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How Discord Went Mainstream

gaspoweredcat 8y ago
maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me
- s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
  People were tired of getting DDoS'ed so they switched away from Skype/Teamspeak. The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use, and the community aspect is appealing. IRC isn't very easy to use for the common person.
  - tomupom 8y ago
    I agree, there is far less of a learning curve involved with Discord and I believe this helped them win over a younger demographic of users. I also feel like they capitalised on something specific that gamers wanted (chat and voice calls with low latency). Skype call quality is very much hit or miss, and while Mumble is great not everyone has the expertise in setting up a server.
  - worble 8y ago
    >The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but am I the only one who finds the UX to be atrocious? Everything seems to a nondescript icon that rarely represents what it's supposed to do, nearly everything is flat so it's hard to tell what you can actually click on and whats decoration. Everytime I use it feels like an exercise in mental gymnastics just to navigate it.
    - chrisan 8y ago
      Have an example? Everything I click on has some action I can do. I'm 40 and grew up on mIRC, Discord feels a natural evolution with all the new features.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
      I mean... 90% of the UI is just text. The only icons are for the server images and some minor ones like emojis in the text input. Have a specific example?
  - gsich 8y ago
    >IRC isn't very easy to use for the common person. A common person can learn. Also the audience (mostly gamers) know how to do stuff with their computers.
    - sneakernets 8y ago
      In today's mobile world, IRC sucks. I've used IRC for years. Sending files is a pain in the ass due to everyone being behind NATs these days. People can flood servers with garbage. Names can be squatted and trolls can run free. Not so much with Discord. It also doesn't require a bouncer just so you can go from mobile to PC to tablet without issue.
- panic 8y ago
  Here are a few things that make Discord nicer than IRC for ordinary (non-voice) chat: 1. You can start a new server right in the client by clicking a button. 2. Logs are saved server-side and synced across all your clients (phone, PC, etc). 3. You can upload images and videos to be hosted by Discord's servers. Media and links appear inline in the chat log. 4. No strange rituals involving NickServ or ChanServ. 5. Mobile notifications.
  - bathory 8y ago
    Regarding 4.), only once which is your account creation which is valid across all discord servers
    - Klover 8y ago
      That depends on the server. You can set it to public, or a mix between the two. Or even a public channel, a registered channel, and a channel for people with 2FA. The way I got into Discord was some open source project had a link on their GitHub page for collaboration, I clicked that, entered a name and within minutes I was helping out with some code. A cookie kept my temporary account alive. I don’t remember any trolls or spammers or anything. I noticed there’s a setting to control the amount of filtering for your server. And I think there’s also a captcha the first time a temporary user joins.
  - lmedinas 8y ago
    In addition to this you have integration with other gaming platforms like: Battle.net, Steam, Twitch and for example join a game directly from Discord.
  - hedgew 8y ago
    6. You don't need to publicize your IP address by default.
    - Sendotsh 8y ago
      IPs have been hidden on most IRC servers for years now.
- fvjft 8y ago
  Apart from the (more than obvious) technical feats, they've raised a lot of money and can afford to offer all of their services, some of them a bit expensive, for free. If they can't find a way to monetise, though, they'll be in trouble. Had TeamSpeak or Mumble been able to offer hosted services for free, maybe Discord wouldn't have existed.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    They have pushed monetization recently. Discord Nitro went from custom id, animated avatar and all emotes of all your servers everywhere to a game subscription service (obviously while raising the price)
    - fvjft 8y ago
      I looked at the games when they launched and they all were indie rubbish, so what can I tell you.
      - Semaphor 8y ago
        Besides a bunch of lootbox stuff for the kiddie shooters, there is Civ IV, XCOM:EU, Bioshock 1&2, Metro 2033 Redux, Project Highrise, Metro Last Light Redux, OOTP18, Tyranny, and so on. Most of those are not for me, but Indie rubbish seems a bit off.
    - starshadowx2 8y ago
      There is still the Nitro classic with just the extra account features, the game subscription is an extra piece if you want it.
- loktarogar 8y ago
  voice is one of the killer features - simple, instant voice chat, just give someone a link and they're pretty much in. no mucking about with settings. in gamer circles that's huge, and the IRC functionality made it great for game guilds or group of friends for async messaging. compare discord to say teamspeak or ventrilo before it, where you had to both set up the software and configure it, as well as rent or own a server for people to connect to, discord was a godsend and miles better than skype
- ktpsns 8y ago
  I recently looked into Discord since ~4yrs, and noticed the UI looks almost exactly like a copy of Slack (http://www.slack.com http://www.slack.com).
  - chrisan 8y ago
    And both look like copies of mIRC with added features. And I'm sure mIRC copied their layout from someone else
  - avinium 8y ago
    Completely disagree. This is just my personal opinion, but I (and my circle) have found Discord to have the worst UI of any mainstream application. First, there's only a dark theme, which I find much more difficult to read than Slack's default light theme. Every window (native client) is crammed full of widgets, making it very difficult for fresh users to figure out which button to click to invite people. It's also constantly firing off unread notifications, adding more and more density to the UI. It makes it very difficult to instantly know where to look. As another example, I just fired up the desktop client and created a random server - and now I literally have no idea how to delete or disconnect from it. I'm not a fan of Slack for other reasons, but its UI is far, far superior to Discord.
- jypepin 8y ago
  not saying that in a negative way, and I agree that for someone who understands IRC, IRC is great! But this comment is very similar to the infamous rsync comment on the Dropbox original Show HN post. Most people don't know IRC, are put off by it's raw (or lack of) design, etc. It's much easier to sell something like slack/discord than IRC. I remember having so many engineers fighting against HipChat being too slow, and saying we should just use IRC. Yes, in a way it's true, it does everything we'd need, it's fast, can be self hosted etc... but Nancy from HR or Paul from finance would NOT want to figure out how it works.
  - nindalf 8y ago
    The top comment on Dropbox's original announcement went like > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software ... is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
    - mruts 8y ago
      He's probably right, it's not reasonable and dropbox is a shitty product. But the market has determined it's valuable, despite what we techies think.
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    IRC is great precisely because it filters out people you don’t want to talk to - such as HR.
  - mruts 8y ago
    I've never used HipChat but I always hated Slack. My boss would always delete my comments without telling me when he didn't like what I said.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  It is popular exactly because it is similar to irc. Original IRC was great but despite all my love it did not age well.
- afarrell 8y ago
  One thing I really appreciate about both Discord and Slack are the ability to insert newlines into messages to make them easier to read.
- gambler 8y ago
