46 ms·

How Discord Won

• echelon 6y ago
  $120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions? That seems crazy. I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    As someone who is not by any means a discord power user, and who doesn't generally pay for skins, even I have been tempted to buy boosts just so that I can use emojis from some servers on other servers, because I think they're funny. If discord can tempt even me to buy, I have no trouble believing they can close the deal with many others.
    • falcolas 6y ago
      Yeah, cross-server emoji are shockingly valuable to me as well. Some servers just have terrible custom emojii, and having a choice of some non-terrible emoji is worth the price. I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
      • Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
        I wish Slack had better portability of custom emoji. There's no blessed API for adding/exporting emoji.
      • echelon 6y ago
        It's 2020 and I can't believe we're paying for emoji. I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in. Emoji are not innovation.
        • madeofpalk 6y ago
          No one said they're an innovation. Just that people value them.
        • kixiQu 6y ago
          What I find irritating is the absence of what Chinese/Korean/Japanese apps have: a curated sticker market where the platform takes a cut of money that goes to the IP holder (brand or artist).
          • lpa22 6y ago
            well - looks like you're in luck https://www.engadget.com/discord-stickers-135019389.html https://www.engadget.com/discord-stickers-135019389.html
        • nexuist 6y ago
          Is art not valuable? Is it not worth paying for? Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand. I also like having GIF profile icons.
        • ByteJockey 6y ago
          Paying for cosmetic features has been, traditionally, one of the monetization models in gaming (which discord is inherently intertwined with) that ends up the least scummy.
        • NineStarPoint 6y ago
          Emoji are in the sweet spot where if you can’t use special emoji you don’t really care, but some people find them shiny enough to pay for. It’s not innovation, but it’s definitely a perfect target for monetization.
        • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  • alchemism 6y ago
    It is nothing compared to the money that flies around inside Twitch broadcast chats. Someone buys everyone a subscription to gain the favor of the host. Someone else donates $xxx to get their name on-screen. And it happens pretty far down the long-tail.
    • cbhl 6y ago
      This reads to me as a B2B play. Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").
      • alchemism 6y ago
        I would say its more organic than intentional, but many streamers encourage fans to join a Discord if they have one, as a higher level of engagement. A chat channel is 'sticky' whereas the chat linked only to a broadcast is ephemeral.
  • mopsi 6y ago
    Nitro is a status symbol in some teen circles. Things like animated avatars make you stand out.
    • isaacgreyed 6y ago
      In some other teen circles it's a negative status symbol. In the "you wasted your money on that?" sort of way.
      • thinkingemote 6y ago
        That's an equalisation, a way to keep people humble but still acknowledging the status to keep the community happy
  • judge2020 6y ago
    Discord has 300+ million users (based on the forbes article). Even if everyone were paying for the cheap $5/mo nitro classic (which is worst case scenario for revenue, but best case scenario for # of paying customers) subscription, that's 24 million paying subscribers, which is less than 10% of their user base. Seems pretty reasonable given that the free tier includes so much.
    • est31 6y ago
      What does the 300+ million refer to? Yearly active users? Monthly active users? Those two metrics are much different.
      • judge2020 6y ago
        Looks like there's only 100+ million MAU[0], the Forbes article just said "300 million registered users". 0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20active%20users,-13.5 https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...
    • jsnell 6y ago
      Your number seems off by an order of magnitude. 24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year
  • n3dm 6y ago
    >$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions? Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?
    • jhgg 6y ago
      Discord does not sell user data. We've stated this many times, unequivocally. Our monetization puts the user as the customer, not say, the product to be sold to advertisers (read: other social networks.) We think that this alignment of incentives sets us up to do the best by our users. Our monetary success depends on how great an experience we can build for our users, such that they convert to a paid subscriber - while not gating everything behind a paywall. Hence why our premium subscription service generally includes cosmetic incentives, that are optional to the core experience of chat, and as well, and unlocks stuff like higher quality streaming (since it costs us more to run, we unlock higher quality once you pay us.) As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy https://discord.com/privacy > The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you. > No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users. > Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable. And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety https://discord.com/safety > We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.
  • sk2020 6y ago
    There are probably several other monetization strategies in play, unless a tiger (Jason Citron) can change his stripes https://archive.org/details/OpenfeintComplaint https://archive.org/details/OpenfeintComplaint Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.
