a server though, if I remember correctly.
But back then there was no official way to browse more or less public servers, which is the case now. I guess to join those it might be good enough in their eyes to just create a temporary account to let users test the waters and hopefully later convert into a proper account.
But back then there was no official way to browse more or less public servers, which is the case now. I guess to join those it might be good enough in their eyes to just create a temporary account to let users test the waters and hopefully later convert into a proper account.
Are you sure you weren't just trying to join a server that required extra verification? My first experiences with Discord, years ago, were exactly the same as the new user experience now, except they seem to be running out of unique digits for some common names.
You're right. Even I underestimated the impact of the one click to join.
I don't remember the last time I joined a community or Slack where I had to enter a bunch of info, but I see in my Discord a bunch of servers I've joined because it is so easy.
I don't remember the last time I joined a community or Slack where I had to enter a bunch of info, but I see in my Discord a bunch of servers I've joined because it is so easy.
Yep, if you demo an app and you require a sign-in, you should re-think the demo.
It is a pretty smooth process but my partner got stuck in a failure mode due to removing friction like confirming email before you can start engaging with the app. A typo in the email and a password manager failing to save the generated password. This problem wasn’t noticed for days while chatting in various communities, when it was, even though their phone was still authenticated, no option but to abandon the account was available.
I’m sure it is a pretty small percentage of users this impacts but I think confirming an email address as real before allowing access avoids this wasted sunk cost and probably more importantly to small communities, avoiding troll accounts/harassment.
I’m sure it is a pretty small percentage of users this impacts but I think confirming an email address as real before allowing access avoids this wasted sunk cost and probably more importantly to small communities, avoiding troll accounts/harassment.
> a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username
While that's good, it would be better if they added an option to "log into an existing account".
I created 3 different discord accounts that way. There was no way to realize that I was creating a new account rather than just creating local name for an existing account.
While that's good, it would be better if they added an option to "log into an existing account".
I created 3 different discord accounts that way. There was no way to realize that I was creating a new account rather than just creating local name for an existing account.
I just tested this on android and it requires an email and password to register - no getting around that. It also asks for my birthday. Then it forces verification by either email or phone. I wish it was just enter a username and go.
Edit: this was for an invite on a server I control and allows unrestricted access. It is not a server requirement; it is a discord requirement.
Edit: this was for an invite on a server I control and allows unrestricted access. It is not a server requirement; it is a discord requirement.
> Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username.
I also want to add: you don't have to install a thing either. I played a few games that heavily encouraged community coordination and still remember people backing out of VOIP because of the download ("I'll do it when I log off" and then never do). In addition, because of a central API, users can be authenticated with in-game/game account info and automatically assigned a role, instead of sitting about waiting for an admin.
Discord removes every barrier of entry possible.
> to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
This lets you measure engagement. Discord trusted their product enough to know engagement would happen.
I also want to add: you don't have to install a thing either. I played a few games that heavily encouraged community coordination and still remember people backing out of VOIP because of the download ("I'll do it when I log off" and then never do). In addition, because of a central API, users can be authenticated with in-game/game account info and automatically assigned a role, instead of sitting about waiting for an admin.
Discord removes every barrier of entry possible.
> to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying.
This lets you measure engagement. Discord trusted their product enough to know engagement would happen.
Any good resources you’d recommend for reading further on this approach?
for most discords you do need a verified email to chat.
That has been my onboarding ethos too when it makes sense, if they need an account at all.
On one app that did require an account, a user can use the app up until the point they need to save something, which is when I take their email address and password and then they are in.
Email is only for password resets. But I don't think I will even require that by default in future. Perhaps a prompt that the user can add their email address just in case they forget their password, but not require it.
On one app that did require an account, a user can use the app up until the point they need to save something, which is when I take their email address and password and then they are in.
Email is only for password resets. But I don't think I will even require that by default in future. Perhaps a prompt that the user can add their email address just in case they forget their password, but not require it.
Jitsy Meet is even easier to set up, no account required. Just visit a web page, create a channel/meeting and you're good to go. I love it compared to Zoom which is quite annoying. The audio is also better. No idea why everyone uses Zoom, most meetings are less than 10 people. I also hear it on news channels in interviews since the pandemic, robotic Zoom voice.
I've used Jitsi throughout the pandemic for all of my university's meetings where I have a say in the platform.
I'm highly pleased with it. From all other platforms I've tried, Jitsi is the saner, offers more freedom and is more inclusive (no account needed). As an educator, platform inclusiveness ranks very high on my criteria for choosing which way to go.
I'm highly pleased with it. From all other platforms I've tried, Jitsi is the saner, offers more freedom and is more inclusive (no account needed). As an educator, platform inclusiveness ranks very high on my criteria for choosing which way to go.
Lots of stuff used to work this way I think.
Anyway, that’s great. Do this. Maybe more people can do this.
Anyway, that’s great. Do this. Maybe more people can do this.
We've spent weeks debating whether to ask users to create an account or not for our app. Going for no auth would've decreased our development costs by a lot, while also increasing conversion because once installed you'd get right into using all the features. But then we realized people abuse the service (it's a B2C SAAS that's free for the C side) and we need a way to ban the abusers from using the platform.
Going for auth impacts everyone because you have to provide (and verify) your info to us, and this translates to 99% of the users being impacted by the other 1% who will not play by the rules. Sure, you can blame companies for not coming up with smarter options for eliminating the abusers that hurt everyone else, but when we're offering a free service without asking for anything back from your side I find it hard to justify investing months of development into this. And this is why you create an account with your email or phone number, and if you make the life hard for everyone else you go out of the platform and let everyone else enjoy it peacefully.
Going for auth impacts everyone because you have to provide (and verify) your info to us, and this translates to 99% of the users being impacted by the other 1% who will not play by the rules. Sure, you can blame companies for not coming up with smarter options for eliminating the abusers that hurt everyone else, but when we're offering a free service without asking for anything back from your side I find it hard to justify investing months of development into this. And this is why you create an account with your email or phone number, and if you make the life hard for everyone else you go out of the platform and let everyone else enjoy it peacefully.
Isn't a new email address basically free? So any abuser would have to spend just an insignificant amount of time to create a new account?
How does the user log back in from a other device?
> even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing.
That's how I ended up with three Discord accounts with no way to merge them and I am not alone [1].
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600531...
That's how I ended up with three Discord accounts with no way to merge them and I am not alone [1].
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600531...
Well it's still trivial to join[0] to all servers from one of those accounts and delete[1] the other two AFAIK.
[0]I acknowledge that if you're in some private servers where inviting is disabled you might need mods to create an invite for your primary account
[1]I haven't tried to delete my discord account recently
[0]I acknowledge that if you're in some private servers where inviting is disabled you might need mods to create an invite for your primary account
[1]I haven't tried to delete my discord account recently
There is something magical about this onboarding flow. Discord join links make it very easy for outsiders to hop in. My introduction to Discord was playing League of Legends several years ago. People would send links to their voice channels so teams could communicate. I clicked and voice chatted (in my web browser no less!). After doing that a few times I felt Discord was pretty cool so I registered and installed the Desktop client.
THIS.
This morning I left my daughter at home until noon. Not knowing how to stay in touch with her 'just run case', I tried to set up a Google Meet that I could join at work to see what she was up to.
Cue 15 minutes of:
- trying to create a meet without an account => fail.
- use my account to create a meet, take link, pull it up on daughter's computer.
- need to create account for daughter on Google so that she can join.
- creation of children account requires me to login because children not >18.
- create family with my account.
- back to creating account for child.
- strong password entered.
- google requires a payment setup, picks up my credit card (??) from my account to add to daughter's account.
- cannot dismiss payment option, stuck there..
Then I thought about Discord:
- Go to Discordapp.com
- Click on "open app", enter chilren first name, server is created
- copy paste link to my computer and go to children server
- Done
This is just fantastic. I just abhor the user story on anything else now, this is just so easy, and solves so many issues.
This morning I left my daughter at home until noon. Not knowing how to stay in touch with her 'just run case', I tried to set up a Google Meet that I could join at work to see what she was up to.
Cue 15 minutes of:
- trying to create a meet without an account => fail.
- use my account to create a meet, take link, pull it up on daughter's computer.
- need to create account for daughter on Google so that she can join.
- creation of children account requires me to login because children not >18.
- create family with my account.
- back to creating account for child.
- strong password entered.
- google requires a payment setup, picks up my credit card (??) from my account to add to daughter's account.
- cannot dismiss payment option, stuck there..
Then I thought about Discord:
- Go to Discordapp.com
- Click on "open app", enter chilren first name, server is created
- copy paste link to my computer and go to children server
- Done
This is just fantastic. I just abhor the user story on anything else now, this is just so easy, and solves so many issues.
I was curious and surprised you didn't link to your site at all so I looked at your submission history and I believe you're referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6670113 ?