  That's exactly why it's successful. It has the playful tone of the old IRC, ICQ, and 90s web chats that's totally missing from most modern platforms. Probably the most "social" of all communication offerings I've seen and used recently. It's designed to talk to people you don't necessarily know, as opposed to just leeching off your existing social connections from the real world. I really hope they don't end up selling out to Microsoft/Google/Facebook or use their platform to do some form of political activism. On the other hand, Discord seems like a good match for small businesses. Would be interested in seeing something offered on that end.
- pault 8y ago
  It's the community. I joined a discord server a few months ago to get support from some product (I can't remember what), and once I started using it I realized there are vibrant communities for all of my hobbies and interests. I now have a bunch of new friends that are into building mechanical keyboards that live in the same city. I would never have met them if I hadn't accidentally stumbled onto Discord.
SeanDav 8y ago
I was a huge Discord fan, but now stopped using it for several reasons. - I can't mute some channels completely. I have raised bug reports, tried all the various options, researched everything I could find in Google about this issue. Bottom line is that "mute" is taken by Discord to be "only mute, unless I think you need to hear this", with no way to fully mute a channel. - I only use Discord in browser and it now has a complete and very distracting screen refresh every few seconds. - It is a memory pig in browser and my browser seems to become unstable after a short time, while running Discord in one of the tabs.
- 2038AD 8y ago
  I'm not a fan of Discord but I think you're mistaken. Right click on the channel icon and go to 'Notification Settings' rather than clicking on 'Server Mute'. From there you can choose whether a mention (inc./ex. @everyone/@here) counts and whether mobile notifications are enabled. As for the client you may want to try Ripcord[0]. It uses less memory though I'm not sure you can mute people the same way. While I don't think it's ever enforced, technically using other clients is against the Discord ToS. Either way there are plenty of reasons not to use Discord if you can. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
  - SeanDav 8y ago
    Thanks for the ripcord suggestion! As far as server/channel mute - believe me, I have tried every option, including your suggestions. It works for most servers but I have 2 that I can't mute no matter what I try.
    - abryzak 8y ago
      There's also an issue that there doesn't seem to be any way to mute @ mentions of roles you're assigned to. So if a server admin assigns you to a role and then mentions that role you'll get a notification even if server mute is on and suppress @everyone and @here is on.
      - 8y ago
ngrilly 8y ago
What do you think of Telegram, compared to Discord? Telegram has one feature I miss in Discord: quote replies. It makes easier to follow conversations in a crowded channel. It is the most upvoted feature in the Discord feedback tool: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030063152-Quoting https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600.... But Telegram misses a lot of things provided by Discord: multiple channels on the same server to organize conversations, reactions/likes, voice, the possibility to transfer ownership of an existing server.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Discord is a replacement for irc, telegram is a replacement for messenger/blogs. You can't really compare them, it's like matching oranges and apples.
  - ngrilly 8y ago
    I agree that Telegram is primarily a messaging app like WhatsApp or Messenger. But its group feature has become really powerful, and can be used as an alternative to IRC (except for the fact that a "group" can't be divided in multiple channels). Some Mozilla groups have been using Telegram for some time: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram
    - sciurus 8y ago
      I think part of the nature of Mozilla is that we end up using everything. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some groups using Discord, too. My team and related ones are still mostly on IRC. Officially, as employees we're all supposed to be using Slack...
      - dralley 8y ago
        Same thing at Red Hat. Most of engineering runs off IRC, most of consulting runs off of Rocket.chat, I hear sales and marketing uses slack, and the "official" company solution is Gchat. And a half dozen other little enclaves.
fouc 8y ago
One thing that really irritates me about Discord is that it has really crappy low-contrast dark & light themes. And it's not theme-able at all. At least slack's default light theme is high contrast and also slack is theme-able.
- Carpetsmoker 8y ago
  Contrast and readability is so 2013. Get used to modern perfect design and stop living in the stone age!!1!1!
- bepvte 8y ago
  I use the browser version and the stylus browser extension to set the font to Roboto and make the text actually pass the chrome inspectors accessibility guidelines
- fvjft 8y ago
  I wish Discord had an actual usable light theme. What they have now is an abomination. They probably look at the stats and see nobody uses the light theme and think "not worth to fix". Of course nobody uses it... it's unusable.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Can_Not 8y ago
  > also slack is theme-able. But no dark theme options, so not theme-able in any useful way.
  - sphynxie 8y ago
    If you use macOS, you can do this: https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed28da8608 https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed2...
Biganon 8y ago
My group of friends migrated from Messenger to Discord a few days ago, we are very pleased. Here's a list of what I love the most: * When a friend arrived in the evening and the others had been talking about random things all day long, the friend was often submerged by the amount of fluff to read. Discord solves this in two ways: 1) the different channels allow us to keep discussions tidy, we have a channel for random discussion, one for our evening plans, one for future holidays, one for music... 2) we can pin (not sure of the name in English) important messages, so the friends arriving later only have to read those. * The desktop application feels light-weight and fast, even on my weak chromebook. Compared to the memory hog that was Messenger in the browser, it's very pleasant. * Many fun functionalities such as custom emojis. The emoji panel that opens when you type a colon makes it easier to find the reaction you want to send. I'm aware many on HN don't see the point of emojis, but I find them really fun and useful. * Bots. Good luck having a bot in a Messenger discussion, with Discord it's trivial. * The audio discussions are very easy to use and efficient. I love the push to talk mode. * Muting is fine-grained. You can mute one channel, an entire server,... * The reactions system makes it trivial to very spontaneously start a little poll. "Where do you guys want to eat? [Letter A emoji] restaurant x [Letter B emoji] restaurant y", and then you react to your own message with both emojis. Your friends just have to click one of the reactions to add theirs, so the little numbers next to each reaction act like a poll counter. * You can edit your own messages, with no time limit AFAIK. Very convenient, especially with the up arrow which automatically edits your last message. * Roles are precise and easy to use. We have a role for the core group of friends, with our private channels. A few drawbacks : * No quote responses, like Whatsapp has for example * No attachments larger than 8 MB, which makes it impossible to send even a small video you've shot with your recent phone (unless you decrease the film resolution in your phone's settings I guess) * I've had a few issues with the Android client, such as receiving a notification for a message, opening the app and the message isn't there. No way to force a refresh, so I have to kill the app and open it again. Might have been caused by battery saving mode, not sure. * Accessing private messages is not very intuitive. Why do you have to go to the main screen first? I don't have many servers, so I'd like to be able to add my closest friends in the server list on the left of the screen, to access our discussions in one click or press. * Some clever things are part of the client instead of the server, which would be fine if it were consistent between clients, which it's not. I'm thinking of the +:reaction_here: shortcut to quickly add a reaction to the last message in the discussion. It doesn't work with the Android client.