  • will_pseudonym 6y ago
    The free service is really featureful, and people really like the "accoutrements"† that you get from Nitro as well as supporting the server(s) they like. Linguistic tangent below if you are interested: ------------------------------------------------ † I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡ ‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline. Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language. The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    It's common in gaming discords, mainly for hi-res streaming. For other communities I suspect the status of boosting and the feeling of "supporting the community" is popular, in a patreon-like way.
  • anderspitman 6y ago
    I don't think Discord has ever even tried to get me to pay them money. Granted I only use it very casually, but the tab is always open.
• 293984j29384 6y ago
  As soon as the author claimed IRC was a competitor to Discord or Skype I had to stop reading.
  • necrotic_comp 6y ago
    Why ? To me, Discord seems like a more fully featured IRC. What am I missing ?
    • josteink 6y ago
      It’s centralized, closed source SaaS, it’s not an open, standardised internet protocol with a vast selection of clients (and servers, real servers!) to choose from. 10 years from now, Discord will be gone but IRC will remain. These days I prefer Matrix, but I have no doubt IRC will stay around. Maybe even because of Matrix users like myself who just keep bridging it in.
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        "Remaining" is a pretty weak consolation. Is that all that matters? The biggest Freenode channel I'm a part of is #nodejs. It has maybe 10 regulars. All of us probably 30+ years old, only clinging to the corpse of IRC out of old habit. And in 10 years we will all be 40+, and in another 10, we will all be 50+. On the other hand, in 10 years if Discord pulls the plug, you'll have a community of people that can migrate elsewhere. To any other solution that will pop up. Because it's the people that are the community, not the platform. Whether I have to use Discord or Slack or future solutions is merely incidental and entirely swappable. One example that comes to mind is https://thedonald.win/ https://thedonald.win/. Reddit killed their subreddit (r/the_donald), so they just moved elsewhere.
  • chrisacky 6y ago
    Why? Factually they are... Case in point.. I used to run game servers for maybe over 1000+ guilds over the years I was active. Even talking 10 years ago, people were still using Skype for connecting to games... just because it doesn't fit your use-case doesn't mean the market wasn't competing. IRC was also in the space. Look at the dozens+ IRC servers which had communities built around them... they've mostly migrated to Discord. I'd love to know your counter point to such an absolute-claim though... because I positively agree with the author.
• chrisacky 6y ago
  As I hyper-casual gamer now, I also like that I can drop into any of the servers I've joined and those communities still know who I am. I maybe play 10 games of Dota a year, and I'm still on first name terms with the people I play with. Disord is just hands down the unifying glue that brings together any type of gaming community, it attacked the problem by always offering a better experience to alternatives, and providing tight integration to the platforms that helped it grow. Every single game chat voice just sucks compared to Discord. Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
  • n3dm 6y ago
    >every single game voice chat just sucks compared to discord I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
    • stryan 6y ago
      Discord has "good enough" voice audio quality and infinitely easier on-boarding and usage compared to Mumble. Most users, especially gamers who often have higher-spec machines then normal users, don't care about RAM usage. Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels. (EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
      • n3dm 6y ago
        I'm not arguing that the features/ease of use is the reason why its doing well. All of those features are unmatched for average consumers that don't care about their privacy which is their customer/product base. I didn't say anything about the features you mentioned and was talking about voice chat only. >Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system. I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
• ggoo 6y ago
  I was not aware that discord had won.
• paxys 6y ago
  It's a bit premature to declare Discord a winner or loser. Let's at least wait till it stops relying on VC funding to operate.
  • Vishnevskiy 6y ago
    Who says we require it now ;)
    • wferrell 6y ago
      Says the founder of Discord :)
      • frakkingcylons 6y ago
        You're replying to the CTO and co-founder of Discord.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • est31 6y ago
    It's a winner for the early investors. A winner for later stage investors including the IPO ones? Who knows. People love moving from one social platform to another. Discord might just disappear in a few years just like ICQ disappeared.
  • karmakaze 6y ago
    That's a title tweak, even as "Why Discord is Winning" would be the same interesting content.
  • saalweachter 6y ago
    I don't know about everyone else, but I also seem to be moving to different chat ecosystems every two or three years. From Campfire to Hangouts to Slack to Discord. I miss IRC.
