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Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's jus

by goeric 10y ago

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.

niftich 10y ago
Amazon doesn't need to buy Discord because Curse/Twitch has close-enough feature parity and if they successfully get enough people to install Twitch Desktop for some reason (there are reasons more than just chat, like streaming), some portion of people will switch or run them concurrently. They don't need to hurry, they can siphon marketshare from Discord passively instead of actively. On the other hand, this move makes Discord an attractive acquisition target who's looking to counter Amazon by pursuing the exact same market with a very similar integrated offering, and who thinks they can buy the market- and mindshare without users fleeing afterwards.
- goeric 10y ago
  I disagree on the former, they absolutely need to hurry. But you're right, definitely an attractive acquisition target. I would say it would be a great fit for Microsoft.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Beam + Discord would be an interesting prop.
- pubby 10y ago
  Ah yes, the Google+ strategy.
shuntress 10y ago
Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being "hard to touch" I feel like I must be missing something. My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards. Discord's browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text/voice channels (as opposed to Mumble's 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different games in different voice channels but sharing links/images/unrelated messages in text). How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?
- jakebasile 10y ago
  Mumble never really took off, so Discord was competing against Teamspeak and Ventrilo, both of which stopped innovating long ago. Discord came in with a great design, good voice quality, low barrier to entry (free, browser client), and enough settings and features to make it viable.
- wayn3 10y ago
  its just hyper-targeted towards twitch streamers. it integrates with all the twitch functionality, like channel subscriptions etc. most streamers have a discord channel now and they bring their entire audience. thats why its growing at such a broken rate. for every even medium sized streamer they convert, they get thousands of active users.
  - shuntress 10y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. I don't really interact on twitch at all so those features of Discord are lost on me.
    - CrystalLangUser 10y ago
      It's really popular with the Twitch community now, but Discord has been a solid alternative to Skype for a very long time. The twitch integration is relatively recent.
xenihn 10y ago
I'm extremely surprised that Discord hasn't been acquired yet.
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  Its because the founders (on record) are adament about staying independent. I am sure they have been seeing plenty of preliminary interest.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    >adament about staying independent. Everyone has a price. The offers were just too low.
- vit05 10y ago
  They recently hit 25 million users and have received more than 20 million in their last round. I think they are receiving some offers but maybe not big enough.
jontas 10y ago
I use Discord every day and I disagree with you. I will go wherever the communities I interact with go. If Twitch starts to incentive streamers to move their communities to Twitch Desktop, it is going to be difficult for Discord to do anything about it. Of course, there are plenty of Discord servers not associated with specific streamers or related to Twitch. Those will be harder to touch but I don't think Twitch cares about them anyway.
- goeric 10y ago
  You're not wrong, that would be the next best play Amazon could do.
- nightski 10y ago
  It also depends on how well Discord maintains it's reliability. Servers have been unavailable more often lately and there has been increased latency. Still perfectly acceptable here, but it seems to be a growing problem.
j_s 10y ago
This is happening to Discord today: http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-1793682247 http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-17936822... To our knowledge, the only recourse users currently have is to disallow direct messaging https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14a https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14... By default, Discord allows any two people who share a server to direct message each other. Unfortunately, the baddies can use this behavior to send you stuff that you don’t want to see — everything from Harry Potter spoiler memes (Snape killed who!??) to much worse. To keep the baddies at bay, we’re adding Safe Direct Messaging.
- TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
  I wonder why hasn't been a problem with stuff like IRC. At least, I've never experienced this problem, and I've been using IRC fairly regularly since 2006. Heck, for a few years I even hung out in various *chan servers. Have I just been incredibly lucky?
  - http-teapot 10y ago
    Back from Quakenet era there were fewer and smaller online communities and generally internet was seen as niche whereas now it is a commodity. Are there any gaming communities still using IRC? It might still be niche which is why it's not a problem? Disclaimer: grew up in France during that time so can't speak for other countries
bigtunacan 10y ago
This has not been my experience. Mine experience has been seeing total fragmentation around chat apps for awhile with Skype, Teamspeak, Curse and Discord. Now it seems most players I encounter have both Curse and Discord installed and will use the URL share feature that both have to share team invites for one or the other. With them generally being used for gaming and now the acquisition and integrations happening between Twitch and Curse I suspect over time we will see Discord go the way of MySpace if they don't find someone to sell to and soon.
- Lazare 10y ago
  My experience was that Ventrilo, Mumble, and Teamspeak had the market split between them, then Discord took it over. It's been months since I've heard of anyone using anything other than Discord, and I've never even heard of someone using Curse's client. (Disclosure: My experience focuses on the WoW and to a lesser extent Overwatch communities, mostly in the Oceanic Aus/NZ region. But in those communities, Discord is utterly, crushingly dominant.)
  - Aeyris 10y ago
    Coming from the ANZ Overwatch community here as well, Overwatch has pretty much completely taken over any voice communications platform that isn't just in-game voice.
devwastaken 10y ago
>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. Time. Curse has significantly better community integrations. Discord has taken a long time to deliver on its features and lacks even the most basic (text channels per voice channel for instance). Curse already has video calls, its a significanty better replacement of Skype than Discord is. Many are migrating to Curse because streamers use it, and it makes it easy and lucrative to do so as a streamer. Unless Discord does something unique, like client side modding support and some cooler things you can do with servers, they're going to get crushed.
- developer2 10y ago
  What popular streamer has recently switched to Curse? Every streamer I watch uses Discord. Each and every one of them. I haven't seen Curse used in well over a year now. Curse finally got around to updating the UI and features of their client a while back, but it was too little too late. Discord had already won.
- NeeT 10y ago
  Our philosophy is to start from the streamer. Twitch and curse joined forces to provide an amazing out-of-the-box desktop experience for our streamers and their fans. Of course this competes with other products, but we do not view it as a zero-sum game We still have a long way to go to deliver that experience and we are actively looking at community feedback on our launch this month. Hubert, Founder of Curse now working for Twitch
romanovcode 10y ago
But it is so god damn slow!

by goeric 10y ago

niftich 10y ago

Amazon doesn't need to buy Discord because Curse/Twitch has close-enough feature parity and if they successfully get enough people to install Twitch Desktop for some reason (there are reasons more than just chat, like streaming), some portion of people will switch or run them concurrently. They don't need to hurry, they can siphon marketshare from Discord passively instead of actively. On the other hand, this move makes Discord an attractive acquisition target who's looking to counter Amazon by pursuing the exact same market with a very similar integrated offering, and who thinks they can buy the market- and mindshare without users fleeing afterwards.

goeric 10y ago
I disagree on the former, they absolutely need to hurry. But you're right, definitely an attractive acquisition target. I would say it would be a great fit for Microsoft.
- eropple 10y ago
  Beam + Discord would be an interesting prop.
pubby 10y ago
Ah yes, the Google+ strategy.

shuntress 10y ago

Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being "hard to touch" I feel like I must be missing something. My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards. Discord's browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text/voice channels (as opposed to Mumble's 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different games in different voice channels but sharing links/images/unrelated messages in text). How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?

jakebasile 10y ago
Mumble never really took off, so Discord was competing against Teamspeak and Ventrilo, both of which stopped innovating long ago. Discord came in with a great design, good voice quality, low barrier to entry (free, browser client), and enough settings and features to make it viable.
wayn3 10y ago
its just hyper-targeted towards twitch streamers. it integrates with all the twitch functionality, like channel subscriptions etc. most streamers have a discord channel now and they bring their entire audience. thats why its growing at such a broken rate. for every even medium sized streamer they convert, they get thousands of active users.
- shuntress 10y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I don't really interact on twitch at all so those features of Discord are lost on me.
  - CrystalLangUser 10y ago
    It's really popular with the Twitch community now, but Discord has been a solid alternative to Skype for a very long time. The twitch integration is relatively recent.

xenihn 10y ago

I'm extremely surprised that Discord hasn't been acquired yet.