aboutruby 8y ago
I think Discord is slowing eating away all other form of online communication as it can be used for such a variety of situations and their API makes it very customizable. The main issue I see is the culture. Discord's community has quite an opposite culture as Slack (free time vs work time) for instance. Being able to have multiple Discord handles could solve that.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Even though I use it a lot for 1 on 1 convos it's definitely not eating that lunch (yet). And imo it won't as long as it remains less reliable for notifications and doesn't have things like last-online, quote replies and read receipts like messenger and WhatsApp.
  - h1d 8y ago
    I don't understand why read reciepts are important. People will respond when they feel like whether it says read or not. Just makes it more cumbersome to get around it when you're too busy to respond.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      Read receipts being there simplify 1-on-1 conversations a lot. Nobody wants to admit it because they don't want to "sound creepy", but most people do use them to know whether or not the other party has read/received the message. It avoids the whole "hey, did you get my text" thing and there's several social situations where knowing whether the other person has read your message (regardless of reply) is useful, so you don't end up calling them to do exactly that. It's like quote replies, emoji, etc… none of these things are essential to 1-on-1 comm, but if there's a platform that has these features, it'll most likely win out over others.
      - h1d 8y ago
        Problem is, it's not reliable. I might accidentally tap on notification and make it read when I'm eating but don't actually want to read it then or if the sender keeps bugging to read it when I know the message had arrived but want to read it later instead, it's not helping the conversation.
jelv 8y ago
Discord business model seems te be to sell games. Not sure if it's going to be a good fit for non-gamers in the future. https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ powered by Matrix also seems a good alternative. It's getting more stable every day.
- ihuman 8y ago
  Originally they only made money by selling a service called Discord Nitro. It allows you to upload larger files/share your screen in a higher resolution, use servers' emojis in any other server, use an animated avatar, and further customize your username. Since they added the store, they've also started giving games to Nitro members, doubled the price of Nitro, and offered an option without the free games at the original price. https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro
- holler 8y ago
  check out https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, it's a new real-time discussion site not targeted at gamers, in beta
- opan 8y ago
  Matrix is really nice. I hope that some of the TUI clients improve a bit, though. I absolutely loved the weechat plugin made in lua, but it'd often take several tries to connect. One day I couldn't connect at all, and there hasn't been github activity lately. It was the only client I found that let me actually reorder rooms and people manually. I really hate the constantly changing order that I can't seem to configure in Riot. Gomuks lacks a lot of good keybinds and stuff that weechat did right by default for being weechat. The emacs package matrix-client.el is alright but tricky to get going due to using quelpa, which none of my other stuff uses. I also have only used it graphically in emacs, so not sure how it is in non-graphical emacs. These little disappointments in the clients make me still prefer irc for a lot of things, but easily sharing images and such on matrix is pretty nice.
  - benparsons 8y ago
    There is a new and much more actively maintained WeeChat plugin, take a look: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix
neilv 8y ago
Does anyone know what dotcom partnerships and individual/influencer affiliate programs Discord has done? For a while, I saw many subreddit mods pushing Discord in side bars and stickied posts, often with language that suggested it was an official Reddit counterpart to the sub. I supposed it could be that Reddit management was choosing to siphon off its own user base and influence to Discord. But my suspicion was that it was more likely the action of one or more mods of the sub, and then question would be what was their motivation.
- briliantbrandon 8y ago
  I'm a subreddit mod for a decent sized esports subreddit and we have an "official" discord for our sub. Our rational for this is it provides a good medium for real time reactions to games/matches that can be shorter and more like twitch chat without having to be actual twitch chat. We noticed too that once we created the discord there was an overall quality increase in the actual posts/comments on the subreddit because most of the less thorough stuff got posted to discord instead. It also provides a good outlet for people looking to find others to game or hangout with that share at least a few similar interests.
- MivLives 8y ago
  There's an influencer program but it's more aimed at Lan parties and other events of that nature. I suspect that the reason you see so many Discords for subreddits is it's free, and easy. I recall few subs having IRCs which the only other option that really compared, probably because of the barrier to entry for both the user and the admin. Reddit did launch their own chat feature. No idea if anyone uses it, I sure as hell haven't.
  - hemicepha 8y ago
    But the reddit chat launched when a Discord channel was already established in all the major communities. And they tried to push it too fast, when it wasn't ready to production, like their official android/ios app.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
elagost 8y ago
From the TOS: By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service. The Company does not guarantee the accuracy, quality, or integrity of any user content posted. They also have a ban against distributing or even talking about macro/autohotkey programs, and, of course, they can see every single message and piece of content you put on the service. It's 20XX; why is there anything but harsh condemnation for services like this? Modern communication platforms should not be set up this way.
- holler 8y ago
  99% of users don't care, it's a great product
  - elagost 8y ago
    I agree, but that's sad, and not the way things should be. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard instead of blindly shuffling into the tar pits. Does that mean life is harder? Yes. But no one great ever took the easy way out.
    - umvi 8y ago
      There are alternatives, like Zulip https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
      - gsich 8y ago
        No voice, how is that an alternative?
      - strig 8y ago
        That's not in any way a replacement for discord.
      - 8y ago
MivLives 8y ago
The majority of people I talk to on Discord went the route of AIM/MSN/Yahoo -> Skype -> Discord. The big thing that I found was that the concept of Discord server was so significantly better then using group messages on anything before it that everyone immediately flocked to it. Just the concept of channels is a new one to a lot of these people. The majority were not gamers (never used Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble), or particularly technical people (IRC would not be a good fit). So props to Discord for making a chat client that's as easy to use as Skype was.
- Slippery_John 8y ago
  This is exactly what my group went through. The text channels were nice, but the real killer feature for us was the seamless voice channels. In Skype you had to be very careful to not call the whole group, you had to manually construct voice chats every time. Being able to see who's on and who's hanging out in a voice channel is huge. Wanna play games or just have a chat but nobody else is on right now? Just drop into a voice channel and people can see that you're there so they can jump in without having to pee-arrange anything. Another live saver has been the ability to control, on your side, how you hear other people. Friend has a new mic that's too loud / quiet? You can adjust their volume. Somebody being inconsiderate / distracting? Mute them, or turn their volume down super low. The general stability was also just fantastic compared to Skype. I used some Skype last year as part of a teaching role and good grief was it torture in comparison. Constant dropping, terrible quality, and painful to arrange.