    • 6y ago
• blibble 6y ago
  xfire won too unless it stays private: at some point it'll be loaded full of ads and then their fickle audience will move onto the next thing
  • athorax 6y ago
    Ah, man. I had totally forgotten about xfire. Used it a ton back in vanilla wow and CS 1.6/source days. RIP
• brink 6y ago
  Discord is what social media should have been - a nice place to hang out online without the vanity. Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
• jjice 6y ago
  Discord really is a high quality service. I remember a friend of mine in either late 2015 or early 2016 told us to give it a shot instead of Skype. This is the same friend that tried to get us to use Mumble and Teamspeak in the past, but we were dissatisfied with the audio quality. We gave it a shot and never went back. Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord. If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
  • judge2020 6y ago
    Matterbridge[0] is also a good solution for backing up your text chats to a service of your choosing. 0: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
  • n3dm 6y ago
    >Discord really is a high quality service. -Lots of server downtime -Obnoxious amount of system resource use -Crashing -Bugs -Forced updates -Privacy concerns. (Scans your open processes, etc) Some of us can agree to disagree.
    • TameAntelope 6y ago
      I have literally zero of those issues, so I'm curious why our experiences are so far apart... From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
      • pessimizer 6y ago
        I've enjoyed using discord, but I also have all of these issues. You'd have to ask the software why it's nicer to you than us, and why it didn't by default exfiltrate the names of unrelated programs you had open.
• tehjoker 6y ago
  Man, I kept seeing the phrase 10x better and expected some quantification. It could be 2x better and get 10x the audience because it was sufficiently compelling.
• krm01 6y ago
  I’ve analyzed the interfaces of Discord and all other chat/community apps as part of research for the UI/UX work we do for clients [1] and from my perspective, the Interface seems to be a big part of the winning factor. It may be just one of the many reasons why Discord does so well, but it’s often overlooked. Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software. Their playful approach makes it fun to be there. Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure). [1] http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro
  • anchpop 6y ago
    Discord has so many features that make it feel like it was made by and for gamers. Like the "currently playing" statuses, or "streamer mode" that hides identifying info when you have OBS open. It also works better than anything else for large communities with its roles/notifications system. It has a good design but I don't see it as particularly playful, just really well executed
    • gverrilla 6y ago
      There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.
  • panorama 6y ago
    Yeah, Discord still impresses me with how clean the interface _feels_ to put it simply. I remember only being on the Discord web client for a long time and remarking how much I enjoyed the interactions despite not being a native app. Then I loaded up the console and was pleasantly surprised to see it was all built in React. I suddenly felt very insecure about my own skill with React :p
  • ma2rten 6y ago
    Can you be more specific? It seems to that Discord is very similar to slack.
• otras 6y ago
  Is Discord profitable? An estimated $120M sounds like a hefty chunk of change, but I wonder what their expenses look like, especially if they're relied heavily on VC money in the past to subsidize having the servers be free.
  • ivanagas 6y ago
    Probably not, they just raised another $100M in June. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-valuation-and-100m-for-a-sales-pitch-lighter-on-the-gaming/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
• varbhat 6y ago
  > How Discord Won Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
• bognition 6y ago
  My child uses discord to coordinate play across multiple platforms, Xbox, mobile, and switch. Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness. As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for. Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
  • electriclove 6y ago
    Are there different servers for her games? Is it with friends she made in person in the past or are these friends she made via these online communities?
    • bognition 6y ago
      Yes people she met IRL. I'm not ready for her to go fully out into the wild internet yet
  • golemiprague 6y ago
    I see the same thing with my kids, in some way it is the new basic, they do their first steps in setting up servers, bots and decorating which is very appealing for girls. Inadvertently I feel like discord is doing much more to attract girls to the field than a lot of other well meaning initiatives.
• adamnemecek 6y ago
  Discord is indeed the shit. Slack is too business oriented, it assumes that I'm a member of one workspace (my place of employment) as opposed to a member of a shit ton interest oriented channels. I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly. I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.
• CalChris 6y ago
  LLVM uses Discord as an alternative to IRC. Discord has a modern pleasant interface. Discord is to IRC as Uber/Lyft are to a taxi company phone number. It however has a weird copyright agreement for user’s content.
  • bregma 6y ago
    Discord is to IRC as AOL was to Usenet.
• ryanSrich 6y ago
  Discord has the best chat UI and experience of any similar tool. Slack is a close second, and Teams a distant third. If Slack can figure out their infrastructure issues, and undo many of the poor UX decisions from the past 12-18 months, they can beat teams. However, if Discord decides to move into the business world and offer a competitively priced product, I could see that doing very well. I honestly don't know why they'd do that, but a business version of Discord is very attractive to me at least.
