15 ms·

Dark Horse Discord

194 points by Osiris30 7y ago

sergiotapia 7y ago
Might as well ask here as it's trending, what happened to Discord's store? It was unceremoniously shuttered and removed from the UI. How much of a loss was it? I imagine months and months of work, nevermind the deals needed to be set with the publishers and game developers. Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?
- kick 7y ago
  It wasn't removed secretly; they refunded everyone, wrote a blog post or two about it, and floated the news to the top of most news aggregators at least a few times.
  - reificator 7y ago
    I got that email and cancelled my nitro subscription because of it, but I didn't know the actual store shut down until months later.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  You won't get an answer from the Discord themselves. But here's my take, as a game developer who was offered to sell on Discord: Discord was trying to turn their massive userbase into a source of revenue with the Discord Store, but they didn't quite anticipate what developers would actually need from a storefront, and they didn't seem interested in understanding the storefront wars of time past, the many "Steam Killers", GoG, Desura, Origin, UPlay, Windows Store, the list goes on. Basically, no AAA partners really care, they've all been burned before, so they do the old standby when you need to rejuvenate a platform (like the Xbox 360 and PS3), and turn to the indie market, in hopes that would showcase a more cooperative community desperate to get any press or attention they can. But the indie market already has itch.io, and Steam, and Discord didn't seem strictly better than either of those, so it was already a bit underwhelming of a launch. Around the same time, the Epic Games Store launched, offering much better royalty deals than Steam/Discord, and Epic offered large grants to developers in exchange for limited-term exclusivity. This got a lot of developer/gamer attention, so quickly all the renewed "storefront war" was seen as Steam vs. Epic, with maybe GoG/itch.io as a very distant third. Discord's Store had no chance out of the gate. They tried to pivot to "buy a Nitro subscription, get some free games", but between their awkward Store interface and nothing really that great on offer, they eventually shuttered it. [0] [0] https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-nitro-a732ddc4b5b1 https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-nitro-a732ddc4b...
  - dmxt 7y ago
    Hm I've never heard of itch.io until I see this comment
dfee 7y ago
My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use. And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst
- Eikon 7y ago
  I never used gitter but started to consider it. May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?
  - fouc 7y ago
    The gitter frontend client is a bit glitchy with scrolling up the backlog. But other than that, it's certainly workable.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC). It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.
  - lawfulcactus 7y ago
    I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    > mIRC Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC. I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.
- 7y ago
m712 7y ago
Discord is also proprietary software and is backed by Tencent. Read the privacy policy, it might surprise you. Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Have any suggestions? I am not aware of any that function as well or as broadly. I would be thrilled to be wrong.
  - fladd 7y ago
    https://matrix.org https://matrix.org with https://riot.im https://riot.im as a client.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      Color me thrilled. These look fantastic.
- sxp 7y ago
  What's the best Free alternative? Since WebRTC is pretty powerful & cross platform, is there a really good WebRTC text + audio chat system that matches the core functionality of Discord?
  - fladd 7y ago
    https://matrix.org https://matrix.org with https://riot.im https://riot.im as a client.
    - przmk 7y ago
      I do not use Discord but I'm under the impression that it has voice channels like Mumble and Teamspeak whereas Matrix does not (yet) have them. This is a big deal-breaker for many teams and I'm definitely waiting until it has that feature before I deploy my own server. For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
kick 7y ago
I find this post odd. As far as I'm aware, it seems like the momentum of Discord has slowed, if anything, since ~2014. That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes blindness.
- ct520 7y ago
  google trends show otherwise? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-12-21%202020-01-21&q=%2Fg%2F11cjpb9d52 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-12-21%202...
- muzani 7y ago
  I suppose HN is part of the early adopter group.
- alephr 7y ago
  That's pretty interesting considering they launched in 2015
  - kick 7y ago
    I said around! But yeah, I was off by a year.
Lorin 7y ago
We've been using Discord since the official developer server days - it just made sense given the flexibility and pricing compared to others such as Slack. Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.
chrysoprace 7y ago
People don't often talk about https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.chat/ when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities. Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of messages.
- petersjt014 7y ago
  My guess--based on my singular experience--would be obscurity. I've never heard of it. Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.
- jack_arleth 7y ago
  Some things that come to mind on a quick reading of the website you linked: - you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along? - I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application? - Does it exist on mobile? I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people. *edited for formatting
  - chrysoprace 7y ago
    That does make a lot of sense. I suppose the barrier to entry is a lot lower with Discord. To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1] The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2] (I'm not affiliated with Spectrum) [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum [2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum
- acemarke 7y ago
Algent 7y ago
I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy. They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.
- erikbye 7y ago
  > They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices IME Discord voice quality has been awful, and that's just direct voice between two people; multiple times every session the call disintegrates, sometimes falling out entirely. 'Robotic sounding' is a description often used. I think region (mine's Europe) and server capacity in that region, might be an important factor in the perceived quality of Discord voice. Several times it's been so bad we have fallen back to other options, e.g., Teams.
  - Kiro 7y ago
    Also in Europe but I have the complete opposite experience. I'm constantly impressed of how great voice in Discord works compared to other options.
    - ksahin 7y ago