rdiddly 8y ago
Bit of a submarine article, or at least it reads like one.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
Slack has been very clear they are not a consumer service. They have no interest in being public social media, their market is businesses paying $$/user. Fair enough. But then Discord has deftly stepped into that void of Slack-for-consumers and it's working pretty well for them. I've been a Discord fan since very early days. It's a great product and a good company.
phreack 8y ago
Is there a reason why they don't just keep a fork their code and rebrand it as a "serious app" for corporate use and charge money for it? Discord has the best service for voice chat and screen sharing I've seen and I'd love to use it with clients instead of all the other weird apps I've had to use. The least painful so far has been Google Meet but even that one has its issues and likely an expirement date.
- sgarman 8y ago
  Because more often than not losing focus kills companies. The greed to do everything leads to doing nothing well.
sarcasmic 8y ago
Discord hits a sweet spot of design choices that make sense for online friends occasionally intermingling with strangers on the Internet. It's free and has share-URLs to onboard into the product, it's pseudonymous so one can be known by a chosen persona, it's centrally hosted so DOS-attempts don't impact users' networks, but the management and moderation of channels and spaces is distributed. History is searchable, 1-to-1 conversations exist, voice chat is optional but effortlessly available. IRC is the ancestor of this kind of chat, but IRC isn't as widely known as it was in past generations, it has connection privacy challenges, and has a less cohesive service identity and onboarding story that people have come to expect with the spread of centralized services. Slack is another modern, centralized take on IRC, but reveals one's email address, and multiparty voice chat is gated behind paid plans and limited in size. Gamer voice chat systems are decentralized and are lacking in text chat. Old instant messaging networks have been shut down, new ones either don't have desktop clients, don't have a good group voice chat, or reveal personal info. Skype was fine on all three and was a hangout tool for many, until Microsoft ran it into the ground. It's a bit of a meme now that companies are putting out chat services yet no one can do them right. Surely there's economic forces at play, and rich media chat is probably expensive, but there's companies with very deep pockets who could run it as a loss leader just to starve their competitors, to commoditize their own complements. But cloud storage for individuals or video hosting like YouTube is also expensive, yet an upgrade path exists for users who want to pay. Google has thoroughly ceded chat to Facebook and still can't sort their strategy out, Facebook is just now realizing that they could tackle a more private chat too and they could satisfy that demand, Microsoft has morphed Skype into everything from Windows-integrated platformwide IM to a bad Snapchat clone and back again to a WebRTC shim, this time with a Chrome-only client. Asian apps capable, but are focusing on other markets and aren't as well known in the US. Telegram still doesn't have group voice calls. VC companies focus on the enterprise where willingness to pay is higher, amounts are higher, but use-cases are different.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
I came on to Discord before hearing about it from HN or other news source. I was invited to a "server" by members of my play-by-post RPG group. I had the impression it was a small and "rebellious" startup with a great product. Word of mouth is the best kind of growth. In a matter of weeks, I moved most of my chat to discord....though for chats with my brother (one of my closest confidants) we still run our own Mattermost server, which has honestly been great.
ouid 8y ago
easy, skype became garbage.
arminiusreturns 8y ago
I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat... I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.
- mcast 8y ago
  It's a classic example of the network effect for social networking.
- CDSlice 8y ago
  Maybe because they don't want to worry about life things happening and you dropping it for a while? Most people don't have the knowledge, capability, and/or will to run their own chat server when they can just use Discord for free and not have to worry about downtime or managing the server hosting. While me and my friends could run a Matrix or IRC server or whatever the new open source chat awesomeness is these days we don't really see the point when Discord does everything we want and more and doesn't require any management beyond setting up our guild settings, channels, and roles.
  - aseipp 8y ago
    This basic problem can always be summed up as something like: "Extreme nerds who are almost completely divorced from the needs and skills of 95% of all computer users are BAFFLED by the fact Social Effects Are Real, and people do not know how to run their own servers. News at 11." and it's extremely predictable and always on-time.
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
    Come talk to me in a year or two when it's found out discord was spying on users for the government and/or selling everyone's data to shady third parties, or being used as a backdoor on systems, and tell me I'd the tradeoff was worth it. Of course I should have chosen my words more carefully, I understand child posters point about how technical things are hard, but I wasn't addressing a webboard of non-technical users... this is HN. I only use Linux for many of the same reasons, and I openly acknowledge it's not as "easy" , but there is Morea to the products and services we use than just that, and I think things like the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of these issues mean that we as techies and general trend leaders in that world need to set a better example on the security and privacy fronts.
CM30 8y ago
Part of me wonders if community moderation had something to do with it. With Discord, people have to know where to find your server link, and can be denied access to various channels until they get past admin set verification rules. This makes it much harder for trolls or troublemakers to brigade a server compared to say, a subreddit, and makes it tricky for your enemies to go trawling through your chat history like on Reddit or what not. It really puts off the content scraping services you saw abusing social media sites a while back for clickbaity articles (like BuzzFeed, College Humour, etc), and shuts down attempts to turn niche communities into a moral panic in the mainstream media. Of course, these aren't the only reasons. Obviously the sheer ease of setting up a Discord server had a major effect, as did the pseudononymity, the voice chat features, the extra bells and whistles compared to IRC and Skype and the share URLs among other things. But I definitely feel the moderation may have had some effect, and may be partly why it seems to be replacing Reddit as the network of choice in gaming communities and what not.
yannovitch 8y ago
I honestly don't understand why, especially on Hacker news, we do not push much more for privacy-oriented solutions. Moreover, with Matrix/Riot, or with XMPP/Conversations, viable alternatives exist, and if we all would put the energy to make these softwares better rather than putting it into proprietary solutions like the one described here, the open alternatives would already be much better than the proprietary ones! Sure, as I've read in this thread, Discord is intended for the same kind of discussions that would happen in a public space, or in a group, not for the "truly private discussions",so "no need for all the privacy features "... except you do, precisely for these reasons! I mean, Discord is privately-owned, a public space by its verynature is not. If I'm talking about anything beyond how nice is the weather, such as my political thoughts, or what I love, I don't want anybody (but possibly me) to be able to make a profit through it!

maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
People were tired of getting DDoS'ed so they switched away from Skype/Teamspeak. The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use, and the community aspect is appealing. IRC isn't very easy to use for the common person.
- tomupom 8y ago
  I agree, there is far less of a learning curve involved with Discord and I believe this helped them win over a younger demographic of users. I also feel like they capitalised on something specific that gamers wanted (chat and voice calls with low latency). Skype call quality is very much hit or miss, and while Mumble is great not everyone has the expertise in setting up a server.
- worble 8y ago
  >The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but am I the only one who finds the UX to be atrocious? Everything seems to a nondescript icon that rarely represents what it's supposed to do, nearly everything is flat so it's hard to tell what you can actually click on and whats decoration. Everytime I use it feels like an exercise in mental gymnastics just to navigate it.
  - chrisan 8y ago
    Have an example? Everything I click on has some action I can do. I'm 40 and grew up on mIRC, Discord feels a natural evolution with all the new features.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
    I mean... 90% of the UI is just text. The only icons are for the server images and some minor ones like emojis in the text input. Have a specific example?
- gsich 8y ago
  >IRC isn't very easy to use for the common person. A common person can learn. Also the audience (mostly gamers) know how to do stuff with their computers.
  - sneakernets 8y ago
    In today's mobile world, IRC sucks. I've used IRC for years. Sending files is a pain in the ass due to everyone being behind NATs these days. People can flood servers with garbage. Names can be squatted and trolls can run free. Not so much with Discord. It also doesn't require a bouncer just so you can go from mobile to PC to tablet without issue.
panic 8y ago
Here are a few things that make Discord nicer than IRC for ordinary (non-voice) chat: 1. You can start a new server right in the client by clicking a button. 2. Logs are saved server-side and synced across all your clients (phone, PC, etc). 3. You can upload images and videos to be hosted by Discord's servers. Media and links appear inline in the chat log. 4. No strange rituals involving NickServ or ChanServ. 5. Mobile notifications.
- bathory 8y ago
  Regarding 4.), only once which is your account creation which is valid across all discord servers
  - Klover 8y ago
    That depends on the server. You can set it to public, or a mix between the two. Or even a public channel, a registered channel, and a channel for people with 2FA. The way I got into Discord was some open source project had a link on their GitHub page for collaboration, I clicked that, entered a name and within minutes I was helping out with some code. A cookie kept my temporary account alive. I don’t remember any trolls or spammers or anything. I noticed there’s a setting to control the amount of filtering for your server. And I think there’s also a captcha the first time a temporary user joins.
- lmedinas 8y ago
  In addition to this you have integration with other gaming platforms like: Battle.net, Steam, Twitch and for example join a game directly from Discord.
- hedgew 8y ago
  6. You don't need to publicize your IP address by default.
  - Sendotsh 8y ago
    IPs have been hidden on most IRC servers for years now.
fvjft 8y ago
Apart from the (more than obvious) technical feats, they've raised a lot of money and can afford to offer all of their services, some of them a bit expensive, for free. If they can't find a way to monetise, though, they'll be in trouble. Had TeamSpeak or Mumble been able to offer hosted services for free, maybe Discord wouldn't have existed.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  They have pushed monetization recently. Discord Nitro went from custom id, animated avatar and all emotes of all your servers everywhere to a game subscription service (obviously while raising the price)
  - fvjft 8y ago
    I looked at the games when they launched and they all were indie rubbish, so what can I tell you.
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      Besides a bunch of lootbox stuff for the kiddie shooters, there is Civ IV, XCOM:EU, Bioshock 1&2, Metro 2033 Redux, Project Highrise, Metro Last Light Redux, OOTP18, Tyranny, and so on. Most of those are not for me, but Indie rubbish seems a bit off.
  - starshadowx2 8y ago
    There is still the Nitro classic with just the extra account features, the game subscription is an extra piece if you want it.
loktarogar 8y ago
voice is one of the killer features - simple, instant voice chat, just give someone a link and they're pretty much in. no mucking about with settings. in gamer circles that's huge, and the IRC functionality made it great for game guilds or group of friends for async messaging. compare discord to say teamspeak or ventrilo before it, where you had to both set up the software and configure it, as well as rent or own a server for people to connect to, discord was a godsend and miles better than skype
ktpsns 8y ago
I recently looked into Discord since ~4yrs, and noticed the UI looks almost exactly like a copy of Slack (http://www.slack.com http://www.slack.com).
- chrisan 8y ago
  And both look like copies of mIRC with added features. And I'm sure mIRC copied their layout from someone else
- avinium 8y ago
  Completely disagree. This is just my personal opinion, but I (and my circle) have found Discord to have the worst UI of any mainstream application. First, there's only a dark theme, which I find much more difficult to read than Slack's default light theme. Every window (native client) is crammed full of widgets, making it very difficult for fresh users to figure out which button to click to invite people. It's also constantly firing off unread notifications, adding more and more density to the UI. It makes it very difficult to instantly know where to look. As another example, I just fired up the desktop client and created a random server - and now I literally have no idea how to delete or disconnect from it. I'm not a fan of Slack for other reasons, but its UI is far, far superior to Discord.
jypepin 8y ago
not saying that in a negative way, and I agree that for someone who understands IRC, IRC is great! But this comment is very similar to the infamous rsync comment on the Dropbox original Show HN post. Most people don't know IRC, are put off by it's raw (or lack of) design, etc. It's much easier to sell something like slack/discord than IRC. I remember having so many engineers fighting against HipChat being too slow, and saying we should just use IRC. Yes, in a way it's true, it does everything we'd need, it's fast, can be self hosted etc... but Nancy from HR or Paul from finance would NOT want to figure out how it works.
- nindalf 8y ago
  The top comment on Dropbox's original announcement went like > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software ... is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
  - mruts 8y ago
    He's probably right, it's not reasonable and dropbox is a shitty product. But the market has determined it's valuable, despite what we techies think.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  IRC is great precisely because it filters out people you don’t want to talk to - such as HR.
- mruts 8y ago
  I've never used HipChat but I always hated Slack. My boss would always delete my comments without telling me when he didn't like what I said.
wetpaws 8y ago
It is popular exactly because it is similar to irc. Original IRC was great but despite all my love it did not age well.
afarrell 8y ago
One thing I really appreciate about both Discord and Slack are the ability to insert newlines into messages to make them easier to read.
gambler 8y ago
That's exactly why it's successful. It has the playful tone of the old IRC, ICQ, and 90s web chats that's totally missing from most modern platforms. Probably the most "social" of all communication offerings I've seen and used recently. It's designed to talk to people you don't necessarily know, as opposed to just leeching off your existing social connections from the real world. I really hope they don't end up selling out to Microsoft/Google/Facebook or use their platform to do some form of political activism. On the other hand, Discord seems like a good match for small businesses. Would be interested in seeing something offered on that end.
pault 8y ago
It's the community. I joined a discord server a few months ago to get support from some product (I can't remember what), and once I started using it I realized there are vibrant communities for all of my hobbies and interests. I now have a bunch of new friends that are into building mechanical keyboards that live in the same city. I would never have met them if I hadn't accidentally stumbled onto Discord.