  • tenryuu 6y ago
    I think there's a lot that could be done in regards to navigation around. Like it works, and it's clear it's inspired from the more mainline chatting interface that's been around for what feels like centuries. But any time I'm using the default client, if I'm not using hotkeys or ctrl+k to navigate across channels, there's just way too much clicking and scrolling. Not to mention you can only have one active chat buffer on display. There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
• Meph504 6y ago
  I really feel the author could have used the term "10x" a little bit more. And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
• branon 6y ago
  There's a lot to be said for low/nonexistent barrier to entry. But like any large platform, such success comes at a price. Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff. Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same). They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience. Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes. Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755
  • slymon99 6y ago
    Multi billion dollar does not mean revenue, it means valuation, which discord has well surpassed [0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-valuation-and-100m-for-a-sales-pitch-lighter-on-the-gaming/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
    • branon 6y ago
      Ah, thanks, that makes much more sense.
  • Kiro 6y ago
    Really unnecessary edit on an otherwise good comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
• bstar77 6y ago
  I've been trying to figure out if Discord is actually a competitor to Slack as I've never seen anyone use discord for anything but gaming. That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out. The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom. I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
  • rcurry 6y ago
    I can’t comment on Teams vs Slack, or on its other productivity features but I’ve been using Teams on a daily basis for some fairly large meetings and it’s never faltered - way more reliable than Skype was at least.
    • bstar77 6y ago
      My issue is more with how information is presented and data is stored. I think Teams just has too many ways to do things and obfuscates too much at times... finding old docs or old conversations can be tedious and sending messages to wrong "teams" mistakingly is an easy thing to do.
      • hnick 6y ago
        I can't even go fullscreen in a Teams meeting anymore after a "recent" (read: months and months ago) update. My small laptop has 1/4 of the screen taken by UI and taskbar, even in "focus" mode.
  • cyrialize 6y ago
• keb_ 6y ago
  I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do have a few nitpicks: > Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process. > Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow. To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server. > Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching. > Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly). How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
  • dylz 6y ago
    > Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure. The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA. For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
    • captainzidgel 6y ago
• the_only_law 6y ago
  How many other chat apps have support for custom emojis that can be used cross-server. Thats half the fun of nitro. On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
• minimalist 6y ago
  One thing I don't see mentioned is marketing. All of that investment allowed discord to purchase an obscene amount of advertisement. Heavy advertisement of a 'free' product targeted toward children seems like a prerequisite for adoption, but I'll admit that this take is as light on actual analysis as the parent blog post. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
  • Gaelan 6y ago
    > currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
    • minimalist 6y ago
      Try it out, I don't think there's any way now. And it's really easy to get completely locked out of your account if you connect from a low-reputation/datacenter IP, like through VPNs or Tor.
    • est31 6y ago
      IIRC discord also requires phone numbers when you connect through services like VPNs or TOR or something. Basically makes pseudonymity really hard. Also regularly I can't log into discord without first filing out a captcha and receiving an E-Mail from them even though my password is valid.
• cyrialize 6y ago
  Discord also has great communities that aren't just for gaming. Personally, I'm part of several discords that are for music, specific technology (thinkpads), etc. To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
• raiyu 6y ago
  Discord won because they found a unique purpose and focused all of their efforts on it while, making sure that all secondary features were also well crafted. What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life. Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary. Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand. However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
  • ivanagas 6y ago
    I agree. The core reason to switch for me (and I assume many others) was because the core features were better than competitors and it was free. On exposure outside main demographic: servers that are gaming adjacent like anime, content creators, and programming already see large numbers of members. A promising sign.
  • ryankrage77 6y ago
    I actually switched away from Discord to Mumble, for higher audio quality & lower latency.
    • Armisael16 6y ago
      Don’t they both use Opus? I use both regularly and the audio is identical to my ears (as opposed to pretty much everything else).
    • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      Funny thing is, I've seen a lot of people complain about Mumble's audio quality. But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years. As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
• ducaale 6y ago
  I really like how the WYSIWYG editor in discord is implemented. For example, if you try to write a block using backticks, that block will be highlighted and the backticks will not disappear. Meanwhile, I am still unable to how understand how slack's WYSIWYG works.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    WYSINWYG
• gorbypark 6y ago
  I really like Discord for coding related "servers". Just the ability to use three backtick (markdown) code blocks makes it amazing for sharing snippets. I'm active in about 10 different servers, none of them game related.
