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Does anyone use discord for work?

katastic 9y ago
I have informally with co-workers. But not in any official capacity. It's like 20x better than every other product out there though. And their new video chat + screen sharing is pretty great. The bandwidth is far higher than any other competitors I've used. My brother and I were playing 1080p videos on each of our screens and watching the other's, just to test it out. Obviously it wasn't full quality, but it kept the frame rate up and looked presentable at least to 720p.
- avree 9y ago
  Weird, I find Discord's audio quality especially to be terrible. And their lack of scalable monetization leads me worried about its longterm success as a platform - they are adding more cost-intensive features and continuing to try to support it with what is essentially a $5 monthly donation model.
  - b1naryth1ef 9y ago
    Can you give more explicit examples of the bad audio quality you experience? I'd be happy to forward this onto our native team to look into if there are some concrete things they can look at. Generally 99% of the audio issues we see people experience are due to ISP/peering/DDoS/etc issues, most of which are handled automatically by our servers within a few minutes.
    - mooman219 9y ago
      Anecdotal, but direct calls are pretty unusable for me. I'm on the west coast, and when I attempt calls to the east cost, it frequently cuts out. The workaround was just creating a server and using a voice room in it. This had drastically higher call quality. I assume this is ISP/Peering related, but to see such a night and day difference between voice channels and direct calls leads me to believe that there's something that can be done on your end. Complaints aside, I love the service. Echoing what avree said, long term monetization worries me. I would like to see discord survive, but its story looks similar to Trello right now in terms of monetization.
      - b1naryth1ef 9y ago
        Ahhhh, thats actually something we're aware of. Currently direct calls run on an entirely separate set of metals vs. everything else (this was mostly to help us test/measure video & screenshare rollout). Unfortunately some providers seem to be having issues with DDoS filtering over-triggering when they see video traffic, which negatively impacts the whole server. Something we're hopefully fixing in the short term!
    - asddddd 9y ago
      I've been using voice calls regularly, and it's occasionally been problematic. Yesterday it was behaving as though it had absolutely insane packet loss (occasional robotic sounding fragments would make it through, otherwise the line was dead) without any indication of high jitter or packet loss - I had to resort to stupid workarounds to get it working. Move convo to a server -> change server to Central from West (why can't this be done for regular calls!) -> instantly working perfectly. FWIW, it generally works pretty well, and overall, Discord is a fantastic product that I'm happy to be using.
    - eropple 9y ago
      FWIW, a serious feature that I would pay you money for right-here-right-now is the ability to multitrack audio. Let me give you many dollars to route each voice to a separate Soundflower channel, so that I can mix them outside of Discord, and I will give you said monies. I'm pretty sure you're even sending unmixed streams down? But I can't get at them! This probably involves not being Electron (from my own adventures in the area), so I don't hold out much hope, but it keeps Discord from replacing Extremely Expensive And Bad solutions like SkypeTX for me.
      - callalex 9y ago
        Doesn’t Mumble have that feature?
        eropple 9y ago
        Mumble doesn't, AFAIK, also do video/screenshare. Think of it like a teleconference. (I could be wrong though, it's been a long time.)
      - exikyut 9y ago