SeanDav 8y ago

I was a huge Discord fan, but now stopped using it for several reasons. - I can't mute some channels completely. I have raised bug reports, tried all the various options, researched everything I could find in Google about this issue. Bottom line is that "mute" is taken by Discord to be "only mute, unless I think you need to hear this", with no way to fully mute a channel. - I only use Discord in browser and it now has a complete and very distracting screen refresh every few seconds. - It is a memory pig in browser and my browser seems to become unstable after a short time, while running Discord in one of the tabs.

2038AD 8y ago
I'm not a fan of Discord but I think you're mistaken. Right click on the channel icon and go to 'Notification Settings' rather than clicking on 'Server Mute'. From there you can choose whether a mention (inc./ex. @everyone/@here) counts and whether mobile notifications are enabled. As for the client you may want to try Ripcord[0]. It uses less memory though I'm not sure you can mute people the same way. While I don't think it's ever enforced, technically using other clients is against the Discord ToS. Either way there are plenty of reasons not to use Discord if you can. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
- SeanDav 8y ago
  Thanks for the ripcord suggestion! As far as server/channel mute - believe me, I have tried every option, including your suggestions. It works for most servers but I have 2 that I can't mute no matter what I try.
  - abryzak 8y ago
    There's also an issue that there doesn't seem to be any way to mute @ mentions of roles you're assigned to. So if a server admin assigns you to a role and then mentions that role you'll get a notification even if server mute is on and suppress @everyone and @here is on.
    - 8y ago

ngrilly 8y ago

What do you think of Telegram, compared to Discord? Telegram has one feature I miss in Discord: quote replies. It makes easier to follow conversations in a crowded channel. It is the most upvoted feature in the Discord feedback tool: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030063152-Quoting https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600.... But Telegram misses a lot of things provided by Discord: multiple channels on the same server to organize conversations, reactions/likes, voice, the possibility to transfer ownership of an existing server.

wetpaws 8y ago
Discord is a replacement for irc, telegram is a replacement for messenger/blogs. You can't really compare them, it's like matching oranges and apples.
- ngrilly 8y ago
  I agree that Telegram is primarily a messaging app like WhatsApp or Messenger. But its group feature has become really powerful, and can be used as an alternative to IRC (except for the fact that a "group" can't be divided in multiple channels). Some Mozilla groups have been using Telegram for some time: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram
  - sciurus 8y ago
    I think part of the nature of Mozilla is that we end up using everything. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some groups using Discord, too. My team and related ones are still mostly on IRC. Officially, as employees we're all supposed to be using Slack...
    - dralley 8y ago
      Same thing at Red Hat. Most of engineering runs off IRC, most of consulting runs off of Rocket.chat, I hear sales and marketing uses slack, and the "official" company solution is Gchat. And a half dozen other little enclaves.

fouc 8y ago

One thing that really irritates me about Discord is that it has really crappy low-contrast dark & light themes. And it's not theme-able at all. At least slack's default light theme is high contrast and also slack is theme-able.

Carpetsmoker 8y ago
Contrast and readability is so 2013. Get used to modern perfect design and stop living in the stone age!!1!1!
bepvte 8y ago
I use the browser version and the stylus browser extension to set the font to Roboto and make the text actually pass the chrome inspectors accessibility guidelines
fvjft 8y ago
I wish Discord had an actual usable light theme. What they have now is an abomination. They probably look at the stats and see nobody uses the light theme and think "not worth to fix". Of course nobody uses it... it's unusable.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Can_Not 8y ago
> also slack is theme-able. But no dark theme options, so not theme-able in any useful way.
- sphynxie 8y ago
  If you use macOS, you can do this: https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed28da8608 https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed2...

Biganon 8y ago

My group of friends migrated from Messenger to Discord a few days ago, we are very pleased. Here's a list of what I love the most: * When a friend arrived in the evening and the others had been talking about random things all day long, the friend was often submerged by the amount of fluff to read. Discord solves this in two ways: 1) the different channels allow us to keep discussions tidy, we have a channel for random discussion, one for our evening plans, one for future holidays, one for music... 2) we can pin (not sure of the name in English) important messages, so the friends arriving later only have to read those. * The desktop application feels light-weight and fast, even on my weak chromebook. Compared to the memory hog that was Messenger in the browser, it's very pleasant. * Many fun functionalities such as custom emojis. The emoji panel that opens when you type a colon makes it easier to find the reaction you want to send. I'm aware many on HN don't see the point of emojis, but I find them really fun and useful. * Bots. Good luck having a bot in a Messenger discussion, with Discord it's trivial. * The audio discussions are very easy to use and efficient. I love the push to talk mode. * Muting is fine-grained. You can mute one channel, an entire server,... * The reactions system makes it trivial to very spontaneously start a little poll. "Where do you guys want to eat? [Letter A emoji] restaurant x [Letter B emoji] restaurant y", and then you react to your own message with both emojis. Your friends just have to click one of the reactions to add theirs, so the little numbers next to each reaction act like a poll counter. * You can edit your own messages, with no time limit AFAIK. Very convenient, especially with the up arrow which automatically edits your last message. * Roles are precise and easy to use. We have a role for the core group of friends, with our private channels. A few drawbacks : * No quote responses, like Whatsapp has for example * No attachments larger than 8 MB, which makes it impossible to send even a small video you've shot with your recent phone (unless you decrease the film resolution in your phone's settings I guess) * I've had a few issues with the Android client, such as receiving a notification for a message, opening the app and the message isn't there. No way to force a refresh, so I have to kill the app and open it again. Might have been caused by battery saving mode, not sure. * Accessing private messages is not very intuitive. Why do you have to go to the main screen first? I don't have many servers, so I'd like to be able to add my closest friends in the server list on the left of the screen, to access our discussions in one click or press. * Some clever things are part of the client instead of the server, which would be fine if it were consistent between clients, which it's not. I'm thinking of the +:reaction_here: shortcut to quickly add a reaction to the last message in the discussion. It doesn't work with the Android client.