• mikenew 6y ago
  IMO one of the core innovations that Discord brought was the way voice works. There's no "calling" or any sort of "person A would like to talk to person B, person C may or may not be welcome" sort of thing. People just click on a voice channel and they're in. Other services have tried the same thing I guess (Hangouts did something kind of similar), but everything adds up to a completely different feeling around voice chat. It feels more like walking into a room with people hanging out than it does dialing someone's number and all the low-level anxiety that goes along with it.
  • ve55 6y ago
    Do keep in mind with Discord's original market (gamers), a lot of existing software worked just like that, including teamspeak and ventrilo.
  • bhauer 6y ago
    But that wasn't an innovation. Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, they all work that way.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      The innovation was building something that anyone would use or even incidentally use. Like you're already in a Discord server to talk about something, and all of those people have global voice chats that they can drop in and out of even just out of curiosity. It's a powerful (and essential) community-building fundamental. Polar opposite of Ventrilo. Discord is the community, not some chat widget on the side. Kind of like a modern MMORPG vs a MUD's `telnet 107.141.162.82 4500` to point out that World of Warcraft didn't innovate much because you're still just connecting to a server. For some reason people always make the mistake of thinking that "a UX/experience that the mainstream will use/love" isn't hard nor innovation. In fact, it's the engineering that's the easy part.
      • daptaq 6y ago
        I've never used Ventrilo, but it sounds just like Mumble.
• dualboot 6y ago
  Discord wins in a lot of ways. A few that jump out to me as important are : * Cross-Platform - You can reliably stay up-to-date on discord from basically every device you own with reliable notifications * Excellent group voice chat quality and controls - Every user can control the volume for each chat participant(You control your own mix.) This is something Teams doesn't have and god I wish it did... * It's Slack for friends. Discord basically does everything Slack does (rich-media real time chat with a specific group of contacts.) It's far easier to crank out a new discord for your friends and you don't get slammed with the "Free Organization" restrictions that come with Slack. There are lots of things it does right, but these were major selling points for me.
  • ivanagas 6y ago
    Good points. Didn't think of cross-platform.
    • dualboot 6y ago
      It's a big factor. Discord is essentially a "better" iMessage for my immediate family.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    > Excellent group voice chat quality and controls Discord is still miles behind Ventrillo for this. There are still participants on every server I've been on who can't be heard at 100% boost on my end. On vent, I could just set up a compression/normalization chain and never have to worry about any participant being too soft or too loud ever again. Maybe sound plugin chains are an advanced feature, but I really, really wish it was offered in Discord.
    • dualboot 6y ago
      I'm all for more functionality!
    • viro 6y ago
      yea that would be considered an advanced feature.
• dvt 6y ago
  > Discord is a successful company. I'm bearish on Discord (as I was last year). Discord didn't win, it's burning money and nitro is (currently) not saving them -- just how their previous attempt at monetization (the store) didn't either. Alternative narratives won't make this fact true. People seem to conveniently forget about XFire, and the many other "gaming chat apps" that preceded it. Why Discord appears to have won is because it's free. We'll see what happens when the money dries up.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I've been thinking of using Discord for the NPO project I'm working on. I am not a huge fan of Slack.
• joshfraser 6y ago
  Origin was one of the earlier companies to switch to using Discord as an alternative to Slack. As a blockchain company, we wanted a place where our team could collaborate & interact with our community at the same time. We found Discord to be far better designed for large communities of people that don't really know or trust each other. We made the switch back in 2018. Today, most crypto companies are using Discord. Honestly, it's a great product for anyone who is fed up paying for Slack. I can't imagine ever switching back. Our story on why we switched from Slack: https://medium.com/originprotocol/moving-from-slack-to-discord-1dd2c939b77b https://medium.com/originprotocol/moving-from-slack-to-disco...
• grishka 6y ago
  I've never liked neither Discord nor Slack. Besides them being Electron apps that throw every single system UI idiom out the window and behave like they're something else, they are just too easy to misuse and suck tremendously if they aren't something you use every day but only check occasionally. One thing that I don't like in Discord in particular is that if you haven't launched it for a month, you're in for a bad time. First, it's going to update like 7 times. Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it. Also message replies are about as awkward as one could've made them.