This links to https://volafile.org/ which I have to say is pretty damn awesome as a concept! Simple yet effective.
curious why you didn't choose to charge a fee for registering an account in the end?
Are you monetizing the service in any way? I assume hosting files up to 20GB doesn't come for free right?
curious why you didn't choose to charge a fee for registering an account in the end?
Are you monetizing the service in any way? I assume hosting files up to 20GB doesn't come for free right?
I like the concept but how do you manage malicious users though?
We've come full circle back to IRC: no registration required, guests get a guestXYZ generated username.
imho Slack screw themselves by not making it nice for larger communities (I.e. how they fucked over the react community). They put themselves in a "Work only" corner which is being taken over by Microsoft Team, etc. RIP Slack
It's a shame that the old guard refused to modernize. Talk to IRC or Jabber fans and they despise basic things like emojis, let alone important things like preserving offline messages and ease of access. There are hills to die on, and they died on too many hills.
> Jabber fans and they despise basic things like emojis
We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school.
> let alone important things like preserving offline messages
Jabber is federated, that's up to the service or client. Also, Jabber is extensible, it could be implemented in a breeze.
We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school.
> let alone important things like preserving offline messages
Jabber is federated, that's up to the service or client. Also, Jabber is extensible, it could be implemented in a breeze.
[deleted]
> We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school.
He's not wrong though. The average IRC user, especially, hates emojis.
He's not wrong though. The average IRC user, especially, hates emojis.
Though I think the reason you never see emojis on IRC is just a reminder that nobody uses IRC from their phone, that's how screwed IRC is.
I don't really get it? Discord kind of won in being the only one offering that type of product.
IRC, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo and Skype are operating in a very different space. Mumble is a small open source project. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are old school desktop apps, I believe both are a one man project. IRC is an open source communication protocol. Skype was just a VOIP app.
The truer competitors to discord would have been the Twitch App, and maybe Steam itself and Microsoft Xbox on PC. But still, I'll just contend Discord is a social media platform tailored to gamers with an emphasis on voice chat. And that was just a unique product that had not been done before. It appeared at the right time, since technology, broadband, and gamers owning good quality mics and competitive online gaming growing all made it possible.
I feel the article should have focused more on how Discord succeeded, and less on how it won, since I don't really see who it competes with.
If you try to have it compete against Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagam it definitely didn't win. If you try to have it compete against Slack, Teams, RocketChat, Chanty, Mattermort, it also didn't win, since it has no paid footing in the enterprise world.
IRC, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo and Skype are operating in a very different space. Mumble is a small open source project. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are old school desktop apps, I believe both are a one man project. IRC is an open source communication protocol. Skype was just a VOIP app.
The truer competitors to discord would have been the Twitch App, and maybe Steam itself and Microsoft Xbox on PC. But still, I'll just contend Discord is a social media platform tailored to gamers with an emphasis on voice chat. And that was just a unique product that had not been done before. It appeared at the right time, since technology, broadband, and gamers owning good quality mics and competitive online gaming growing all made it possible.
I feel the article should have focused more on how Discord succeeded, and less on how it won, since I don't really see who it competes with.
If you try to have it compete against Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagam it definitely didn't win. If you try to have it compete against Slack, Teams, RocketChat, Chanty, Mattermort, it also didn't win, since it has no paid footing in the enterprise world.
I think Discord (and Slack and similar) is best understood as a community platform rather than the things we are tempted to compare it to, because it's not just chat (IRC), it's not just voice chat (Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype), it's a fuller community building experience that helps you meet and stay in touch with other people inside the same org/interest. And I think this is something HN commentary consistently misses.
As an example, IRC isn't a community building tool. It doesn't have offline async notifications/messaging, for one. It misses these tools that helps you develop relationships. It's just ephemeral chat (for better or worse).
That's why it doesn't matter if Discord isn't perfect. People want to form relationships, not just chat, not just post.
As an example, IRC isn't a community building tool. It doesn't have offline async notifications/messaging, for one. It misses these tools that helps you develop relationships. It's just ephemeral chat (for better or worse).
That's why it doesn't matter if Discord isn't perfect. People want to form relationships, not just chat, not just post.
I don’t think they won, it feels kind of like they are holding on to a torch for some time before something else eventually passes by them.
I run a discord channel and there are several inherent flaws that make me want to move over to Slack or something better.
No threaded replies, no voice message, confusing Direct Messages, confusing screen share, etc, let alone the I am Playing video game status updates makes it unsuitable for other than gamers imo.
I can say though they did an amazing job with the bots system and customization of ranks and channels.
It feels like a matter of time someone combines the best of Slack, Discord, and IRC ...
I run a discord channel and there are several inherent flaws that make me want to move over to Slack or something better.
No threaded replies, no voice message, confusing Direct Messages, confusing screen share, etc, let alone the I am Playing video game status updates makes it unsuitable for other than gamers imo.
I can say though they did an amazing job with the bots system and customization of ranks and channels.
It feels like a matter of time someone combines the best of Slack, Discord, and IRC ...
Discord won because Skype couldn't keep up with ever growing gaming community and their demands and it wasn't specialized for gamers at the first place. Modern gaming is very specialized and you need a software to game efficiently with other people(communicate, coordinate, inform, message etc.)
I'm not sure how Slack is related to Discord but they seem the same for me UI wise. I always wondered why Slack didn't purchase Discord and turn it into their gaming division.
Before Discord you as a gamer could either use clunky Skype or something like outdated Ventrilo.
I'm not sure how Slack is related to Discord but they seem the same for me UI wise. I always wondered why Slack didn't purchase Discord and turn it into their gaming division.
Before Discord you as a gamer could either use clunky Skype or something like outdated Ventrilo.
Slight anecdote:
on a DIY server, I see a job ad for devs, I sell myself to that person and soon I get invited to a room. It's about making a discord game, turns out my almost new boss is a 13yo boy with business envy. Was highly surprised.
on a DIY server, I see a job ad for devs, I sell myself to that person and soon I get invited to a room. It's about making a discord game, turns out my almost new boss is a 13yo boy with business envy. Was highly surprised.
I can “handle” Twitter, Facebook, etc. These services are part of my life, contained, separate. I cannot “handle” Discord. Discord is far worse for me. By default, the interface bombards me with either notifications or “soft” notifications that change the color of channels to make you wonder what’s going on in there. I’ve come to loathe it. I recently quit Discord, despite the fact that I run a Discord community of several hundred people. Basically just abandoned it. It was killing me. Twitter is like a pleasant minor distraction compared to this quagmire.
You can make it completely impossible for a server (or people) to notify you in any way whatsoever through settings.
That's one of the positive features that keeps streamers and communities using it -- you can't bother people who don't want to be bothered.
That's one of the positive features that keeps streamers and communities using it -- you can't bother people who don't want to be bothered.
Couldn't you just stick to Discord on mobile and only open it when a notif comes? That way you don't see any changes in the icon, like on desktop. Plus, the notification settings in general are pretty flexible, one of the few things I genuinely like about Discord.
Mute everything. I solves most of these issues.
They haven't won yet. They were on a really strong path early on but the app is bloating itself into oblivion.
or it's because they focused on a niche market that actually like to use computers
I've always struggled to log into Discord.
1. Try to log onto a channel, but get presented with a "We've detected something out of the ordinary going on. To continue using Discord" where my only option is to verify by phone, which I don't want to do.
2. Occasionally, I'll figure it's worth a try in incognito. I get a step further, only to read "New login location detected, please check your e-mail.". Go back to non-incognito, check email, open the verify link in an incognito window.
3. Instead of finally signing me in, it says "IP address authorized" and "If you followed this link after trying to login on the desktop or mobile app, please go back and try again.".
4. Fair enough, time to log in, again. Submit credentials, get presented with the bizzarely slow fade-in recaptchas. Fail twice, succeed on the third time. Horray! I can see the channel!
5. Finally try those other organisations invite links (in the form of discord.com/invite/org), but get "This invite may be expired, or you might not have permission to join.".
1. Try to log onto a channel, but get presented with a "We've detected something out of the ordinary going on. To continue using Discord" where my only option is to verify by phone, which I don't want to do.
2. Occasionally, I'll figure it's worth a try in incognito. I get a step further, only to read "New login location detected, please check your e-mail.". Go back to non-incognito, check email, open the verify link in an incognito window.
3. Instead of finally signing me in, it says "IP address authorized" and "If you followed this link after trying to login on the desktop or mobile app, please go back and try again.".
4. Fair enough, time to log in, again. Submit credentials, get presented with the bizzarely slow fade-in recaptchas. Fail twice, succeed on the third time. Horray! I can see the channel!
5. Finally try those other organisations invite links (in the form of discord.com/invite/org), but get "This invite may be expired, or you might not have permission to join.".
That sounds like your originating IP is linked to abuse, like accounts banned for ToS or botting. Slow-fade, harder captchas are another symptom of that (and could indicate Google/whatever-captcha-they-use also don't trust your IP). Is this over a VPN, Tor, or residential IP?
If you enable fingerprinting resistance/block their attempts to run a significant amount of privacy-violating JS, you risk permanent account lockouts. This includes non-VPN. You can get account lockouts for "suspicious" on standard, non-VPN IPs, without any recaptcha weirdness.
They may also ask for ID or birthday or phone at any time. This is not something I want in a casual chat app.
They may also ask for ID or birthday or phone at any time. This is not something I want in a casual chat app.
They are using an antiquated security and require capchas for VPN users. It's kind of lame. The IP ban should be removed after a day for abuse. It's an ignorant "security measure" and annoyance to users who also value a bit of privacy.
Same here. It's because everything is always incognito and I have uBlock installed. I avoid Discord as much as possible partially due to that.
But also the idea of sharing my life with yet another American company is really not appealing to me. I want to be able to express myself without the fear of it being recorded for whatever reason. Can't wait for Signal to introduce encrypted group chat...
But also the idea of sharing my life with yet another American company is really not appealing to me. I want to be able to express myself without the fear of it being recorded for whatever reason. Can't wait for Signal to introduce encrypted group chat...
This articles sorely misses the point of target demographics and use cases.
I don't like Skype, but still use it pervasively for basic business communications.
My aging parents use all sorts of technology, even with their grandkids, and Discord is not on the list.
'Gaming' is a very key, central social aspect to Discord and I'm doubtful that it would exist to such a degree of popularity without it.
Also - despite the fact that it is, indeed quite good ... it's also complicated.
I don't like Skype, but still use it pervasively for basic business communications.
My aging parents use all sorts of technology, even with their grandkids, and Discord is not on the list.
'Gaming' is a very key, central social aspect to Discord and I'm doubtful that it would exist to such a degree of popularity without it.
Also - despite the fact that it is, indeed quite good ... it's also complicated.
I recommend reading https://www.swyx.io/slack-fumble
We are devs or small SEO plugin for WordPress and we use discord for all our comms, despite the fact w.org is using slack. And that they will move to matrix. Because they invested in it.
We are devs or small SEO plugin for WordPress and we use discord for all our comms, despite the fact w.org is using slack. And that they will move to matrix. Because they invested in it.
thanks for the shoutout!
I started using dicord to play D&D online. It's great for that.
Then I persuaded our team at work to switch from skype/hangouts/slack to discord. It just work much better, has less connection problems, uses no transfer when you're not talking, filters noise better, allows to change volume level per user, has infinite history on text chat.
There's no competition.
Then I persuaded our team at work to switch from skype/hangouts/slack to discord. It just work much better, has less connection problems, uses no transfer when you're not talking, filters noise better, allows to change volume level per user, has infinite history on text chat.
There's no competition.
Discord wins because it allows you, the member of an existing community to set up a new subset of that community over which you have power. For a while I thought discord was paying people to create communities for everything but then I realized, they don't need to; the joy of being in charge is enough.
Are you really in charge though? Discord has deleted servers over political speech. It sounds nice and agreeable and all when you're calling them out for being "Nazis", but the fact is that there's no due process or chance of a fair appeal if you're arbitrarily labelled as one of these "Nazis". You have the illusion of being in charge but are ultimately a feudal serf.
Anyone actively and freely communicating on an actual independent platform is instead seen as a liability to the public because there's no implied threat or leverage over their community.
https://blog.discord.com/our-stand-on-racial-equality-320088...
Anyone actively and freely communicating on an actual independent platform is instead seen as a liability to the public because there's no implied threat or leverage over their community.
https://blog.discord.com/our-stand-on-racial-equality-320088...
Actual control is irrelevant; it's the feeling of control and the ability to excercise control on others that is the bribe. That said, I think that most people will never run afowl of the above rules so it's not like they'd notice.
As much as they have made a really good app, it's chat. The moment discord starts becoming expensive , people will switch to mattermost or zulip or ircV3 by that time (ps or matrix). The privacy issues are real and the moat to exit is shallow. We already switched our community to mattermost because , discord doesnt seem sustainable for long term, and we also have control that can't be taken away. It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.
> It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.
Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.
https://matrix.org/
Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.
https://matrix.org/
Yes of course, Matrix too. In fact i am waiting for them to make it easy to integrate existing user base to switch to them. Matrix will probably be the ultimate replacement to discord, because it lends itself naturally to the case of a medium sized game-based community.
Privacy issues don't outweigh convenience and familiarity, and are provably not a barrier to massive scale and longevity (see every large social network with 1B+ users). I don't think you appreciate how convenient the single-account, cross server approach is. Discord has made its way across a ton of communities and likely will continue to do so. It held up to scale and scrutiny especially in early covid times.
The problem with basic protocols is they are inherently very slow to develop and iterate, so problems stick around for a long time. UX can vary widely across different clients for the protocol. SMS has had huge longevity and will stick around for a good while longer, but I don't think anyone is arguing that SMS is actually better than the internet based closed systems that exist today.
The problem with basic protocols is they are inherently very slow to develop and iterate, so problems stick around for a long time. UX can vary widely across different clients for the protocol. SMS has had huge longevity and will stick around for a good while longer, but I don't think anyone is arguing that SMS is actually better than the internet based closed systems that exist today.
The thing with discord is, its communities are offspring of other communities. The parent communities are either some subreddit , or some gaming group somewhere, or some forum , or some crypto community etc. The communities centers are elsewhere, not on discord. Most of them can move between chat apps like nomads.
In my experience, there is a huge difference between people active on discord community vs the reddit community in most cases.
But theres still a reddit community. Is there a case where the community went discord only? And are they willing to pay when discord stops being free?
I mean, If there isn't a huge overlap in users of both reddit and discord, then it's an entirely different community on the same topic.
But to answer your question, plenty and not sure if they are willing to pay. Many open source projects now a days start on discord and then eventually add a subreddit. For example, deno.
But to answer your question, plenty and not sure if they are willing to pay. Many open source projects now a days start on discord and then eventually add a subreddit. For example, deno.
But it's not just chat. It's a community.
People don't want to "switch". They don't want to host software. They don't want to register for a bunch of different communities.
They just want to click "Join" and build relationships. Or click "Create" to create one. You can't just try to solve chat and protocols (IRCv3), you need to solve community.
I certainly agree with what you're saying. But so far our attempts at decentralized social systems are clearly early on in the experimentation process, to put it the nicest way possible. Open protocols are a great idea, but that is the easy part that we like to fixate on. The hard part is a compelling experience that people will want to use so that you have people to chat with.
And so far we're still trying to figure out what that solution looks like.
People don't want to "switch". They don't want to host software. They don't want to register for a bunch of different communities.
They just want to click "Join" and build relationships. Or click "Create" to create one. You can't just try to solve chat and protocols (IRCv3), you need to solve community.
I certainly agree with what you're saying. But so far our attempts at decentralized social systems are clearly early on in the experimentation process, to put it the nicest way possible. Open protocols are a great idea, but that is the easy part that we like to fixate on. The hard part is a compelling experience that people will want to use so that you have people to chat with.
And so far we're still trying to figure out what that solution looks like.
Part of me wonders if another thing that helped Discord do well was the fact the communities on it were invite only and private by default.
Yeah, I don't like this walled garden aspect of most sites either. But let me explain:
Basically, on sites like Reddit, if a community gets controversial, it almost certainly will get media attention, and potentially get banned or censored because of that. Similarly, if someone says something controversial on Twitter, that could mean losing their job or what not too.
That can't happen as easily on Discord, since you need the invite link to join, and can more easily keep out snooping journalists, moral guardians, etc.
Yeah, I don't like this walled garden aspect of most sites either. But let me explain:
Basically, on sites like Reddit, if a community gets controversial, it almost certainly will get media attention, and potentially get banned or censored because of that. Similarly, if someone says something controversial on Twitter, that could mean losing their job or what not too.
That can't happen as easily on Discord, since you need the invite link to join, and can more easily keep out snooping journalists, moral guardians, etc.
privacy issues/concerns aside i think Discord is great. Mobile and multi-platform Desktop apps works the same way, it has modern features and integrations.
In fact it seems to have killed IRC for many, which is kinda sad. Most of the IRC networks i use are mostly dead now. For me Discord has replaced TS and IRC.
In fact it seems to have killed IRC for many, which is kinda sad. Most of the IRC networks i use are mostly dead now. For me Discord has replaced TS and IRC.
Discord is an order of magnitude better. It challenged the rigid voice chat where text chat was a secondhand feature, where voip was unreliable, and where a sense of community was lacking. It cultivated all of that.
Now you see streamers, gamers, and groups of friends making Discords for their communities.