      Also in Europe, I've been using Discord almost daily for 5 years now, and always impressed by the voice quality.
      - hypertextcoffee 7y ago
        I'm not sure how you've been using it for 5 years, when it's only been out for 4 (May 13th 2015)[0]. [0]https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is-the-best-voip-service-available/ https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is...
        jagger27 7y ago
adambowles 7y ago
I can't find any reference on the internet to the SUAQ (Shut up and Que[ue]) server mentioned in the article. Anyone got the invite link?
- raziel2p 7y ago
  I found this: https://www.patreon.com/shut_up https://www.patreon.com/shut_up The article mentions it's invite-only so you're not going to find a public link to join.
  - adambowles 7y ago
    Thank you, I couldn't even find this page via my Googling
dotdotdots 7y ago
From the title I thought this would be Bret Weinstein's the "dark horse podcast". Check it out if you like evolutionary psychology. Even better is his brothers podcast, "The Portal" (https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/ https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/). Its brilliant, in a mad scientist kind-of way. Its where the dirty laundry, of the science community, is aired.
mxstbr 7y ago
> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion versus slacks 12 billion valuation? Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.
BenSS 7y ago
Discord is one crisis away from imploding if they don't get serious about moderation tools and parental controls. They're turning a blind eye to the issues around tweens/teens interacting with much older folks online in pursuit of growth.
- gfodor 7y ago
  Their permissions system and moderation tools imo outclass anyone else out there. I haven't seen parental controls but I'm curious what moderation deficiencies you're referring to.
  - ve55 7y ago
    I think the parent comment is more concerned about the prospect of young Discord users being allowed to communicate with a very large and diverse set of users/servers, which includes a lot of adult/fringe/pornographic/political content, easily allowing them to receive direct messages from others in these communities.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- errantspark 7y ago
  Ugh. Why would Discord, a tool for making private communities be on the hook for moderation and parental controls? Let's stop it with this tired "but think of the children" argument. It's not Discord's job to parent people's kids.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure the parent is talking about the court of public opinion. Every few weeks like clockwork now the New York Times or the Verge runs some breathless story about how IG/YouTube/Messenger/whatever is harboring pedophiles; it's easy to see how Discord could be next. The difference is, those other companies are big enough to manage the PR hit and fallout; I'm not sure Discord is the same.
heydabop 7y ago
Just a note, Discord has two Nitro tiers (the table only mentions one) at $5/mo and $10/mo, or $50/yr and $100/yr.
time0ut 7y ago
I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it makes Teams and Slack look primitive. The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots. You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...
- sneak 7y ago
  Discord cannot be used anonymously via Tor without providing a telephone number to tie it to your real-world identity, and it does not even pretend to support end to end cryptography, even for DMs. No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result. They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full chat content, including all DMs. I have stopped using it for these reasons. I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.
  - S33V 7y ago
    Wasn't there post on here just a few days ago about how Discord exactly does that? pretend to support end to end encryption? Someone created their own discord client and found that VOIP packets were being decrypted by discord in between clients
    - time0ut 7y ago
      My understanding of that was that is currently the only way to do WebRTC in a one to many scenario, so not sure I'd say they're pretending.
    - ntr-- 7y ago
      You can ask for all the data associated with your account, so clearly not. I did it about a year ago and got a huge trove of messages back as JSON.
pier25 7y ago
It would be great of dev communities didn't use chats for everything. I get that the casual nature of chats is great for getting a sense of community but the same issues pop over and over again. Users with issues or questions should be redirected to somewhere that can indexed (Forum, Github issues, etc).
- ljm 7y ago
  It’s just IRC with extra stuff. I’d love to stick with IRC if we could.
stubish 7y ago
Voice? Really? In the communities I've hung around in (gamer & tech) it sits idle, unused. Curious why it keeps being placed front and center as a major feature, when people don't seem to actually want it.
- teirce 7y ago
  IME, in large community servers (usually info dumps or LFG platforms like the video in the article) I almost never see it used. But in my smaller friend-focused Discord servers, there's always someone in the voice channels. I think the greatest thing Discord did for gaming communities was make it so easy to get people together in a voice channel that everyone stopped using Skype. I tried for years to move people to Mumble/Vent/TS but it never stuck. But Discord managed to do it. I'd say voice is still the main feature that draws me and friends to the platform.
- ivnubinas 7y ago
  Discord is usually used in online games in which voice communication gives you a big advantage. In the Discord homepage it says "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" which were the programs used for voice communication in online games.
gwilkes 7y ago
Spot on, the 10,000 free limit is much more limiting than many people think. I've seen very small businesses of even 3-4 people lose tons of institutional knowledge just because they wouldn't pay for slack. With larger tech groups you can start losing information after a few days. And the larger the group the less likely they will pay for it. I like the UI of Slack but am happy when I see tech groups using Discord instead. I have more thoughts here if anyone is interested, including alternatives, "Why tech groups can use Slack for free but open source projects and businesses of any size shouldn’t": https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-away-with-using-slack-for-free-but-open-source-projects-and-businesses-of-96c427aaefbb https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-a...
bruceb 7y ago
Out of curiosity is there a way to know the general split between how much Discord is used on a phone relative to a computer?
benjaminsuch 7y ago
They got millions of gamers. Why can't they implement a store like Steam has?
- judge2020 7y ago
  They already tried[0], but the dedicated store page got removed (now devs. can allow people to download games via their discord server/guild). 0: https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fdd4 https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd...

