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You might have missed the "technical" qualifier. Twitter isn't an especially hard problem either.

by Volt 6y ago

bananaface 6y ago
I didn't miss the qualifier. Discord is a chat client with very restricted servers. It's really not that hard as technical problems go.
- luizfelberti 6y ago
  Please, do tell us what kind of exotic problems you work on, that you think massive scale real-time communications is not a hard technical problem We're eager to know!
  - bananaface 6y ago
    No, that's stupid. I couldn't build Discord. My point is that as relative problems go, I don't see Discord as a big one. I might be wrong but as far as I can tell it's a solved problem and has been for over a decade. I'd wager you could build it with an incompetent team that had domain expertise. AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005?
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      > AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. AWS maybe, insomuch as "orders of magnitude" can mean as little as "100x". But still, unconvinced. There's something like 200 AWS services, and Discord on the whole is certainly more than twice as complex as the average AWS service. World of Warcraft being >100x more complex than Discord doesn't track. > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Perhaps you are unaware that Discord has (pretty high quality!) voicechat and livestreaming? Certainly much better than anything that existed in 2005.
    - luizfelberti 6y ago
      > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Discord was pretty much unrivaled in voice-chat quality for a long time, and to this day it's only "real" competitors in technical prowess in this space that come to mind are Apple's Facetime and Google's Duo. Both Facetime and Duo have bespoke algorithms for this kind of thing: Duo for example leverages SOTA ML to correct audio gaps in the call[0], while Facetime leverages ECN on their custom adaptive bitrate algorithm so that the call is more resilient to noisy networks (couldn't find a good reference for this second one). Keep in mind that both Google and Apple have highly-qualified teams working exclusively on networking protocols, and yet still there was a time a while ago where Discord pretty much had the best call quality experience around (GMeet is still wonky to this day). The only thing about this that was "solved" in 2005 is shoveling packets over UDP, or at most, if you wanted to be really fancy, just shoveling them over SCTP instead. I think you're severely underestimating how much knowledge of networks it takes to build something to par that level of quality. The only thing you can point at back in 2005 is Skype, and they do not come even close. You also seem to be equating difficulty with complexity, which even though they are at times correlated, is still a false equivalency. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in...

You might have missed the "technical" qualifier. Twitter isn't an especially hard problem either.

by Volt 6y ago

You might have missed the "technical" qualifier. Twitter isn't an especially hard problem either.

I didn't miss the qualifier. Discord is a chat client with very restricted servers. It's really not that hard as technical problems go.

luizfelberti 6y ago
Please, do tell us what kind of exotic problems you work on, that you think massive scale real-time communications is not a hard technical problem We're eager to know!
- bananaface 6y ago
  No, that's stupid. I couldn't build Discord. My point is that as relative problems go, I don't see Discord as a big one. I might be wrong but as far as I can tell it's a solved problem and has been for over a decade. I'd wager you could build it with an incompetent team that had domain expertise. AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    > AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. AWS maybe, insomuch as "orders of magnitude" can mean as little as "100x". But still, unconvinced. There's something like 200 AWS services, and Discord on the whole is certainly more than twice as complex as the average AWS service. World of Warcraft being >100x more complex than Discord doesn't track. > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Perhaps you are unaware that Discord has (pretty high quality!) voicechat and livestreaming? Certainly much better than anything that existed in 2005.
  - luizfelberti 6y ago
    > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Discord was pretty much unrivaled in voice-chat quality for a long time, and to this day it's only "real" competitors in technical prowess in this space that come to mind are Apple's Facetime and Google's Duo. Both Facetime and Duo have bespoke algorithms for this kind of thing: Duo for example leverages SOTA ML to correct audio gaps in the call[0], while Facetime leverages ECN on their custom adaptive bitrate algorithm so that the call is more resilient to noisy networks (couldn't find a good reference for this second one). Keep in mind that both Google and Apple have highly-qualified teams working exclusively on networking protocols, and yet still there was a time a while ago where Discord pretty much had the best call quality experience around (GMeet is still wonky to this day). The only thing about this that was "solved" in 2005 is shoveling packets over UDP, or at most, if you wanted to be really fancy, just shoveling them over SCTP instead. I think you're severely underestimating how much knowledge of networks it takes to build something to par that level of quality. The only thing you can point at back in 2005 is Skype, and they do not come even close. You also seem to be equating difficulty with complexity, which even though they are at times correlated, is still a false equivalency. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in...