  • MaulingMonkey 6y ago
    > First, it's going to update like 7 times. I just use the website versions. No installs, no updates. Also means no global keybinds for voice chat, no automatic "currently playing ...", and no electron-specific XSS bugs - but that's fine by me. > Then, everything has a red badge on it. EVERYTHING. It's absolutely impossible to navigate through this mess of useless "server announcements" and other crap with @all in it. The per-server notification settings in Discord can let you mute these. The defaults are admittedly annoyingly permissive, resulting in a repeat annoyance that will eventually crop up every time I join a new server.
• Foxboron 6y ago
  No, it's existed for 5 years. It has consolidated larger parts of the Skype/Teamspeak/Mumble users but VC has swallowed discord whole before it meaningfully replaces old FOSS communities. The future is probably (still) going to be IRC with Matrix somewhere for federation, while discord users has moved over to the next competitor.
• jjcm 6y ago
  I’m truly amazed at how well discord got down their invite-to-server flow. It’s honestly the best I’ve seen. I get annoyed when I have to join a separate slack org, but joining a discord server has practically no barrier at all. It means that setting up individual servers per person is totally viable. Joining someone’s server feels like going over to their house to hang out.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    It's also truly amazing how bad Slack messed their server joining flow. Not sure it's different now, but back when I was joining Slack servers everyone was using a free-tier Heroku app to host a textfield that would send you an email. A server joining flow so bad that people have to host another server just to let people join it.
• progval 6y ago
  > Discord requires nearly no setup. Starting a server on Discord takes two clicks. Creating channels is two clicks. It works instantly and all the time. What? I just tried, and it took about 4 recaptcha challenges just to create an account, 12 clicks (excluding the clicks on recaptcha challenges), and 4 more clicks to create the server
  • colesantiago 6y ago
    Compared to IRC, where do I start?
    • progval 6y ago
      For example, https://webchat.freenode.net/ https://webchat.freenode.net/ One click + a captcha
      • colesantiago 6y ago
        Right, but now my username gets taken and I don't get any notifications or can send images on this service??? Any big service will require multiple security checks, after you sign up to Discord, you can login with a QR code on a new device. No captchas. and get the above for free. It is going to be a mission to get a bunch of friends to use this 'Freenode' service.
• ve55 6y ago
  I've been becoming increasingly concerned that Discord is winning a little too much, and will basically end up becoming the Facebook of the next generation if things go right for them. Right now they're still in the fun phase - they've built a product that users love, have extreme growth, have a lot of money to spend, and are agile and young. Generally the fun phase of a consumer-facing social company does not last forever though, and I'm not looking forward to the phases that often seem to follow. We can look at anything from Reddit to Youtube to Facebook to see the types of issues that lead social products to become increasingly user-hostile over time, and I'm not confident that Discord can avoid the pitfalls that have led to the decline in quality of most similar products. The issues that often lead to the increase in user-hostility have many different causes and manifestations, but they often start with an increase in monetization, often with vast troves of user data, of which Discord is obviously not lacking in. As the platform grows and controls the social lives of hundreds of millions, there becomes increased demands for censorship, not just of political and ideological nature, but also for the purposes of copyright and IP, and the from multitude of governments that they must work with (obviously including, but not limited to the US). Discord already has very strong network and gate-keeping effects in many communities, and social ostracization is faced by users that contemplate not using it; losing network effects once you have them is generally not very easy, so it will likely be the dominant player in its area for a long time. I don't want to just sit here and spread negativity about potential issues, but seeing an entire generation of people use yet-another-social-product, it does have me concerned from time to time. I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies sitting in between users, reading and storing their logs, every click they make, and gate-keeping access to begin with. We've seen some of the places this can lead, and many of them aren't very pretty. Regardless, Discord has made a great product that strongly beats its present and past competitors (which is what I'd add to the full article above - competitors like Skype were really bad! From excessive ads to laggy calling to leaking user IPs, which it still does), and for that I'm grateful that there's such a better software alternative for communities and friends to get together with. But I would definitely love to see pro-active work and assurances from Discord that help to convince me that they will be a unique force of Good in the consumer social space rather than regress to the mean that we see exists today.
