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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

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
  I forgot the most important thing of all, there's no invitation system to join a group chat in Skype! You can get put into chats you have no interest in. Discord servers allow you to build communities, and can and do scale up to tens of thousands of members. This is something Skype simply can't be used for. Maybe it's not your use-case. You may want channels in a community because there may be different topics you want to split apart. For example, in a programming server, Ruby and JavaScript channels, but both in the same server. Much like subforums on a traditional forum. Bots are separate from user accounts on Discord, and you have total control over their permissions. Bots using user accounts are strictly prohibited. I don't think not adding people you don't trust is a solution to proper access control. Even if you do, their accounts being breached is always an issue. You caught me on the computer issue! I can't say much about it, other than that you might not be the intended target of developers anymore, so for that reason I can understand your choice of Skype Classic. Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me. As a final note, I believe the privacy situation on Skype to be much worse than Discord (though I can't act like Discord is Signal or something).
  - Endy 8y ago
    You can also leave those chats you're not interested in with the touch of a button, or mute the chat if you care about the people but don't care about the chat itself. Heck, you can set it with a filter, as I said, so that it pops up if something you are interested in gets discussed. I don't quite understand your mindset about the need for subchannels on a centralized IM client. Why not just have two group chats, one named "Perl" and the other named "ECMAScript/JavaScript"? Or, since as you pointed out it's similar to a forum structure, why not just use a forum? Also, user-reliant privacy is stronger, to me, than computer-reliant privacy. Educating users, showing them and letting them see why they should have good security practices, etc., seems like a better deal in the long run than trying to keep track of accounts and outwit the next person to exploit some weakness in the code. But I think your one comment sums everything up: "Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me." Modern IRC, for me, is just, well, IRC. I have Miranda-NG on my computer because ChatZilla's not that good anymore. I don't need it centralized, because that's not how it works. As I said, the most bearable Discord ever was for me, was when I ran it through Miranda alongside my logins to FreeNode, EFNet, and Undernet. And even that only lasted a week before I got too frustrated with the annoyances.

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
I forgot the most important thing of all, there's no invitation system to join a group chat in Skype! You can get put into chats you have no interest in. Discord servers allow you to build communities, and can and do scale up to tens of thousands of members. This is something Skype simply can't be used for. Maybe it's not your use-case. You may want channels in a community because there may be different topics you want to split apart. For example, in a programming server, Ruby and JavaScript channels, but both in the same server. Much like subforums on a traditional forum. Bots are separate from user accounts on Discord, and you have total control over their permissions. Bots using user accounts are strictly prohibited. I don't think not adding people you don't trust is a solution to proper access control. Even if you do, their accounts being breached is always an issue. You caught me on the computer issue! I can't say much about it, other than that you might not be the intended target of developers anymore, so for that reason I can understand your choice of Skype Classic. Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me. As a final note, I believe the privacy situation on Skype to be much worse than Discord (though I can't act like Discord is Signal or something).
- Endy 8y ago
  You can also leave those chats you're not interested in with the touch of a button, or mute the chat if you care about the people but don't care about the chat itself. Heck, you can set it with a filter, as I said, so that it pops up if something you are interested in gets discussed. I don't quite understand your mindset about the need for subchannels on a centralized IM client. Why not just have two group chats, one named "Perl" and the other named "ECMAScript/JavaScript"? Or, since as you pointed out it's similar to a forum structure, why not just use a forum? Also, user-reliant privacy is stronger, to me, than computer-reliant privacy. Educating users, showing them and letting them see why they should have good security practices, etc., seems like a better deal in the long run than trying to keep track of accounts and outwit the next person to exploit some weakness in the code. But I think your one comment sums everything up: "Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me." Modern IRC, for me, is just, well, IRC. I have Miranda-NG on my computer because ChatZilla's not that good anymore. I don't need it centralized, because that's not how it works. As I said, the most bearable Discord ever was for me, was when I ran it through Miranda alongside my logins to FreeNode, EFNet, and Undernet. And even that only lasted a week before I got too frustrated with the annoyances.