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I think it's a good move. Discord is definitely making almost no money up to the current point, and this move can help put it on the eventual road to profitabil

I think it's a good move. Discord is definitely making almost no money up to the current point, and this move can help put it on the eventual road to profitability. The cut of profit Discord takes is the same as Steam (30%). The product itself is fantastic, and other than valid security and privacy concerns, it's a lot better than any other chat application I've used in the past. Discord is actually quite nice for communities other than gaming. I'm a member of a number of language learning and programming servers that I enjoy. Skype looks more and more like a massive mistake after the Microsoft acquisition. You have a product with an abysmal user experience, no improvements, an awful group chat feature, unreliable voice calls, and so much more that was wrong. I'd wager that they were over-confident of their dominant position. Slack and Discord will hopefully completely replace it with time.

lathiat 8y ago
I agree.. I love what Discord are doing and I hope this works out for them. For reasons that I struggle to put my finger on.. Discord beats out all of the Enterprise chat apps for chat. Most of the groups I am in (that are non gaming related) now use Discord for their chats. The client support across iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac is fantastic and consistent. And the mobile notifications are super smart - if your desktop is not idle they go there, if you haven't read them yet once you've been idle or lock your screen they are now sent to your phone - including any you haven't yet read. It's great.
- dcow 8y ago
  I’ve played with the API a little bit... it’s a brilliant little web socket protocol. Whoever designed it was not pressured to get an MVP product out as fast as humanly possible, or has insane experience with real-time distributed protocols, or both. Discord works through arbitrary NATs and your connections persist across client updates and even device reboots. Sometimes this yields weird behavior but I find it technically reassuring more than anything. I’m pretty sure they use Erlang (Elixir) which is infamous as the language that Facebook couldn’t wrangle. I’d love to read more about their stack.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    They do use a lot of Elixir; they’ve written about it in the past.
    - dcow 8y ago
      That’s what I’ve read too: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
  - sergiotapia 8y ago
    Do you have more info on how Facebook tried to use Elixir but couldn't?
    - dcow 8y ago
      I heard about it second hand from an engineering manager who knew some people there. Would love more info too. Context was an argument about introducing Kotlin on an Android team which, well, is no longer arguable (= Edit: I found this: https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231 https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231, and this: https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stability-and-scalability/51412338919/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stabi....
gsich 8y ago
Just drop Slack altogether. Discords interface is so much nicer and faster, I don't see what use Slack still has.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  I avoid Slack entirely. My comment [1] on Reddit still stands for Slack's advantages for business. I'm sure Discord is happy without the business userbase, but I can't help feeling they could challenge Slack if they wanted to. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/95wzu6/discord_is_going_to_start_selling_games/e3xrrc5/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/95wzu6/discord_is_...
  - gsich 8y ago
    It will probably happen, if not enough money is coming in from this. My feeling is that Nitro is not enough currently. Maybe the shop will help.
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  Mostly integration with services that sales/marketing/design/engineering people use. I'm not familiar with Discord beyond destiny lfg, but can you have webhooks for Discord to alert for example, new github PRs/commits?
  - reificator 8y ago
    Absolutely. I'm a part of several servers that post to a channel whenever a github release is made, and some that post straight to Discord from the buildscript.
- joecot 8y ago
  I was close to convincing my small company to go with discord instead of slack, until we realized discord specifically disallows commercial use. Maybe they can charge something for commercial use and I'll get them to switch back.
Endy 8y ago
I find it amazing how very different the user experience is for me compared to so many others. I hate(d) Discord; in fact I deleted my first account there a while back - then, a few months after I was back to Skype full-time (instead of having to run a resource-hogging Chromium browser to deal with Discord), one of the sites I'm on said that they wanted to make all off-site comms come through Discord. I tried it for a single week. I have since deleted that account as well. Skype, on the other hand, has never once given me a problem. Calls are fine, such as I need them. The text chats for both group and private work well. The client is decent enough on my computer that I can at least run a YouTube video at the same time, or play a game. Heck, I've even done screen-sharing. Trying that with Discord caused my computer to just freeze up and then eventually crash when it figured out how to even do that. I have tried using Miranda to connect to Discord as well as IRC, but the connection is unreliable and there's no way to tell Miranda "download messages from x time ago". So you can say it's very much on track to its namesake. All that Discord has done is create just that amongst the groups of friends I have online - chaos and discord. And on that same note, where's the Pastafarian response to these SubGenius and Erisian derived communication methods? Seriously though, if Slack and Discord replace Skype and IRC, that will be the end of the age of IM for me.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  Skype: - You cannot prevent anyone in a group chat from inviting anyone to a group chat. Routinely, people will add their full list of hundreds of contacts to group chats. This is awful. - Anyone that's a member of a group chat can change the topic of the chat. - No audit log of actions for group communication owners to look at. - Awful role permission system for group chats. - No separate community mechanism from group chats to messages in the same way that Discord separates servers from DMs. - Skype has a poor history of account security. DDoSing from Skype's API was very prominent. Social engineering Skype to lock user accounts was also common. - No guarantees of whether or not your messages on Skype will be synced across devices, or when they will disappear. - Inferior bot ecosystem to that of Discord or Slack. - Inferior notification system, can't listen to mentions alone. - No channels in group chats. - Enjoy being spammed by scam bots adding you in your private messages. Skype is a terrible piece of software. Edit: I'm not saying that what you claim didn't happen to you, but I've never heard of anyone with such terrible performance problems before. As far as RAM goes at least, Discord uses similar amounts to what Skype did for me. Perhaps it's possible you were infected by some form of malware, I can't imagine not being able to run Discord and watch a YouTube video on any computer from the past half-decade.