        The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here. I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation? If you're prepared to throw money at the situation, it's possible this may be fixable with a simple bespoke solution. I say "possible" because, unfortunately, I just did some digging and found https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876: > Unfortunately we don't support multi-channel > 2 nor multiple devices at the moment. > ... > Are there any future plans to support these two features? Is this a w3c issue or a Chrome issue? > ... > I am quite skeptical about this; I was told this requires a huge change in our WebRTC-side infrastructure, but I am not sure what the current status is. > The spec indicates getUserMedia can be configured with 'channel count', so I assume this is Chrome issue. That immediately nukes WebRTC :( Could make for a fun project. I'm very fascinated with audio handling myself and this sounds interesting, but I'm unsure I'd personally have the skills (or mental stamina/attention span :< ) to be sure I could follow through. I'm also only on a Linux box, which brings up the platform-native problem.
    - fletchowns 9y ago
      Occasionally we notice the robotic voices when service has really degraded. But when it's operating normally, it seems like mumble sounds better. It's also annoying having to adjust each users volume slider individually, I wish Discord would just do that automatically and normalize the levels of everybody.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - gizmo385 9y ago
    One thing that I've noticed helps is swapping the region for the server. It doesn't result in any noticeable outage on your server and has resolved any voice quality issues that we've run into most of the time. Usually just swapping between US-Central and US-West in our case.
sbarre 9y ago
We've debated it internally, but currently have decided to stick with Slack (free version)
andyfleming 9y ago
I briefly thought about whether it would be a better option than Slack. However, Slack seems a little more polished in the areas that we actually use. The subtle, better design in places like the core chat experience aren't worth giving up. I have used Discord quite a bit for gaming, but it hasn't proved a better option than Slack to me (at least in a work context).
zanny 9y ago
I would strongly recommend against it. Discord has no privacy guarantees in their TOS and actively says they will sell your data. Its how they offer their service "for free". Workplace conversations should be private, and that almost exclusively means either a siloed self hosted solution or a service with a contract that guarantees data integrity and privacy. If you are playing video games using Discord is fine, at least up until you start talking about personal details of your life in their chat rooms or over their voice services. If I'm having conversations I don't want Discord's data customers having, I'll use Signal / Matrix (self hosted or encrypted channels) / Mumble.
- eslachance 9y ago
  That's nice misinformation, mate. Discord makes money from Nitro, and they started off with a fairly large investor cushion which grew since launch. There is nothing in the ToS that states in any way, shape, or form, that they can sell their data. I challenge you to quote the exact place where it says that.
  - lightedman 9y ago
    You don't look in the ToS. You look in the company articles of incorporation or bylaws which will explain things like how money is allowed to be made.
    - exikyut 9y ago
      How would that work? If a company drafts ToS and then plumb violates them, well, it'll be found out eventually and then you get things like the recent debacle with telco data being sold (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286), and then the company(s) in question will either get completely shredded or their reputation will at least be seriously besmirched. I can see the logic of what you're saying, but at the same time I can't see how it would hold up. If you can show me how it would work I'm listening though.
      - 9y ago
synicalx 9y ago
Unofficially, for "out of band" discussions and also for on-call events where we need to collab on stuff. We're stuck with Skype for official stuff and telephony though.
jakebasile 9y ago
We did, but due to some people having image issues about using a “gamer tool”, we were forced to switch back to the inferior Slack.
eslachance 9y ago
I'll need to echo some of the other comments here - at work we're pretty much stuck with Skype for Business (aka "lync") because the voice system ties into it. When I suggested Discord, it was shrugged off because it's "Chat for Gamers" and clearly they're not going to budge from that niche anytime soon, from all the recent features I've seen.