* "serverless" aka no IP grabbing and doxx
* voice + chat (with emojis, images, videos) + easy desktop sharing
that's all I guess, no other software did offer that.
Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble and so on.
* voice + chat (with emojis, images, videos) + easy desktop sharing
that's all I guess, no other software did offer that.
Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble and so on.
If I had to choose between exposing my IP, and exposing my user account ID, user account name, and profile photo (that I've used on literally every other Discord community), I'd go with the former. At least in the case of the former, you can fix that with a VPN. If you use a VPN with Discord on the other hand, they're more likely to disable your account for phone-number verification.
I prefer the option that people actually want to use so that communities can thrive. This is a requirement for a chat community that is easy to overlook in favor of other advantages, but those advantages aren't very compelling when you, say, are sitting alone in a dying IRC server.
> * "serverless" aka no IP grabbing and doxx
So long as you don't join a voice channel, right? As I understand it all the voice and video is webrtc, so p2p.
So long as you don't join a voice channel, right? As I understand it all the voice and video is webrtc, so p2p.
Discord has not yet "won" for me. Until I can host it myself, use my own certificates, and control the server bitrate and logs I won't use it.
For now, Mumble serves all my needs and works great. It is by far the lightest and fastest voice system out there right now.
For now, Mumble serves all my needs and works great. It is by far the lightest and fastest voice system out there right now.
All it needs is a more intelligent setup-system, and possibly a (better) web version.
I’ve never used Discord. What is it? What other things is it similar to?
Slack for gamers.
Anecdata/opinion from me: Discord's infinite chat history and search [note 1] is a winning feature for me, and it's frustrating for me that other services I still use don't have that. For example, FB's Messenger app still doesn't have message search, even though the desktop version does. Why?!
[Note 1] However, Discord's message search seems to be quite finicky when it comes to searching links. For example, if someone posts a link with "www.twitter.com/user", it wouldn't show up with a "twitter.com/user" search, but it would show up for "twitter.com" or "www.twitter.com/user". Room for improvement.
[Note 1] However, Discord's message search seems to be quite finicky when it comes to searching links. For example, if someone posts a link with "www.twitter.com/user", it wouldn't show up with a "twitter.com/user" search, but it would show up for "twitter.com" or "www.twitter.com/user". Room for improvement.
Discord doesn't let you thread conversations, and I hate that. If you want to have a related conversation that is accessible to other users but not immediately visible, you have to create a channel.
The feature request has been made... in fact it's been made multiple times and been deleted at least once https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600317...
Slack handles this well, even at the free tier, with threads having a separate type of notification. In fact I'm on two communities that use slack... the limits on free slack (10,000 messages mainly) can be a feature for communities, hiding past messages.
I'd gladly pay for threads in discord. It gets even worse with private channels. Want to discuss something between three folks on a discord server that don't have a shared role without adding another channel to someone's list?
As it stands, this requires knowing someone's username on discord (not what they are called on the server) to add permissions then navigating to edit a channel's permissions, and setting two permissions for each discord user name so they can read and writ. Alternatively, you can do it with the creation of a new role and channel and adding that role to folks, which is annoying if you use roles for communicating anything other than permission levels. And that's if you have the permissions to do that. On Slack you can let anybody thread a conversation.
It's annoying, even as as discord owner. I've been contemplating writing a bot to handle it, but frankly it should be built in. And so should message threads.
The feature request has been made... in fact it's been made multiple times and been deleted at least once https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600317...
Slack handles this well, even at the free tier, with threads having a separate type of notification. In fact I'm on two communities that use slack... the limits on free slack (10,000 messages mainly) can be a feature for communities, hiding past messages.
I'd gladly pay for threads in discord. It gets even worse with private channels. Want to discuss something between three folks on a discord server that don't have a shared role without adding another channel to someone's list?
As it stands, this requires knowing someone's username on discord (not what they are called on the server) to add permissions then navigating to edit a channel's permissions, and setting two permissions for each discord user name so they can read and writ. Alternatively, you can do it with the creation of a new role and channel and adding that role to folks, which is annoying if you use roles for communicating anything other than permission levels. And that's if you have the permissions to do that. On Slack you can let anybody thread a conversation.
It's annoying, even as as discord owner. I've been contemplating writing a bot to handle it, but frankly it should be built in. And so should message threads.
Someone posted in Discord some thread testing they were doing. The developers responded that they are testing, but it's not being committed to yet.
https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/hzobo2/threads_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/hzobo2/threads_...
Has anyone had luck replacing Slack with Discord? Threads are the major obviously missing feature for me at this point, but I think I might gladly trade that to get a sane Markdown editor back, which Discord has.
Also our team doesn't currently pay for Slack (small academic lab), so all our old message history is being held hostage, which has been a bit annoying.
Also our team doesn't currently pay for Slack (small academic lab), so all our old message history is being held hostage, which has been a bit annoying.
They won because it was free to make servers. All the other competitors you had to purchase from some hosting solution or run it on a server, not a lot of gamers can do this
Here are 14 popular servers accounting for nearly $250,000 in revenue per year.
So where's the big revenue?
So where's the big revenue?
really love seeing news about Discord being successful. It is a product I use daily, and rarely have issues.
their tech blogs have been pretty cool to read, talking about the various problems of scale they have had while leveraging the BEAM vm.
I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages.
their tech blogs have been pretty cool to read, talking about the various problems of scale they have had while leveraging the BEAM vm.
I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages.
>I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages.
I remember looking through their engineering job postings once recently, and not one of them mentioned Elixir, making me wonder how much they are really committed to it.
I remember looking through their engineering job postings once recently, and not one of them mentioned Elixir, making me wonder how much they are really committed to it.
We don't have an open req for our chat infra team right now which heavily uses Elixir. We are quite committed to Elixir, actually, we were interviewed by José Valim about how we use Elixir :)
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
Discord won because the competition sucked. What are the alternatives? Let's break it down:
XMPP - Stuck in the past, lacks modern basic features like "If I leave my laptop open and receive a message, it doesn't disappear into the ether and I can still read it on my phone". And if you do manage to configure it to match modern messaging services, you just spent hours in config-file land, which 99% of users aren't interested in attempting.
Hipchat, Slack - So now at work, when you present in meetings, and show your Slack window, everyone will see that you're in "Dave's Sexy Game Server" as well as BigSeriousCorp? No thanks.
Google Hangouts - In typical Google fashion, they've taken the perpetual-MVP approach to this product. Somewhere, someone inside Google is arguing that removing chat functionality from their chat platform is the best way to simplify the product and cut costs. Oh okay. I'll describe it. It's a 200px by 200px window of sadness with no searchable chat history.
Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger - Mobile-first experiences.
Forums (PhpBB etc.) - Better for offline communication, mobile sucks, hard to keep track of new messages to conversations.
XMPP - Stuck in the past, lacks modern basic features like "If I leave my laptop open and receive a message, it doesn't disappear into the ether and I can still read it on my phone". And if you do manage to configure it to match modern messaging services, you just spent hours in config-file land, which 99% of users aren't interested in attempting.
Hipchat, Slack - So now at work, when you present in meetings, and show your Slack window, everyone will see that you're in "Dave's Sexy Game Server" as well as BigSeriousCorp? No thanks.
Google Hangouts - In typical Google fashion, they've taken the perpetual-MVP approach to this product. Somewhere, someone inside Google is arguing that removing chat functionality from their chat platform is the best way to simplify the product and cut costs. Oh okay. I'll describe it. It's a 200px by 200px window of sadness with no searchable chat history.
Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger - Mobile-first experiences.
Forums (PhpBB etc.) - Better for offline communication, mobile sucks, hard to keep track of new messages to conversations.
I don't think any of those were alternatives for gaming, which is what it was (still is?) marketed for.
If you wanted to play a game and do voice chat with a group of friends, TeamSpeak, Discord, and Mumble were the only options that were group-first (easier to do lobbies than single-person calls). Discord's UI is 2 decades ahead of Mumble / TS, and it's free.
If you wanted to play a game and do voice chat with a group of friends, TeamSpeak, Discord, and Mumble were the only options that were group-first (easier to do lobbies than single-person calls). Discord's UI is 2 decades ahead of Mumble / TS, and it's free.
The gaming alternatives were mumble and teamspeak which also sucked. Its no wonder discord took off when all of the competition sucked.
not a single one of those were or are the alternatives to discord, except for slack now.
the actual competitors were teamspeak, skype, mumble, and ventrilo.
the actual competitors were teamspeak, skype, mumble, and ventrilo.
Is it reasonable to consider using Discord as an online forum for residents of a condo building? I'm looking for something cheap/free, easy to use and to set up.
Yes, as long as people would actually install it and care to use that medium at all. Like I think everyone my age (30s) would do it, but I know my parents wouldn't.