194 points by Osiris30 7y ago

Might as well ask here as it's trending, what happened to Discord's store? It was unceremoniously shuttered and removed from the UI. How much of a loss was it? I imagine months and months of work, nevermind the deals needed to be set with the publishers and game developers. Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?

kick 7y ago
It wasn't removed secretly; they refunded everyone, wrote a blog post or two about it, and floated the news to the top of most news aggregators at least a few times.
- reificator 7y ago
  I got that email and cancelled my nitro subscription because of it, but I didn't know the actual store shut down until months later.
Jasper_ 7y ago
You won't get an answer from the Discord themselves. But here's my take, as a game developer who was offered to sell on Discord: Discord was trying to turn their massive userbase into a source of revenue with the Discord Store, but they didn't quite anticipate what developers would actually need from a storefront, and they didn't seem interested in understanding the storefront wars of time past, the many "Steam Killers", GoG, Desura, Origin, UPlay, Windows Store, the list goes on. Basically, no AAA partners really care, they've all been burned before, so they do the old standby when you need to rejuvenate a platform (like the Xbox 360 and PS3), and turn to the indie market, in hopes that would showcase a more cooperative community desperate to get any press or attention they can. But the indie market already has itch.io, and Steam, and Discord didn't seem strictly better than either of those, so it was already a bit underwhelming of a launch. Around the same time, the Epic Games Store launched, offering much better royalty deals than Steam/Discord, and Epic offered large grants to developers in exchange for limited-term exclusivity. This got a lot of developer/gamer attention, so quickly all the renewed "storefront war" was seen as Steam vs. Epic, with maybe GoG/itch.io as a very distant third. Discord's Store had no chance out of the gate. They tried to pivot to "buy a Nitro subscription, get some free games", but between their awkward Store interface and nothing really that great on offer, they eventually shuttered it. [0] [0] https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-nitro-a732ddc4b5b1 https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-nitro-a732ddc4b...
- dmxt 7y ago
  Hm I've never heard of itch.io until I see this comment

dfee 7y ago

My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use. And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst

Eikon 7y ago
I never used gitter but started to consider it. May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?
- fouc 7y ago
  The gitter frontend client is a bit glitchy with scrolling up the backlog. But other than that, it's certainly workable.
radicalbyte 7y ago
Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC). It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.
- lawfulcactus 7y ago
  I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).
- seisvelas 7y ago
  > mIRC Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC. I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.
7y ago

m712 7y ago

Discord is also proprietary software and is backed by Tencent. Read the privacy policy, it might surprise you. Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.