aboutruby 8y ago

I think Discord is slowing eating away all other form of online communication as it can be used for such a variety of situations and their API makes it very customizable. The main issue I see is the culture. Discord's community has quite an opposite culture as Slack (free time vs work time) for instance. Being able to have multiple Discord handles could solve that.

scrollaway 8y ago
Even though I use it a lot for 1 on 1 convos it's definitely not eating that lunch (yet). And imo it won't as long as it remains less reliable for notifications and doesn't have things like last-online, quote replies and read receipts like messenger and WhatsApp.
- h1d 8y ago
  I don't understand why read reciepts are important. People will respond when they feel like whether it says read or not. Just makes it more cumbersome to get around it when you're too busy to respond.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Read receipts being there simplify 1-on-1 conversations a lot. Nobody wants to admit it because they don't want to "sound creepy", but most people do use them to know whether or not the other party has read/received the message. It avoids the whole "hey, did you get my text" thing and there's several social situations where knowing whether the other person has read your message (regardless of reply) is useful, so you don't end up calling them to do exactly that. It's like quote replies, emoji, etc… none of these things are essential to 1-on-1 comm, but if there's a platform that has these features, it'll most likely win out over others.
    - h1d 8y ago
      Problem is, it's not reliable. I might accidentally tap on notification and make it read when I'm eating but don't actually want to read it then or if the sender keeps bugging to read it when I know the message had arrived but want to read it later instead, it's not helping the conversation.

jelv 8y ago

Discord business model seems te be to sell games. Not sure if it's going to be a good fit for non-gamers in the future. https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ powered by Matrix also seems a good alternative. It's getting more stable every day.

ihuman 8y ago
Originally they only made money by selling a service called Discord Nitro. It allows you to upload larger files/share your screen in a higher resolution, use servers' emojis in any other server, use an animated avatar, and further customize your username. Since they added the store, they've also started giving games to Nitro members, doubled the price of Nitro, and offered an option without the free games at the original price. https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro
holler 8y ago
check out https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, it's a new real-time discussion site not targeted at gamers, in beta
opan 8y ago
Matrix is really nice. I hope that some of the TUI clients improve a bit, though. I absolutely loved the weechat plugin made in lua, but it'd often take several tries to connect. One day I couldn't connect at all, and there hasn't been github activity lately. It was the only client I found that let me actually reorder rooms and people manually. I really hate the constantly changing order that I can't seem to configure in Riot. Gomuks lacks a lot of good keybinds and stuff that weechat did right by default for being weechat. The emacs package matrix-client.el is alright but tricky to get going due to using quelpa, which none of my other stuff uses. I also have only used it graphically in emacs, so not sure how it is in non-graphical emacs. These little disappointments in the clients make me still prefer irc for a lot of things, but easily sharing images and such on matrix is pretty nice.
- benparsons 8y ago
  There is a new and much more actively maintained WeeChat plugin, take a look: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix

neilv 8y ago

Does anyone know what dotcom partnerships and individual/influencer affiliate programs Discord has done? For a while, I saw many subreddit mods pushing Discord in side bars and stickied posts, often with language that suggested it was an official Reddit counterpart to the sub. I supposed it could be that Reddit management was choosing to siphon off its own user base and influence to Discord. But my suspicion was that it was more likely the action of one or more mods of the sub, and then question would be what was their motivation.

briliantbrandon 8y ago
I'm a subreddit mod for a decent sized esports subreddit and we have an "official" discord for our sub. Our rational for this is it provides a good medium for real time reactions to games/matches that can be shorter and more like twitch chat without having to be actual twitch chat. We noticed too that once we created the discord there was an overall quality increase in the actual posts/comments on the subreddit because most of the less thorough stuff got posted to discord instead. It also provides a good outlet for people looking to find others to game or hangout with that share at least a few similar interests.
MivLives 8y ago
There's an influencer program but it's more aimed at Lan parties and other events of that nature. I suspect that the reason you see so many Discords for subreddits is it's free, and easy. I recall few subs having IRCs which the only other option that really compared, probably because of the barrier to entry for both the user and the admin. Reddit did launch their own chat feature. No idea if anyone uses it, I sure as hell haven't.
- hemicepha 8y ago
  But the reddit chat launched when a Discord channel was already established in all the major communities. And they tried to push it too fast, when it wasn't ready to production, like their official android/ios app.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

elagost 8y ago

From the TOS: By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service. The Company does not guarantee the accuracy, quality, or integrity of any user content posted. They also have a ban against distributing or even talking about macro/autohotkey programs, and, of course, they can see every single message and piece of content you put on the service. It's 20XX; why is there anything but harsh condemnation for services like this? Modern communication platforms should not be set up this way.

holler 8y ago
99% of users don't care, it's a great product
- elagost 8y ago
  I agree, but that's sad, and not the way things should be. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard instead of blindly shuffling into the tar pits. Does that mean life is harder? Yes. But no one great ever took the easy way out.
  - umvi 8y ago
    There are alternatives, like Zulip https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
    - gsich 8y ago
      No voice, how is that an alternative?
    - strig 8y ago
      That's not in any way a replacement for discord.
    - 8y ago

MivLives 8y ago

The majority of people I talk to on Discord went the route of AIM/MSN/Yahoo -> Skype -> Discord. The big thing that I found was that the concept of Discord server was so significantly better then using group messages on anything before it that everyone immediately flocked to it. Just the concept of channels is a new one to a lot of these people. The majority were not gamers (never used Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble), or particularly technical people (IRC would not be a good fit). So props to Discord for making a chat client that's as easy to use as Skype was.