I have informally with co-workers. But not in any official capacity. It's like 20x better than every other product out there though. And their new video chat + screen sharing is pretty great. The bandwidth is far higher than any other competitors I've used. My brother and I were playing 1080p videos on each of our screens and watching the other's, just to test it out. Obviously it wasn't full quality, but it kept the frame rate up and looked presentable at least to 720p.

avree 9y ago
Weird, I find Discord's audio quality especially to be terrible. And their lack of scalable monetization leads me worried about its longterm success as a platform - they are adding more cost-intensive features and continuing to try to support it with what is essentially a $5 monthly donation model.
- b1naryth1ef 9y ago
  Can you give more explicit examples of the bad audio quality you experience? I'd be happy to forward this onto our native team to look into if there are some concrete things they can look at. Generally 99% of the audio issues we see people experience are due to ISP/peering/DDoS/etc issues, most of which are handled automatically by our servers within a few minutes.
  - mooman219 9y ago
    Anecdotal, but direct calls are pretty unusable for me. I'm on the west coast, and when I attempt calls to the east cost, it frequently cuts out. The workaround was just creating a server and using a voice room in it. This had drastically higher call quality. I assume this is ISP/Peering related, but to see such a night and day difference between voice channels and direct calls leads me to believe that there's something that can be done on your end. Complaints aside, I love the service. Echoing what avree said, long term monetization worries me. I would like to see discord survive, but its story looks similar to Trello right now in terms of monetization.
    - b1naryth1ef 9y ago
      Ahhhh, thats actually something we're aware of. Currently direct calls run on an entirely separate set of metals vs. everything else (this was mostly to help us test/measure video & screenshare rollout). Unfortunately some providers seem to be having issues with DDoS filtering over-triggering when they see video traffic, which negatively impacts the whole server. Something we're hopefully fixing in the short term!
  - asddddd 9y ago
    I've been using voice calls regularly, and it's occasionally been problematic. Yesterday it was behaving as though it had absolutely insane packet loss (occasional robotic sounding fragments would make it through, otherwise the line was dead) without any indication of high jitter or packet loss - I had to resort to stupid workarounds to get it working. Move convo to a server -> change server to Central from West (why can't this be done for regular calls!) -> instantly working perfectly. FWIW, it generally works pretty well, and overall, Discord is a fantastic product that I'm happy to be using.
  - eropple 9y ago
    FWIW, a serious feature that I would pay you money for right-here-right-now is the ability to multitrack audio. Let me give you many dollars to route each voice to a separate Soundflower channel, so that I can mix them outside of Discord, and I will give you said monies. I'm pretty sure you're even sending unmixed streams down? But I can't get at them! This probably involves not being Electron (from my own adventures in the area), so I don't hold out much hope, but it keeps Discord from replacing Extremely Expensive And Bad solutions like SkypeTX for me.
    - callalex 9y ago
      Doesn’t Mumble have that feature?
      - eropple 9y ago
        Mumble doesn't, AFAIK, also do video/screenshare. Think of it like a teleconference. (I could be wrong though, it's been a long time.)
    - exikyut 9y ago
      The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here. I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation? If you're prepared to throw money at the situation, it's possible this may be fixable with a simple bespoke solution. I say "possible" because, unfortunately, I just did some digging and found https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876: > Unfortunately we don't support multi-channel > 2 nor multiple devices at the moment. > ... > Are there any future plans to support these two features? Is this a w3c issue or a Chrome issue? > ... > I am quite skeptical about this; I was told this requires a huge change in our WebRTC-side infrastructure, but I am not sure what the current status is. > The spec indicates getUserMedia can be configured with 'channel count', so I assume this is Chrome issue. That immediately nukes WebRTC :( Could make for a fun project. I'm very fascinated with audio handling myself and this sounds interesting, but I'm unsure I'd personally have the skills (or mental stamina/attention span :< ) to be sure I could follow through. I'm also only on a Linux box, which brings up the platform-native problem.
  - fletchowns 9y ago
    Occasionally we notice the robotic voices when service has really degraded. But when it's operating normally, it seems like mumble sounds better. It's also annoying having to adjust each users volume slider individually, I wish Discord would just do that automatically and normalize the levels of everybody.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gizmo385 9y ago
  One thing that I've noticed helps is swapping the region for the server. It doesn't result in any noticeable outage on your server and has resolved any voice quality issues that we've run into most of the time. Usually just swapping between US-Central and US-West in our case.

sbarre 9y ago

We've debated it internally, but currently have decided to stick with Slack (free version)

andyfleming 9y ago

I briefly thought about whether it would be a better option than Slack. However, Slack seems a little more polished in the areas that we actually use. The subtle, better design in places like the core chat experience aren't worth giving up. I have used Discord quite a bit for gaming, but it hasn't proved a better option than Slack to me (at least in a work context).

zanny 9y ago

I would strongly recommend against it. Discord has no privacy guarantees in their TOS and actively says they will sell your data. Its how they offer their service "for free". Workplace conversations should be private, and that almost exclusively means either a siloed self hosted solution or a service with a contract that guarantees data integrity and privacy. If you are playing video games using Discord is fine, at least up until you start talking about personal details of your life in their chat rooms or over their voice services. If I'm having conversations I don't want Discord's data customers having, I'll use Signal / Matrix (self hosted or encrypted channels) / Mumble.

eslachance 9y ago
That's nice misinformation, mate. Discord makes money from Nitro, and they started off with a fairly large investor cushion which grew since launch. There is nothing in the ToS that states in any way, shape, or form, that they can sell their data. I challenge you to quote the exact place where it says that.
- lightedman 9y ago
  You don't look in the ToS. You look in the company articles of incorporation or bylaws which will explain things like how money is allowed to be made.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    How would that work? If a company drafts ToS and then plumb violates them, well, it'll be found out eventually and then you get things like the recent debacle with telco data being sold (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286), and then the company(s) in question will either get completely shredded or their reputation will at least be seriously besmirched. I can see the logic of what you're saying, but at the same time I can't see how it would hold up. If you can show me how it would work I'm listening though.
    - 9y ago

synicalx 9y ago

Unofficially, for "out of band" discussions and also for on-call events where we need to collab on stuff. We're stuck with Skype for official stuff and telephony though.

jakebasile 9y ago

We did, but due to some people having image issues about using a “gamer tool”, we were forced to switch back to the inferior Slack.

eslachance 9y ago

I'll need to echo some of the other comments here - at work we're pretty much stuck with Skype for Business (aka "lync") because the voice system ties into it. When I suggested Discord, it was shrugged off because it's "Chat for Gamers" and clearly they're not going to budge from that niche anytime soon, from all the recent features I've seen.