Pfhreak 7y ago
Have any suggestions? I am not aware of any that function as well or as broadly. I would be thrilled to be wrong.
- fladd 7y ago
  https://matrix.org https://matrix.org with https://riot.im https://riot.im as a client.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Color me thrilled. These look fantastic.
sxp 7y ago
What's the best Free alternative? Since WebRTC is pretty powerful & cross platform, is there a really good WebRTC text + audio chat system that matches the core functionality of Discord?
- fladd 7y ago
  https://matrix.org https://matrix.org with https://riot.im https://riot.im as a client.
  - przmk 7y ago
    I do not use Discord but I'm under the impression that it has voice channels like Mumble and Teamspeak whereas Matrix does not (yet) have them. This is a big deal-breaker for many teams and I'm definitely waiting until it has that feature before I deploy my own server. For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.

kick 7y ago

I find this post odd. As far as I'm aware, it seems like the momentum of Discord has slowed, if anything, since ~2014. That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes blindness.

ct520 7y ago
google trends show otherwise? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-12-21%202020-01-21&q=%2Fg%2F11cjpb9d52 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-12-21%202...
muzani 7y ago
I suppose HN is part of the early adopter group.
alephr 7y ago
That's pretty interesting considering they launched in 2015
- kick 7y ago
  I said around! But yeah, I was off by a year.

Lorin 7y ago

We've been using Discord since the official developer server days - it just made sense given the flexibility and pricing compared to others such as Slack. Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.

chrysoprace 7y ago

People don't often talk about https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.chat/ when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities. Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of messages.

petersjt014 7y ago
My guess--based on my singular experience--would be obscurity. I've never heard of it. Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.
jack_arleth 7y ago
Some things that come to mind on a quick reading of the website you linked: - you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along? - I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application? - Does it exist on mobile? I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people. *edited for formatting
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  That does make a lot of sense. I suppose the barrier to entry is a lot lower with Discord. To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1] The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2] (I'm not affiliated with Spectrum) [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum [2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum
acemarke 7y ago

Algent 7y ago

I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy. They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.

erikbye 7y ago
> They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices IME Discord voice quality has been awful, and that's just direct voice between two people; multiple times every session the call disintegrates, sometimes falling out entirely. 'Robotic sounding' is a description often used. I think region (mine's Europe) and server capacity in that region, might be an important factor in the perceived quality of Discord voice. Several times it's been so bad we have fallen back to other options, e.g., Teams.
- Kiro 7y ago
  Also in Europe but I have the complete opposite experience. I'm constantly impressed of how great voice in Discord works compared to other options.
  - ksahin 7y ago
    Also in Europe, I've been using Discord almost daily for 5 years now, and always impressed by the voice quality.
    - hypertextcoffee 7y ago
      I'm not sure how you've been using it for 5 years, when it's only been out for 4 (May 13th 2015)[0]. [0]https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is-the-best-voip-service-available/ https://www.pcgamer.com/one-year-after-its-launch-discord-is...
      - jagger27 7y ago

adambowles 7y ago

I can't find any reference on the internet to the SUAQ (Shut up and Que[ue]) server mentioned in the article. Anyone got the invite link?

raziel2p 7y ago
I found this: https://www.patreon.com/shut_up https://www.patreon.com/shut_up The article mentions it's invite-only so you're not going to find a public link to join.
- adambowles 7y ago
  Thank you, I couldn't even find this page via my Googling

dotdotdots 7y ago

From the title I thought this would be Bret Weinstein's the "dark horse podcast". Check it out if you like evolutionary psychology. Even better is his brothers podcast, "The Portal" (https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/ https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/). Its brilliant, in a mad scientist kind-of way. Its where the dirty laundry, of the science community, is aired.

mxstbr 7y ago

> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion versus slacks 12 billion valuation? Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.