Slippery_John 8y ago
This is exactly what my group went through. The text channels were nice, but the real killer feature for us was the seamless voice channels. In Skype you had to be very careful to not call the whole group, you had to manually construct voice chats every time. Being able to see who's on and who's hanging out in a voice channel is huge. Wanna play games or just have a chat but nobody else is on right now? Just drop into a voice channel and people can see that you're there so they can jump in without having to pee-arrange anything. Another live saver has been the ability to control, on your side, how you hear other people. Friend has a new mic that's too loud / quiet? You can adjust their volume. Somebody being inconsiderate / distracting? Mute them, or turn their volume down super low. The general stability was also just fantastic compared to Skype. I used some Skype last year as part of a teaching role and good grief was it torture in comparison. Constant dropping, terrible quality, and painful to arrange.

rdiddly 8y ago

Bit of a submarine article, or at least it reads like one.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

Slack has been very clear they are not a consumer service. They have no interest in being public social media, their market is businesses paying $$/user. Fair enough. But then Discord has deftly stepped into that void of Slack-for-consumers and it's working pretty well for them. I've been a Discord fan since very early days. It's a great product and a good company.

phreack 8y ago

Is there a reason why they don't just keep a fork their code and rebrand it as a "serious app" for corporate use and charge money for it? Discord has the best service for voice chat and screen sharing I've seen and I'd love to use it with clients instead of all the other weird apps I've had to use. The least painful so far has been Google Meet but even that one has its issues and likely an expirement date.

sgarman 8y ago
Because more often than not losing focus kills companies. The greed to do everything leads to doing nothing well.

sarcasmic 8y ago

Discord hits a sweet spot of design choices that make sense for online friends occasionally intermingling with strangers on the Internet. It's free and has share-URLs to onboard into the product, it's pseudonymous so one can be known by a chosen persona, it's centrally hosted so DOS-attempts don't impact users' networks, but the management and moderation of channels and spaces is distributed. History is searchable, 1-to-1 conversations exist, voice chat is optional but effortlessly available. IRC is the ancestor of this kind of chat, but IRC isn't as widely known as it was in past generations, it has connection privacy challenges, and has a less cohesive service identity and onboarding story that people have come to expect with the spread of centralized services. Slack is another modern, centralized take on IRC, but reveals one's email address, and multiparty voice chat is gated behind paid plans and limited in size. Gamer voice chat systems are decentralized and are lacking in text chat. Old instant messaging networks have been shut down, new ones either don't have desktop clients, don't have a good group voice chat, or reveal personal info. Skype was fine on all three and was a hangout tool for many, until Microsoft ran it into the ground. It's a bit of a meme now that companies are putting out chat services yet no one can do them right. Surely there's economic forces at play, and rich media chat is probably expensive, but there's companies with very deep pockets who could run it as a loss leader just to starve their competitors, to commoditize their own complements. But cloud storage for individuals or video hosting like YouTube is also expensive, yet an upgrade path exists for users who want to pay. Google has thoroughly ceded chat to Facebook and still can't sort their strategy out, Facebook is just now realizing that they could tackle a more private chat too and they could satisfy that demand, Microsoft has morphed Skype into everything from Windows-integrated platformwide IM to a bad Snapchat clone and back again to a WebRTC shim, this time with a Chrome-only client. Asian apps capable, but are focusing on other markets and aren't as well known in the US. Telegram still doesn't have group voice calls. VC companies focus on the enterprise where willingness to pay is higher, amounts are higher, but use-cases are different.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

I came on to Discord before hearing about it from HN or other news source. I was invited to a "server" by members of my play-by-post RPG group. I had the impression it was a small and "rebellious" startup with a great product. Word of mouth is the best kind of growth. In a matter of weeks, I moved most of my chat to discord....though for chats with my brother (one of my closest confidants) we still run our own Mattermost server, which has honestly been great.

ouid 8y ago

easy, skype became garbage.

arminiusreturns 8y ago

I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat... I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.

mcast 8y ago
It's a classic example of the network effect for social networking.
CDSlice 8y ago
Maybe because they don't want to worry about life things happening and you dropping it for a while? Most people don't have the knowledge, capability, and/or will to run their own chat server when they can just use Discord for free and not have to worry about downtime or managing the server hosting. While me and my friends could run a Matrix or IRC server or whatever the new open source chat awesomeness is these days we don't really see the point when Discord does everything we want and more and doesn't require any management beyond setting up our guild settings, channels, and roles.
- aseipp 8y ago
  This basic problem can always be summed up as something like: "Extreme nerds who are almost completely divorced from the needs and skills of 95% of all computer users are BAFFLED by the fact Social Effects Are Real, and people do not know how to run their own servers. News at 11." and it's extremely predictable and always on-time.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Come talk to me in a year or two when it's found out discord was spying on users for the government and/or selling everyone's data to shady third parties, or being used as a backdoor on systems, and tell me I'd the tradeoff was worth it. Of course I should have chosen my words more carefully, I understand child posters point about how technical things are hard, but I wasn't addressing a webboard of non-technical users... this is HN. I only use Linux for many of the same reasons, and I openly acknowledge it's not as "easy" , but there is Morea to the products and services we use than just that, and I think things like the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of these issues mean that we as techies and general trend leaders in that world need to set a better example on the security and privacy fronts.

CM30 8y ago

Part of me wonders if community moderation had something to do with it. With Discord, people have to know where to find your server link, and can be denied access to various channels until they get past admin set verification rules. This makes it much harder for trolls or troublemakers to brigade a server compared to say, a subreddit, and makes it tricky for your enemies to go trawling through your chat history like on Reddit or what not. It really puts off the content scraping services you saw abusing social media sites a while back for clickbaity articles (like BuzzFeed, College Humour, etc), and shuts down attempts to turn niche communities into a moral panic in the mainstream media. Of course, these aren't the only reasons. Obviously the sheer ease of setting up a Discord server had a major effect, as did the pseudononymity, the voice chat features, the extra bells and whistles compared to IRC and Skype and the share URLs among other things. But I definitely feel the moderation may have had some effect, and may be partly why it seems to be replacing Reddit as the network of choice in gaming communities and what not.

yannovitch 8y ago

I honestly don't understand why, especially on Hacker news, we do not push much more for privacy-oriented solutions. Moreover, with Matrix/Riot, or with XMPP/Conversations, viable alternatives exist, and if we all would put the energy to make these softwares better rather than putting it into proprietary solutions like the one described here, the open alternatives would already be much better than the proprietary ones! Sure, as I've read in this thread, Discord is intended for the same kind of discussions that would happen in a public space, or in a group, not for the "truly private discussions",so "no need for all the privacy features "... except you do, precisely for these reasons! I mean, Discord is privately-owned, a public space by its verynature is not. If I'm talking about anything beyond how nice is the weather, such as my political thoughts, or what I love, I don't want anybody (but possibly me) to be able to make a profit through it!