But as an easy social/community tool for a small group when you want something more than just a WhatsApp group, it's great.
The downside is that it's just chat and thus any important info being discussed can be hard to link, find, and centralize. I'm part of some organizations that handle this by having a Facebook group as a lightweight forum and landing page of the organization along with the Discord for more hangout and meet each other vibes.
But as an easy social/community tool for a small group when you want something more than just a WhatsApp group, it's great.
The downside is that it's just chat and thus any important info being discussed can be hard to link, find, and centralize. I'm part of some organizations that handle this by having a Facebook group as a lightweight forum and landing page of the organization along with the Discord for more hangout and meet each other vibes.
If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I am resentful of Discord. I hate that it exists, I hate that it is used, and most of all I hate that it is popular. It's irrational hatred (I think distate is legitamate), but I can't deny it. I don't know if it's my general aversion to gamer culture, or the fact that it's an electron application, or that it just came out of nowhere, and suddenly was everywhere. I decide not to use it, but still feel left out. I'm glad and sad.
I go out of my way to ensure that my contacts don't use Discord. At the begining of the pandemic, my friends wanted to use it (the TeamSpeak server we used to use was full), but it didn't work on my end, AFAIK because of strict browser policies. Luckly we swiched to mumble, and it works great. The effort to configure it at first it greater, and the defaults can be improved, but I'm far happier this way, without being sucked into another horrible service.
I don't think your hatred is irrational. I, too, hate discord and everything it stands for. Your points are very valid indeed, but I think the main reason I hate it is because it really showed me that I am in the grave minority when it comes to caring about the issues you listed. Nearly* all people I know don't give a fuck: They don't give a fuck that it's a web browser with web widgets and humongous spacing everywhere. They don't care that it cannot be customized. They don't care about who runs the whole operation. They don't care where the money comes from. They don't care that I (I know, I know) have to fill out about 15 captchas every time I want to interact with the thing. They don't care that other clients are forbidden and a bannable offense.
Every time someone invites me to discord, it shows me that the world indeed couldn't care less about the values that are central to me when evaluating software. But I wouldn't expect that from the gaming community anyways, those guys never cared. The true pain comes when I find some free software project where all developement talk is on discord. Because it shows me that even the people I'd expect to care at least a tiny little bit about all those points, are okay with this.
I also want to add that I want to punch an executive every time someone calls his discord space a "server". It's not a server. It seems that fight is lost as well. Discord servers are what people think of now when the word server is used, and this change of meaning will not be reversed.
*Except my two best friends, who continue using a self hosted teamspeak/mumble with me and of whom one shares my grief about the whole discord situation.
Every time someone invites me to discord, it shows me that the world indeed couldn't care less about the values that are central to me when evaluating software. But I wouldn't expect that from the gaming community anyways, those guys never cared. The true pain comes when I find some free software project where all developement talk is on discord. Because it shows me that even the people I'd expect to care at least a tiny little bit about all those points, are okay with this.
I also want to add that I want to punch an executive every time someone calls his discord space a "server". It's not a server. It seems that fight is lost as well. Discord servers are what people think of now when the word server is used, and this change of meaning will not be reversed.
*Except my two best friends, who continue using a self hosted teamspeak/mumble with me and of whom one shares my grief about the whole discord situation.
>I also want to add that I want to punch an executive every time someone calls his discord space a "server". It's not a server.
As far as I know, they don't even internally use that name, but call it a "guild", which is kind of a bad name in its own right (because not every community using Discord is a "guild" - not even in gaming, since mostly fantasy-MMORPG-style games call their game-internal groups "guilds", other games often use different monikers, "clans" or "corporations" or whatever fits the game world). However, I must admit that it was a genius idea to market the thing to users as a "server", because that invokes the idea of an actual dedicated server as they were typical for earlier Teamspeak/Mumble solutions, which usually was a significant time and money investment. By calling Discord communities "servers", people who switch over from one of these classic self-hosted setups subconsciously think they are now getting the same thing for free that they usually had to pay a significant sum of money for.
As far as I know, they don't even internally use that name, but call it a "guild", which is kind of a bad name in its own right (because not every community using Discord is a "guild" - not even in gaming, since mostly fantasy-MMORPG-style games call their game-internal groups "guilds", other games often use different monikers, "clans" or "corporations" or whatever fits the game world). However, I must admit that it was a genius idea to market the thing to users as a "server", because that invokes the idea of an actual dedicated server as they were typical for earlier Teamspeak/Mumble solutions, which usually was a significant time and money investment. By calling Discord communities "servers", people who switch over from one of these classic self-hosted setups subconsciously think they are now getting the same thing for free that they usually had to pay a significant sum of money for.
I don't believe anyone who every ran his own voicecomm server has the feeling that he's getting the same thing as before, especially since the operations where a bit more involved. My guess is the terminology is purely for the little guys, the users who never ran a server themselfes. I used a server a friend's friend of mine hosted for a long time before setting up my own and most of the time I got the feeling the users really where a bit jealous of the admins in their own little Kingdom. Now, discord has given all of those people the power to create a kingdom of their own with the press of a button, running somewhere in a datacenter without the involvement it took before.
Don't get me wrong, this point I deem mostly good for the users, abusive admins bullying people where a problem since the bbs times, but the new price is more than I'm willing to pay. I'm just so very, very sad that everyone else is for some reason fine with being bullied by discord instead of someone's older cousin.
Don't get me wrong, this point I deem mostly good for the users, abusive admins bullying people where a problem since the bbs times, but the new price is more than I'm willing to pay. I'm just so very, very sad that everyone else is for some reason fine with being bullied by discord instead of someone's older cousin.
I feel similarly but for different reasons. It effectively killed forums, and the context-switch-heavy UX design enables more people to do drive-by, low-quality posting, rather than more deliberate and thought out discourse. Gaming culture has been severely downgraded as a result.
Though forums were of course dying before Discord came around, probably mainly because mainstream users aren't going to register for a bunch of different forums. So a centralized forum like Reddit had the advantage of people not needing to be enough of an <interest> fanatic to join <Interest>Forum.com but enough to want to poke around on r/<interest> from time to time. So r/<interest> is going to have an advantage over the forum.
And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online.
And I don't think Discord is as competitive with forums as you think. My forum has a Discord. Yeah, people hang out on it, and now it's an essential part of the community. A lot of our casual conversations and friend-making is just shooting the shit which forums are awful at. But now I see my users engaging each other on more and more personal levels and getting to know each other.
But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse. I think it's much better now because it went mainstream. When I was growing up, being a "gamer" still had that loser virgin stereotype. Now I see my friend's 13yo son in Discord voice chats when I'm hanging out at their place and you hear a healthy assortment of even women gamers. Seems so so much better than when I was 13yo. Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
There are always things that change for the worse in these kinds of shifts, but it's also important to understand the upsides.
And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online.
And I don't think Discord is as competitive with forums as you think. My forum has a Discord. Yeah, people hang out on it, and now it's an essential part of the community. A lot of our casual conversations and friend-making is just shooting the shit which forums are awful at. But now I see my users engaging each other on more and more personal levels and getting to know each other.
But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse. I think it's much better now because it went mainstream. When I was growing up, being a "gamer" still had that loser virgin stereotype. Now I see my friend's 13yo son in Discord voice chats when I'm hanging out at their place and you hear a healthy assortment of even women gamers. Seems so so much better than when I was 13yo. Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
There are always things that change for the worse in these kinds of shifts, but it's also important to understand the upsides.
>And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online.
You're cherry-picking a specific use-case of a forum and constructing a straw man out of it. Forums are (at least more than Discord) a very good tool for discussing strategies, making counter-arguments, posting guides, or organizing information.
> But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse.
Except that wasn't what gaming culture was at the time for everyone. Because the attention economy is now concentrated on unthreaded discord chats, you have more drive-by commenters, messages taken out of context, lack of deliberate information, and more hoops to go through to get good information organized. Pinned messages aren't obvious to everyone and the UX for those limits the utility gained from it. Therefore it becomes much harder to disseminate good information to your community, guild, or whatever. People just aren't going to see it as much. That becomes baked into the culture, and the notion of sharing or teaching becomes seen as a thing for "boomers" or "autists" (actual words I've seen people use on the subject). This system might be an upgrade if you're getting drunk or doing drugs with the homies on a Friday night, but if you take gaming and teamwork seriously, it's a massive downgrade.
> Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
Ouch, depending on the model those have been known to emit 5000 times the RF radiation that a cellular phone typically emits. http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report...
You're cherry-picking a specific use-case of a forum and constructing a straw man out of it. Forums are (at least more than Discord) a very good tool for discussing strategies, making counter-arguments, posting guides, or organizing information.
> But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse.