BenSS 7y ago

Discord is one crisis away from imploding if they don't get serious about moderation tools and parental controls. They're turning a blind eye to the issues around tweens/teens interacting with much older folks online in pursuit of growth.

gfodor 7y ago
Their permissions system and moderation tools imo outclass anyone else out there. I haven't seen parental controls but I'm curious what moderation deficiencies you're referring to.
- ve55 7y ago
  I think the parent comment is more concerned about the prospect of young Discord users being allowed to communicate with a very large and diverse set of users/servers, which includes a lot of adult/fringe/pornographic/political content, easily allowing them to receive direct messages from others in these communities.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
errantspark 7y ago
Ugh. Why would Discord, a tool for making private communities be on the hook for moderation and parental controls? Let's stop it with this tired "but think of the children" argument. It's not Discord's job to parent people's kids.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the parent is talking about the court of public opinion. Every few weeks like clockwork now the New York Times or the Verge runs some breathless story about how IG/YouTube/Messenger/whatever is harboring pedophiles; it's easy to see how Discord could be next. The difference is, those other companies are big enough to manage the PR hit and fallout; I'm not sure Discord is the same.

heydabop 7y ago

Just a note, Discord has two Nitro tiers (the table only mentions one) at $5/mo and $10/mo, or $50/yr and $100/yr.

time0ut 7y ago

I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it makes Teams and Slack look primitive. The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots. You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...

sneak 7y ago
Discord cannot be used anonymously via Tor without providing a telephone number to tie it to your real-world identity, and it does not even pretend to support end to end cryptography, even for DMs. No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result. They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full chat content, including all DMs. I have stopped using it for these reasons. I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.
- S33V 7y ago
  Wasn't there post on here just a few days ago about how Discord exactly does that? pretend to support end to end encryption? Someone created their own discord client and found that VOIP packets were being decrypted by discord in between clients
  - time0ut 7y ago
    My understanding of that was that is currently the only way to do WebRTC in a one to many scenario, so not sure I'd say they're pretending.
  - ntr-- 7y ago
    You can ask for all the data associated with your account, so clearly not. I did it about a year ago and got a huge trove of messages back as JSON.

pier25 7y ago

It would be great of dev communities didn't use chats for everything. I get that the casual nature of chats is great for getting a sense of community but the same issues pop over and over again. Users with issues or questions should be redirected to somewhere that can indexed (Forum, Github issues, etc).

ljm 7y ago
It’s just IRC with extra stuff. I’d love to stick with IRC if we could.

stubish 7y ago

Voice? Really? In the communities I've hung around in (gamer & tech) it sits idle, unused. Curious why it keeps being placed front and center as a major feature, when people don't seem to actually want it.

teirce 7y ago
IME, in large community servers (usually info dumps or LFG platforms like the video in the article) I almost never see it used. But in my smaller friend-focused Discord servers, there's always someone in the voice channels. I think the greatest thing Discord did for gaming communities was make it so easy to get people together in a voice channel that everyone stopped using Skype. I tried for years to move people to Mumble/Vent/TS but it never stuck. But Discord managed to do it. I'd say voice is still the main feature that draws me and friends to the platform.
ivnubinas 7y ago
Discord is usually used in online games in which voice communication gives you a big advantage. In the Discord homepage it says "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" which were the programs used for voice communication in online games.

gwilkes 7y ago

Spot on, the 10,000 free limit is much more limiting than many people think. I've seen very small businesses of even 3-4 people lose tons of institutional knowledge just because they wouldn't pay for slack. With larger tech groups you can start losing information after a few days. And the larger the group the less likely they will pay for it. I like the UI of Slack but am happy when I see tech groups using Discord instead. I have more thoughts here if anyone is interested, including alternatives, "Why tech groups can use Slack for free but open source projects and businesses of any size shouldn’t": https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-away-with-using-slack-for-free-but-open-source-projects-and-businesses-of-96c427aaefbb https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-a...

bruceb 7y ago

Out of curiosity is there a way to know the general split between how much Discord is used on a phone relative to a computer?

benjaminsuch 7y ago

They got millions of gamers. Why can't they implement a store like Steam has?

judge2020 7y ago
They already tried[0], but the dedicated store page got removed (now devs. can allow people to download games via their discord server/guild). 0: https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fdd4 https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd...