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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 wh

by 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.
- Endy 8y ago
  I haven't gotten a single message from a Skype bot in over a year. Sure, Discord may not have too many yet, but just wait. When it becomes more profitable to allow the bots than to block them, Discord will have them too. The same thing has happened to every communication method in the history of man. When the carrier decides they either can make money off soulless selling machines or that it's simply not worth the money to keep playing 'cat-and-mouse' with them, they'll enter the playing field. And as to the 'bot ecosystem', good. I'd prefer a bot-hostile ecosystem, where every user account has to belong to a human being and every account online has to have a human behind it. You're right, there are no channels in group chats - why would someone need a channel within a channel? If I want a group chat with a specific group of individuals, it's trivial to create one and add people from either another chat or my friends list. What you're asking for seems somewhat silly to me. I also don't understand what you mean about a 'separate community mechanism', the group chat is a subcommunity within the Skype community. If I want to contact someone, I just find them in my friends list and send them a message. They'll get it the next time they're online. I'll agree with you, the permissions controls aren't there - the solution is: don't add people you don't trust to a group chat with people you care about. If you want permissions controls and bots galore, go to IRC. I disagree about the notification system; I've got two groups set up that only pop up unread if my name is said. It's not a "mention" filter, it's a word filter which I typed my name and my nickname within the group into. I also don't care one iota about cross-device syncing, it's not my use-case. I have one computer. That's all I use when it comes to chatting. I don't use a device (i.e. anything that's not a PC) to do a great deal of Internet things. Social engineering is going to happen no matter what the platform is; that's the whole point of it being social. Heck, the first 'hackers' were arguably social engineers. You can't really defend against it as a platform, all you can do is educate. I'll grant that Skype doesn't do that well, but neither does IRC or Slack. Also, my computer is not from the last half-decade. It is an x86 machine with 1GB of RAM and will remain such for the foreseeable future. I am not planning on upgrading, ever, because I don't see anything on the market that looks to me like a clear upgrade with no downsides to the software and peripherals I wish to run.
  - Kaveren 8y ago
4ff6f7fd26e 8y ago
fwiw Skype is now an Electron ("resource-hogging Chromium browser" and all) app, too.
- Endy 8y ago
  I don't use that version of Skype. My client still connects just fine.

by Endy 8y ago

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.

Endy 8y ago
I haven't gotten a single message from a Skype bot in over a year. Sure, Discord may not have too many yet, but just wait. When it becomes more profitable to allow the bots than to block them, Discord will have them too. The same thing has happened to every communication method in the history of man. When the carrier decides they either can make money off soulless selling machines or that it's simply not worth the money to keep playing 'cat-and-mouse' with them, they'll enter the playing field. And as to the 'bot ecosystem', good. I'd prefer a bot-hostile ecosystem, where every user account has to belong to a human being and every account online has to have a human behind it. You're right, there are no channels in group chats - why would someone need a channel within a channel? If I want a group chat with a specific group of individuals, it's trivial to create one and add people from either another chat or my friends list. What you're asking for seems somewhat silly to me. I also don't understand what you mean about a 'separate community mechanism', the group chat is a subcommunity within the Skype community. If I want to contact someone, I just find them in my friends list and send them a message. They'll get it the next time they're online. I'll agree with you, the permissions controls aren't there - the solution is: don't add people you don't trust to a group chat with people you care about. If you want permissions controls and bots galore, go to IRC. I disagree about the notification system; I've got two groups set up that only pop up unread if my name is said. It's not a "mention" filter, it's a word filter which I typed my name and my nickname within the group into. I also don't care one iota about cross-device syncing, it's not my use-case. I have one computer. That's all I use when it comes to chatting. I don't use a device (i.e. anything that's not a PC) to do a great deal of Internet things. Social engineering is going to happen no matter what the platform is; that's the whole point of it being social. Heck, the first 'hackers' were arguably social engineers. You can't really defend against it as a platform, all you can do is educate. I'll grant that Skype doesn't do that well, but neither does IRC or Slack. Also, my computer is not from the last half-decade. It is an x86 machine with 1GB of RAM and will remain such for the foreseeable future. I am not planning on upgrading, ever, because I don't see anything on the market that looks to me like a clear upgrade with no downsides to the software and peripherals I wish to run.
- Kaveren 8y ago

4ff6f7fd26e 8y ago

fwiw Skype is now an Electron ("resource-hogging Chromium browser" and all) app, too.

Endy 8y ago
I don't use that version of Skype. My client still connects just fine.