Except that wasn't what gaming culture was at the time for everyone. Because the attention economy is now concentrated on unthreaded discord chats, you have more drive-by commenters, messages taken out of context, lack of deliberate information, and more hoops to go through to get good information organized. Pinned messages aren't obvious to everyone and the UX for those limits the utility gained from it. Therefore it becomes much harder to disseminate good information to your community, guild, or whatever. People just aren't going to see it as much. That becomes baked into the culture, and the notion of sharing or teaching becomes seen as a thing for "boomers" or "autists" (actual words I've seen people use on the subject). This system might be an upgrade if you're getting drunk or doing drugs with the homies on a Friday night, but if you take gaming and teamwork seriously, it's a massive downgrade.
> Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands.
Ouch, depending on the model those have been known to emit 5000 times the RF radiation that a cellular phone typically emits. http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report...
To add a competitive perspective: I'm the founder of Guilded, which is (afaik) the only VC-funded startup in direct competition with Discord.
Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why?
In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it.
Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers.
My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime).
If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way.
Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...
Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why?
In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it.
Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers.
My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime).
If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way.
Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...
i disagree, as a very early adopter of discord. early discord was rough around the edges, but it was still 10x better than any competitor because of how atrociously bad teamspeak/mumble/skype/ventrilo were. using skype was one of the worst communication experiences i have had on a computer - the fact that discord voice connections were semi-stable, not a complete hassle to set up, and had individual servers as well as DMs already made it better than any of its competiotors.
I think you're both right at the same time. Discord didn't need to be perfect to gain momentum, but it needed to be better. In a way, not only was Discord better; it also added a new use case.
I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups.
I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.
I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups.
I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.
Nice insight, so gamers are (or at least were?) the "early adopters" persona that a new product loves to have. I see this a lot in startup lore though, the idea of finding an audience where you are solving a big specific pain, rather than trying to make everyone's life a tiny bit better (but less than they care).
Oh man, I'm still excited about the prospects of guided. The threading alone is a feature I dearly miss.
The problem has been getting everyone on voice chat in guided. It just didn't work as well as discord and our group more or less abandoned it. Getting a hundred people organized and trying a new tool is a pita. Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since.
It's definitely a catch up game now. :( :( :(
But I have faith it can work out.
The problem has been getting everyone on voice chat in guided. It just didn't work as well as discord and our group more or less abandoned it. Getting a hundred people organized and trying a new tool is a pita. Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since.
It's definitely a catch up game now. :( :( :(
But I have faith it can work out.
> Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since.
We haven't announced it yet, but we've just started rolling out an all new "bot creator" feature this week, which'll allow you to create bots for your server without writing any code (and if you do want to write code, we now have an early-access request form for our upcoming API). If you want to try it out and don't have access to it yet, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile).
(we've improved voice significantly and have also added streaming channels for streaming gameplay, too, if you want to give those a shot!)
We haven't announced it yet, but we've just started rolling out an all new "bot creator" feature this week, which'll allow you to create bots for your server without writing any code (and if you do want to write code, we now have an early-access request form for our upcoming API). If you want to try it out and don't have access to it yet, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile).
(we've improved voice significantly and have also added streaming channels for streaming gameplay, too, if you want to give those a shot!)
hey sorry i didn't reply, i don't check the threads all too often.
that's cool! good luck with that. I think many of us already have many bots that we use. But honestly the biggest hurdle was the audio issues. At least with Mumble it is the evil we know, but when we first tried Guilded like 5 months ago, even getting the client to switch microphones was a big chore and we couldn't get some people to even get on voice chat.
Point is, if you can make it work as seamlessly as discord, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I love the thread features, all the document management, I eat that shit up, but no good voice, no use.
that's cool! good luck with that. I think many of us already have many bots that we use. But honestly the biggest hurdle was the audio issues. At least with Mumble it is the evil we know, but when we first tried Guilded like 5 months ago, even getting the client to switch microphones was a big chore and we couldn't get some people to even get on voice chat.
Point is, if you can make it work as seamlessly as discord, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I love the thread features, all the document management, I eat that shit up, but no good voice, no use.
You're entirely correct about Discord but it will be difficult to switch over completely unless you make it almost a drop in replacement for discord (eg. supporting discord bots). I can imagine moving over some of the small servers with just a few friends but getting bigger communities to switch is a hard problem and unless you do that, almost everyone will still have a reason to stay on discord.
The biggest thing missing from discord right now is the ability to upload videos. I understand you can pay to upgrade to be able to do this, but my friends and I switched to discord from hangouts, and not being able to upload funny videos is a bummer.
I guess I'll be the one to say it. Discord has a serious privacy problem. And I'm not talking about the potential eavesdropping by the company on your private messages.
Your username, user ID, profile photo, mutual friends, and mutual servers are always visible to anyone. Something you said years ago could potentially come back to screw you over at any time. Changing your username does not help, as the messages you posted back then will be displayed under your new username.
Want to start a serious game project as a developer? That clan you posted drunk messages in 5 years ago might still have someone in it who can then use those messages against you, for little or no reason at all. Gaming communities can be savage.
Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
Your username, user ID, profile photo, mutual friends, and mutual servers are always visible to anyone. Something you said years ago could potentially come back to screw you over at any time. Changing your username does not help, as the messages you posted back then will be displayed under your new username.
Want to start a serious game project as a developer? That clan you posted drunk messages in 5 years ago might still have someone in it who can then use those messages against you, for little or no reason at all. Gaming communities can be savage.
Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because:
1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile.
2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account.
3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere).
4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
There are dozens of mod related issues I've found with discord that seem simple but just haven't been implemented. A lot of people on discord forums voiced their dissatisfaction as well.
The moment I stopped being a mod though these problems seemed void to me.
The moment I stopped being a mod though these problems seemed void to me.
This article is clickbait, and it's full of... Nonsense? I like Discord as software and I like them as a company, but a lot of what's beining attributed to Discord isn't true here.
Firstly: won what?
Discord was born _years_ (over a decade for some) after some of the "competitors" mentioned became defunct, while others are still thriwing, and is built on top of the foundations and groundwork laid by that same competition.
For casual or small parties, Discord is great. For large scale multi-squad coordination Discord is the worst out of all the competition (priority speaker feature does not solve this on its own).
Firstly: won what?
Discord was born _years_ (over a decade for some) after some of the "competitors" mentioned became defunct, while others are still thriwing, and is built on top of the foundations and groundwork laid by that same competition.
For casual or small parties, Discord is great. For large scale multi-squad coordination Discord is the worst out of all the competition (priority speaker feature does not solve this on its own).
> It is easy to switch to Discord. Inviting people is two clicks and a paste. Joining a server (once you have an account) is two clicks. It is so simple you don’t even think about it.
...and then you have to delete that account because you're not logged in on the browser, and log in to the main site with your browser, and click on the invite link again
I think there is a "get verification link in email" step somewhere in there for me too, it's always a major pain in the ass to accept an invite for me and I kind of dread getting discord invites because of this.
...and then you have to delete that account because you're not logged in on the browser, and log in to the main site with your browser, and click on the invite link again
I think there is a "get verification link in email" step somewhere in there for me too, it's always a major pain in the ass to accept an invite for me and I kind of dread getting discord invites because of this.
I remember when I first heard of discord back in 2015 before it became the huge thing it is these days. It seemed like a cool idea and reminded me of IRC, which I still used then, + voice chat if you needed it. Back then I had trouble getting my gaming friends on board as communication was split between Skype, Steam, TeamSpeak, the odd Mumble server, some IRC, etc. When people finally joined in and you were able to talk to most of them in one place, either via text or voice, it was great and made things a lot easier.
Nowadays though, I'm kind of weary of it. Their struggles to find a proper way of monetization makes me feel a bit uneasy at times to be quite honest. I would prefer to have a way to talk to my friends on a service that is either self-hosted, such as Matrix, or at least a little more transparent and trustworthy. But now it very hard to get people away from it and even if, it would probably create split groups again which would be a step backwards. They certainly did fill a niche of easy community building in a time when you would either have to set something up yourself, i.e. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, or rely on arguably worse services such as Skype. I guess it also helped that they looked towards Slack for some inspiration in a way. But there's still the issue that any of the open-source alternatives are arguable worse to this day, so a lot of people are stuck with it, sadly.
Nowadays though, I'm kind of weary of it. Their struggles to find a proper way of monetization makes me feel a bit uneasy at times to be quite honest. I would prefer to have a way to talk to my friends on a service that is either self-hosted, such as Matrix, or at least a little more transparent and trustworthy. But now it very hard to get people away from it and even if, it would probably create split groups again which would be a step backwards. They certainly did fill a niche of easy community building in a time when you would either have to set something up yourself, i.e. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, or rely on arguably worse services such as Skype. I guess it also helped that they looked towards Slack for some inspiration in a way. But there's still the issue that any of the open-source alternatives are arguable worse to this day, so a lot of people are stuck with it, sadly.
As someone who has never paid for cosmetic or superficial features for a service (chat, games, websites etc), I am grateful for people who do.
> Discord won the competition for the gaming chat platform of choice, and now it wants to be the platform for all internet communities. This means they will be competing with the “big dogs” like Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Epic.
It’ll be interesting to see if they keep their edge once they expand into other areas
It’ll be interesting to see if they keep their edge once they expand into other areas
From a competitor perspective, Discord is a great product. There is no question about it. But the UI/UX and lingo is heavily optimized for gaming communities.
Discord's UX/UI can be disorienting and complex for professional communities. With AirSend, We are targeting the professional niche with clean and simple UX (https://www.airsend.io/build-community).
While Discord is trying to cross over to other communities, there is a good possibility that it will alienate their original supporters and make the system more complex overall. For Discord, there is definitely a multi-billion dollar opportunity in just gaming itself.
Discord's UX/UI can be disorienting and complex for professional communities. With AirSend, We are targeting the professional niche with clean and simple UX (https://www.airsend.io/build-community).
While Discord is trying to cross over to other communities, there is a good possibility that it will alienate their original supporters and make the system more complex overall. For Discord, there is definitely a multi-billion dollar opportunity in just gaming itself.
What's fascinating to me is that I've been a developer for more than 20 years and have never used Discord. It's very popular obviously, but how have I managed not to be sucked in? I haven't made any effort to avoid it.
I guess if you're in a crowd that is into gaming and gen-z culture, you'd get sucked in in no time. Most of the time, how I ended up joining discord communities was while searching for something like "Community for X" or while going through a subreddit and they had a Discord channel. But most often, you only stay if you have friends who are active on there and uses the voice chat feature frequently.
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One of the few things I find to be an unrelenting pain in the ass about Discord as an unfamiliar user is account management - is my account tied to the server I've joined? Is it tied to my email? If I click a link to join a server and set a username, how do I link that with my existing account? If I set my username/profile picture on one server, does it change across all the servers I've joined?
As a college student that's constantly told to join Discord servers for every class/club/friend group, it's so annoying for this not to work intuitively, and the Discord documentation isn't too helpful either. I think I must have joined about 6 different servers across 3 different email addresses by now just because of how obtuse it is.
As a college student that's constantly told to join Discord servers for every class/club/friend group, it's so annoying for this not to work intuitively, and the Discord documentation isn't too helpful either. I think I must have joined about 6 different servers across 3 different email addresses by now just because of how obtuse it is.
So much overanalysis.
Discord "won" this round of social musical chairs because of pure luck, just like AIM and MySpace and Friendster and Facebook and Snap and Tiktok, etc. In a few years, its users will be "old" and then the next generation will flock to some other "cool" service.
You can't control, nor predict, nor copy anything about this sort of service. It either gains traction, for whatever reason, or it doesn't. Once it does, network effects take over and growth is exponential.
Analyze Discord to death, it won't give you any clue how to duplicate it.
Discord "won" this round of social musical chairs because of pure luck, just like AIM and MySpace and Friendster and Facebook and Snap and Tiktok, etc. In a few years, its users will be "old" and then the next generation will flock to some other "cool" service.
You can't control, nor predict, nor copy anything about this sort of service. It either gains traction, for whatever reason, or it doesn't. Once it does, network effects take over and growth is exponential.
Analyze Discord to death, it won't give you any clue how to duplicate it.
Discord: the app I am proud to have installed on my phone. Twitter/Reddit: the apps I feel forced to have on my phone.
How does it compares to Disqus?
there's no victory when the users lose. praising a proprietary platform like Discord is not quite a nice thing, at best.
computers are more than mere quick abacuses, they define our lives. the amount of personal user data and metadata that crap gathers is quite frightening. user privacy loses bad with Discord.
Being proprietary, who knows what else will be the best step in their malicious software.
it's cute to think UX is everything, but not everyone laughs at each PRISM reveal.
computers are more than mere quick abacuses, they define our lives. the amount of personal user data and metadata that crap gathers is quite frightening. user privacy loses bad with Discord.
Being proprietary, who knows what else will be the best step in their malicious software.
it's cute to think UX is everything, but not everyone laughs at each PRISM reveal.
"Won" is a bad term. It implies that the game is over. Of course, it is not over. Yahoo "won". So did Skype, and MySpace, the list of internet tech companies/websites that " won" are probably longer than the number of sites that you visited today. The game is never over.
something that is not underlined enough is that you're allowed to purchase Nitro for someone else channel you enjoy, via gifts.
that removes a lot of friction, compared to, say, splitting a teamserver costs or putting a paypal donation button.
that removes a lot of friction, compared to, say, splitting a teamserver costs or putting a paypal donation button.
I'm a founder of a company making Jira/Trello competitor [0] and we actually just released a Discord integration this week (we've had a Slack one for ages) because we had a number of customers and potential customers ask for it. So a small N, but it does seem to be gaining in popularity inside companies, at least smaller ones.
0: https://kitemaker.co
0: https://kitemaker.co
There's something fishy with the sign-up UX, though. I constantly keep seeing new users accidentally creating two accounts (the record being four!) when they join a server for the first time.
I've seen this happen quite a lot with servers that I'm in.
I've this this happen when someone is not logged into Discord in their browser and is logged in in the Discord app. When they click the server join link, Discord creates a new dangling (no-email-attached) account. However, since they are logged into the Discord app, their real account also joins the server when they launch the app from the browser.
I'm pretty keen on sharing this knowledge because I recently realized I've done this myself, and it took me way too long to figure it out. I "started" using Discord a few months ago, and in one of the servers I joined, I saw an account with an oddly-familiar username that joined a server about a minute before I did. And then I saw the same thing happen in another server! After a few weeks of having a weird feeling about this, I finally found out that in my browser, I was logged into a dangling account I created back in 2018, before I really knew what Discord was. (I think back then I thought Discord was just a voice chat service without permanent accounts.)
I would love for Discord to solve this and a few other identity management-related issues!
I've this this happen when someone is not logged into Discord in their browser and is logged in in the Discord app. When they click the server join link, Discord creates a new dangling (no-email-attached) account. However, since they are logged into the Discord app, their real account also joins the server when they launch the app from the browser.
I'm pretty keen on sharing this knowledge because I recently realized I've done this myself, and it took me way too long to figure it out. I "started" using Discord a few months ago, and in one of the servers I joined, I saw an account with an oddly-familiar username that joined a server about a minute before I did. And then I saw the same thing happen in another server! After a few weeks of having a weird feeling about this, I finally found out that in my browser, I was logged into a dangling account I created back in 2018, before I really knew what Discord was. (I think back then I thought Discord was just a voice chat service without permanent accounts.)
I would love for Discord to solve this and a few other identity management-related issues!
I introduced discord at a startup I was a part of. We worked completely remotely and I felt super lonely. I tried to create a culture of everyone who wanted to, could just roam our discord channels and get that watercooler like chatting. It was mildly successful though it was mostly the gamers that were used to sitting around in that type of setting all day.
Might be an opportunity for discord there, perhaps integrate with slack
Might be an opportunity for discord there, perhaps integrate with slack
> There is a good reason people do not use Skype and it is because it sucks.
Nope! (Well yes, but, historically ...) Skype cracked down on free conference calls. I seem to recall this was before the Microsoft acquisition which ultimately destroyed it.
Skype was bustling with fun conference calls, when they were free.
Nope! (Well yes, but, historically ...) Skype cracked down on free conference calls. I seem to recall this was before the Microsoft acquisition which ultimately destroyed it.
Skype was bustling with fun conference calls, when they were free.
This analysis completely misses the mark and spreads a lot of untruths.
The two major points are:
1. Discord makes money by letting users elevate their status, while offering core feature for free.
2. It is 10x better than other offerings.
Regarding 1, immediately after making that statement, the author lists perks such as bigger upload file size limits, better audio quality, screen sharing resolution, etc. These features are not about status, they are core. I therefore do not accept the premise that Discord is "free to play" like the mentioned League of Legends. Ironically, live game coaches for League of Legends will tell their customers to not share the screen on Discord, but on Skype, due to better quality and latency, for free.
Regarding 2, the 10x factor is obviously marketing speech for "significantly better", but even that is factually wrong. As mentioned in 1), a lot of core features such as audio and video quality are limited, unlike rivaling software. Even IRC offered unlimited file sharing of even gigabytes in size (and therefore had a community around it). Meanwhile Discord will not even allow you to share short video clips less than a minute of length due to file size. Skype is being criticized, but what's conveniently being left out is that Skype rose to fame before it was bought by Microsoft and had its architecture changed from peer-to-peer to server-client. Skype used to be much better than it is now and used to have less limitations, and was give-or-take better or worse than Discord. Certainly no 10x here.