tzakrajs 10y ago
Its because the founders (on record) are adament about staying independent. I am sure they have been seeing plenty of preliminary interest.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  >adament about staying independent. Everyone has a price. The offers were just too low.
vit05 10y ago
They recently hit 25 million users and have received more than 20 million in their last round. I think they are receiving some offers but maybe not big enough.

jontas 10y ago

I use Discord every day and I disagree with you. I will go wherever the communities I interact with go. If Twitch starts to incentive streamers to move their communities to Twitch Desktop, it is going to be difficult for Discord to do anything about it. Of course, there are plenty of Discord servers not associated with specific streamers or related to Twitch. Those will be harder to touch but I don't think Twitch cares about them anyway.

goeric 10y ago
You're not wrong, that would be the next best play Amazon could do.
nightski 10y ago
It also depends on how well Discord maintains it's reliability. Servers have been unavailable more often lately and there has been increased latency. Still perfectly acceptable here, but it seems to be a growing problem.

j_s 10y ago

This is happening to Discord today: http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-1793682247 http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-17936822... To our knowledge, the only recourse users currently have is to disallow direct messaging https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14a https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14... By default, Discord allows any two people who share a server to direct message each other. Unfortunately, the baddies can use this behavior to send you stuff that you don’t want to see — everything from Harry Potter spoiler memes (Snape killed who!??) to much worse. To keep the baddies at bay, we’re adding Safe Direct Messaging.

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
I wonder why hasn't been a problem with stuff like IRC. At least, I've never experienced this problem, and I've been using IRC fairly regularly since 2006. Heck, for a few years I even hung out in various *chan servers. Have I just been incredibly lucky?
- http-teapot 10y ago
  Back from Quakenet era there were fewer and smaller online communities and generally internet was seen as niche whereas now it is a commodity. Are there any gaming communities still using IRC? It might still be niche which is why it's not a problem? Disclaimer: grew up in France during that time so can't speak for other countries

bigtunacan 10y ago

This has not been my experience. Mine experience has been seeing total fragmentation around chat apps for awhile with Skype, Teamspeak, Curse and Discord. Now it seems most players I encounter have both Curse and Discord installed and will use the URL share feature that both have to share team invites for one or the other. With them generally being used for gaming and now the acquisition and integrations happening between Twitch and Curse I suspect over time we will see Discord go the way of MySpace if they don't find someone to sell to and soon.

Lazare 10y ago
My experience was that Ventrilo, Mumble, and Teamspeak had the market split between them, then Discord took it over. It's been months since I've heard of anyone using anything other than Discord, and I've never even heard of someone using Curse's client. (Disclosure: My experience focuses on the WoW and to a lesser extent Overwatch communities, mostly in the Oceanic Aus/NZ region. But in those communities, Discord is utterly, crushingly dominant.)
- Aeyris 10y ago
  Coming from the ANZ Overwatch community here as well, Overwatch has pretty much completely taken over any voice communications platform that isn't just in-game voice.

devwastaken 10y ago

>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. Time. Curse has significantly better community integrations. Discord has taken a long time to deliver on its features and lacks even the most basic (text channels per voice channel for instance). Curse already has video calls, its a significanty better replacement of Skype than Discord is. Many are migrating to Curse because streamers use it, and it makes it easy and lucrative to do so as a streamer. Unless Discord does something unique, like client side modding support and some cooler things you can do with servers, they're going to get crushed.

developer2 10y ago
What popular streamer has recently switched to Curse? Every streamer I watch uses Discord. Each and every one of them. I haven't seen Curse used in well over a year now. Curse finally got around to updating the UI and features of their client a while back, but it was too little too late. Discord had already won.
NeeT 10y ago
Our philosophy is to start from the streamer. Twitch and curse joined forces to provide an amazing out-of-the-box desktop experience for our streamers and their fans. Of course this competes with other products, but we do not view it as a zero-sum game We still have a long way to go to deliver that experience and we are actively looking at community feedback on our launch this month. Hubert, Founder of Curse now working for Twitch

romanovcode 10y ago

But it is so god damn slow!