lathiat 8y ago

I agree.. I love what Discord are doing and I hope this works out for them. For reasons that I struggle to put my finger on.. Discord beats out all of the Enterprise chat apps for chat. Most of the groups I am in (that are non gaming related) now use Discord for their chats. The client support across iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac is fantastic and consistent. And the mobile notifications are super smart - if your desktop is not idle they go there, if you haven't read them yet once you've been idle or lock your screen they are now sent to your phone - including any you haven't yet read. It's great.

dcow 8y ago
I’ve played with the API a little bit... it’s a brilliant little web socket protocol. Whoever designed it was not pressured to get an MVP product out as fast as humanly possible, or has insane experience with real-time distributed protocols, or both. Discord works through arbitrary NATs and your connections persist across client updates and even device reboots. Sometimes this yields weird behavior but I find it technically reassuring more than anything. I’m pretty sure they use Erlang (Elixir) which is infamous as the language that Facebook couldn’t wrangle. I’d love to read more about their stack.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  They do use a lot of Elixir; they’ve written about it in the past.
  - dcow 8y ago
    That’s what I’ve read too: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  Do you have more info on how Facebook tried to use Elixir but couldn't?
  - dcow 8y ago
    I heard about it second hand from an engineering manager who knew some people there. Would love more info too. Context was an argument about introducing Kotlin on an Android team which, well, is no longer arguable (= Edit: I found this: https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231 https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231, and this: https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stability-and-scalability/51412338919/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stabi....

gsich 8y ago

Just drop Slack altogether. Discords interface is so much nicer and faster, I don't see what use Slack still has.

Kaveren 8y ago
I avoid Slack entirely. My comment [1] on Reddit still stands for Slack's advantages for business. I'm sure Discord is happy without the business userbase, but I can't help feeling they could challenge Slack if they wanted to. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/95wzu6/discord_is_going_to_start_selling_games/e3xrrc5/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/95wzu6/discord_is_...
- gsich 8y ago
  It will probably happen, if not enough money is coming in from this. My feeling is that Nitro is not enough currently. Maybe the shop will help.
sergiotapia 8y ago
Mostly integration with services that sales/marketing/design/engineering people use. I'm not familiar with Discord beyond destiny lfg, but can you have webhooks for Discord to alert for example, new github PRs/commits?
- reificator 8y ago
  Absolutely. I'm a part of several servers that post to a channel whenever a github release is made, and some that post straight to Discord from the buildscript.
joecot 8y ago
I was close to convincing my small company to go with discord instead of slack, until we realized discord specifically disallows commercial use. Maybe they can charge something for commercial use and I'll get them to switch back.

Endy 8y ago

I find it amazing how very different the user experience is for me compared to so many others. I hate(d) Discord; in fact I deleted my first account there a while back - then, a few months after I was back to Skype full-time (instead of having to run a resource-hogging Chromium browser to deal with Discord), one of the sites I'm on said that they wanted to make all off-site comms come through Discord. I tried it for a single week. I have since deleted that account as well. Skype, on the other hand, has never once given me a problem. Calls are fine, such as I need them. The text chats for both group and private work well. The client is decent enough on my computer that I can at least run a YouTube video at the same time, or play a game. Heck, I've even done screen-sharing. Trying that with Discord caused my computer to just freeze up and then eventually crash when it figured out how to even do that. I have tried using Miranda to connect to Discord as well as IRC, but the connection is unreliable and there's no way to tell Miranda "download messages from x time ago". So you can say it's very much on track to its namesake. All that Discord has done is create just that amongst the groups of friends I have online - chaos and discord. And on that same note, where's the Pastafarian response to these SubGenius and Erisian derived communication methods? Seriously though, if Slack and Discord replace Skype and IRC, that will be the end of the age of IM for me.

Kaveren 8y ago
Skype: - You cannot prevent anyone in a group chat from inviting anyone to a group chat. Routinely, people will add their full list of hundreds of contacts to group chats. This is awful. - Anyone that's a member of a group chat can change the topic of the chat. - No audit log of actions for group communication owners to look at. - Awful role permission system for group chats. - No separate community mechanism from group chats to messages in the same way that Discord separates servers from DMs. - Skype has a poor history of account security. DDoSing from Skype's API was very prominent. Social engineering Skype to lock user accounts was also common. - No guarantees of whether or not your messages on Skype will be synced across devices, or when they will disappear. - Inferior bot ecosystem to that of Discord or Slack. - Inferior notification system, can't listen to mentions alone. - No channels in group chats. - Enjoy being spammed by scam bots adding you in your private messages. Skype is a terrible piece of software. Edit: I'm not saying that what you claim didn't happen to you, but I've never heard of anyone with such terrible performance problems before. As far as RAM goes at least, Discord uses similar amounts to what Skype did for me. Perhaps it's possible you were infected by some form of malware, I can't imagine not being able to run Discord and watch a YouTube video on any computer from the past half-decade.