The real point IMO, and other commenters have written about this in great detail already, is the ease of onboarding. The article only talks about the ease of joining a channel etc. and compares that to Skype for example, but calling somebody in Skype is also only 2 clicks. It's really account creation and server joining (click a link). And the fact that competitors drove their software into the ground.
The two major points are:
1. Discord makes money by letting users elevate their status, while offering core feature for free.
2. It is 10x better than other offerings.
Regarding 1, immediately after making that statement, the author lists perks such as bigger upload file size limits, better audio quality, screen sharing resolution, etc. These features are not about status, they are core. I therefore do not accept the premise that Discord is "free to play" like the mentioned League of Legends. Ironically, live game coaches for League of Legends will tell their customers to not share the screen on Discord, but on Skype, due to better quality and latency, for free.
Regarding 2, the 10x factor is obviously marketing speech for "significantly better", but even that is factually wrong. As mentioned in 1), a lot of core features such as audio and video quality are limited, unlike rivaling software. Even IRC offered unlimited file sharing of even gigabytes in size (and therefore had a community around it). Meanwhile Discord will not even allow you to share short video clips less than a minute of length due to file size. Skype is being criticized, but what's conveniently being left out is that Skype rose to fame before it was bought by Microsoft and had its architecture changed from peer-to-peer to server-client. Skype used to be much better than it is now and used to have less limitations, and was give-or-take better or worse than Discord. Certainly no 10x here.
The real point IMO, and other commenters have written about this in great detail already, is the ease of onboarding. The article only talks about the ease of joining a channel etc. and compares that to Skype for example, but calling somebody in Skype is also only 2 clicks. It's really account creation and server joining (click a link). And the fact that competitors drove their software into the ground.
This comment is spot-on.
Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at better-than-Discord quality (not talking about Skype here, but Teamspeak and Ventrilo) and with better-than-Discord administrative control over groups (especially Teamspeak had this nailed, with very extensive rights management that's even suitable to the largest and best-organized gaming guilds). What Discord nailed is ease-of-setup, especially of the server part: by offering free hosting that imitated the "one server = one guild" structure well-known to gamers while actually implementing a much-cheaper hosting structure serving thousands of users from one physical server they eliminated one of the typical pain points with existing solutions, which all depended on either having one technically-savvy gamer hosting the server on his own hardware (mostly virtual private servers were used here), or someone paying for hosted versions. This structure provided an opening for Discord: since gamer clans and guilds come and go in quick succession, each time this happens, the continued use of "classic" voice chat solutions like Teamspeak etc. depended on whether "the guy with the server" would continue hosting the voice server for the new guild. Often enough, the new guild simply wasn't lucky enough to have that guy, so they look out for solutions, and Discord offered them one: a free "server" providing a good-enough group voice chat solution.
With regard to monetization one could even argue that Discord failed a lot in that department. The attempt to sell games was largely unsuccessful, and besides the Nitro program they didn't really find anything that works. And even the Nitro program had to be made into an actual "premium" program in order to lead to significant-enough adoption, offering better quality on core features of the service instead of purely cosmetic status-boosting, which is AFAIK not what they originally intended to do with the program.
Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at better-than-Discord quality (not talking about Skype here, but Teamspeak and Ventrilo) and with better-than-Discord administrative control over groups (especially Teamspeak had this nailed, with very extensive rights management that's even suitable to the largest and best-organized gaming guilds). What Discord nailed is ease-of-setup, especially of the server part: by offering free hosting that imitated the "one server = one guild" structure well-known to gamers while actually implementing a much-cheaper hosting structure serving thousands of users from one physical server they eliminated one of the typical pain points with existing solutions, which all depended on either having one technically-savvy gamer hosting the server on his own hardware (mostly virtual private servers were used here), or someone paying for hosted versions. This structure provided an opening for Discord: since gamer clans and guilds come and go in quick succession, each time this happens, the continued use of "classic" voice chat solutions like Teamspeak etc. depended on whether "the guy with the server" would continue hosting the voice server for the new guild. Often enough, the new guild simply wasn't lucky enough to have that guy, so they look out for solutions, and Discord offered them one: a free "server" providing a good-enough group voice chat solution.
With regard to monetization one could even argue that Discord failed a lot in that department. The attempt to sell games was largely unsuccessful, and besides the Nitro program they didn't really find anything that works. And even the Nitro program had to be made into an actual "premium" program in order to lead to significant-enough adoption, offering better quality on core features of the service instead of purely cosmetic status-boosting, which is AFAIK not what they originally intended to do with the program.
@Discord Team
• Why does Discord snoop my clipboard/pasteboard without any explicit paste action from me? (iOS 14 has exposed a bunch of other apps that do this. I can only hope this is not malicious.)
• Why can't I mass delete my own messages?
• Why does Discord snoop my clipboard/pasteboard without any explicit paste action from me? (iOS 14 has exposed a bunch of other apps that do this. I can only hope this is not malicious.)
• Why can't I mass delete my own messages?
Considering the "pay for status and get everything else for free" strategy, it's understandable why Discord was promoting itself as a gamer-only platform for so long.
In a professional or educational setting, custom emojis and cool-looking animations aren't that important. You just want a tool that does the job and does it well. If it does it for free, even better.
If you look at it from that perspective, companies and educational institutions were a problem for Discord. They were using the service same as everyone else, while not bringing much revenue. This was especially true for school groups, which consisted mostly of kids that didn't have credit cards.
The marketing move to appeal only to gamers, making the service unattractive for others, may have been deliberate after all.
Nowadays, Discord has enough features to justify paying for, even if you don't care about status, so the strategy has changed.
In a professional or educational setting, custom emojis and cool-looking animations aren't that important. You just want a tool that does the job and does it well. If it does it for free, even better.
If you look at it from that perspective, companies and educational institutions were a problem for Discord. They were using the service same as everyone else, while not bringing much revenue. This was especially true for school groups, which consisted mostly of kids that didn't have credit cards.
The marketing move to appeal only to gamers, making the service unattractive for others, may have been deliberate after all.
Nowadays, Discord has enough features to justify paying for, even if you don't care about status, so the strategy has changed.
I feel like I'm in the minority that I don't find discord miles better than the competition.
I've not historically had a problem with skype for voice chat, so I don't see how discord is "10x better" than skype
I've not historically had a problem with skype for voice chat, so I don't see how discord is "10x better" than skype
I'm more of a casual gamer these days, but a friend of mine was (and still is) a pretty hardcore gamer. I encountered discord somewhere in it's early days before anyone really knew about it, and recommended it to him at a time when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart. He then introduced discord to that group which revived it completely, and afaik, they're still pretty active. He's also paying for the nitro stuff and a pretty happy user.
I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too.
Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.
I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too.
Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.
>when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart.
Speaking of this, I think Discord also conquered one more application in relative secrecy, and that's the gaming community forum. reddit took on regular forums, but for smaller communities I think reddit fails at this.
Discord gives you multiple channels to talk in, which allows conversation grouping like sub-forums, and extensive chat histories with search, removing the non-permanence of other chat options.
Speaking of this, I think Discord also conquered one more application in relative secrecy, and that's the gaming community forum. reddit took on regular forums, but for smaller communities I think reddit fails at this.
Discord gives you multiple channels to talk in, which allows conversation grouping like sub-forums, and extensive chat histories with search, removing the non-permanence of other chat options.
It is free but it is closed source as far as I can understand (or am I wrong?)
I think the article is a little biased, also the price table is not explained very well.
I think Discord guys are great, but I'd like to not underestimate Slack and MS-Teams on this area
I think the article is a little biased, also the price table is not explained very well.
I think Discord guys are great, but I'd like to not underestimate Slack and MS-Teams on this area
"10x better"? Citation needed.
>In short, it is a way for someone to pay to stand out.
Oh boy, that is putting it so naively.
The tricky part with "status for sale" is projecting some semblance of legitimacy. Specially among more tech savy and piraty communities (eg gaming), if you are paying extra for a free service and making a big deal about it with flair, you are just a fool.
They did a great job in integrating technical perks with flair in a continum; from audio quality, through animations and banners, to vanity URLs. And the boost system creates a ladder with different steps. And it only worked because of how discerning their users are (for contrast, some people are plainly oblivious to media degradation in places like whatsapp).
They knew very well their market and how to package legitimate status to them.
Oh boy, that is putting it so naively.
The tricky part with "status for sale" is projecting some semblance of legitimacy. Specially among more tech savy and piraty communities (eg gaming), if you are paying extra for a free service and making a big deal about it with flair, you are just a fool.
They did a great job in integrating technical perks with flair in a continum; from audio quality, through animations and banners, to vanity URLs. And the boost system creates a ladder with different steps. And it only worked because of how discerning their users are (for contrast, some people are plainly oblivious to media degradation in places like whatsapp).
They knew very well their market and how to package legitimate status to them.
Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software.
Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure).
[1] http://fairpixels.pro