  • 6y ago
• chmod775 6y ago
  > It is easy to switch to Discord. Inviting people is two clicks and a paste. Joining a server (once you have an account) is two clicks. This is kind of missing an elephant in the room. Because even creating an account on discord after clicking a "join server" link only requires you to put in an username. No pointless e-mail requirement, not even a password, no nothing. Put in an username and you're good to go. This might look particularly weird to some of the HN community who are fond of optimizing the conversion rate of their pointless landing page -> sign up flow and like to subscribe people to mailing lists that 97% of their users will find fucking annoying. I've been doing a similar thing to discord on a site I run where users don't even have to choose a name. They get a randomly assigned name which they can change later if they want. A new user needs to perform 0 clicks to begin using the product. This was especially helpful in the beginning, because the first few people who stumbled upon the site immediately became users and started interacting with each other. By adding stupid landing pages, sign up flows, analytics (which then requires me to get permission from my users), and whatnot the site probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground half as fast.
  • jscheel 6y ago
    100x this. It's so annoying to join a slack channel. Discord feels much more free-flowing, like IRC (yes, yes, I know).
    • trophycase 6y ago
      Slack also makes no sense. I need a different login for different channels?
      • Nuzzerino 6y ago
        The upside of doing this way for Slack is that it's one way to not expose your account ID to every member in every channel you're in, the way that Discord does. Better for privacy compliance.
        • reportgunner 6y ago
• snarkypixel 6y ago
  imho Slack screw themselves by not making it nice for larger communities (I.e. how they fucked over the react community). They put themselves in a "Work only" corner which is being taken over by Microsoft Team, etc. RIP Slack
• pippy 6y ago
  It's a shame that the old guard refused to modernize. Talk to IRC or Jabber fans and they despise basic things like emojis, let alone important things like preserving offline messages and ease of access. There are hills to die on, and they died on too many hills.
  • anthk 6y ago
    > Jabber fans and they despise basic things like emojis We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school. > let alone important things like preserving offline messages Jabber is federated, that's up to the service or client. Also, Jabber is extensible, it could be implemented in a breeze.
    • oblio 6y ago
      > We had those for sure before you ever have been in a school. He's not wrong though. The average IRC user, especially, hates emojis.
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        Though I think the reason you never see emojis on IRC is just a reminder that nobody uses IRC from their phone, that's how screwed IRC is.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• didibus 6y ago
  I don't really get it? Discord kind of won in being the only one offering that type of product. IRC, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo and Skype are operating in a very different space. Mumble is a small open source project. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are old school desktop apps, I believe both are a one man project. IRC is an open source communication protocol. Skype was just a VOIP app. The truer competitors to discord would have been the Twitch App, and maybe Steam itself and Microsoft Xbox on PC. But still, I'll just contend Discord is a social media platform tailored to gamers with an emphasis on voice chat. And that was just a unique product that had not been done before. It appeared at the right time, since technology, broadband, and gamers owning good quality mics and competitive online gaming growing all made it possible. I feel the article should have focused more on how Discord succeeded, and less on how it won, since I don't really see who it competes with. If you try to have it compete against Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagam it definitely didn't win. If you try to have it compete against Slack, Teams, RocketChat, Chanty, Mattermort, it also didn't win, since it has no paid footing in the enterprise world.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I think Discord (and Slack and similar) is best understood as a community platform rather than the things we are tempted to compare it to, because it's not just chat (IRC), it's not just voice chat (Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype), it's a fuller community building experience that helps you meet and stay in touch with other people inside the same org/interest. And I think this is something HN commentary consistently misses. As an example, IRC isn't a community building tool. It doesn't have offline async notifications/messaging, for one. It misses these tools that helps you develop relationships. It's just ephemeral chat (for better or worse). That's why it doesn't matter if Discord isn't perfect. People want to form relationships, not just chat, not just post.
• jaequery 6y ago
  I don’t think they won, it feels kind of like they are holding on to a torch for some time before something else eventually passes by them. I run a discord channel and there are several inherent flaws that make me want to move over to Slack or something better. No threaded replies, no voice message, confusing Direct Messages, confusing screen share, etc, let alone the I am Playing video game status updates makes it unsuitable for other than gamers imo. I can say though they did an amazing job with the bots system and customization of ranks and channels. It feels like a matter of time someone combines the best of Slack, Discord, and IRC ...
• mrkramer 6y ago
  Discord won because Skype couldn't keep up with ever growing gaming community and their demands and it wasn't specialized for gamers at the first place. Modern gaming is very specialized and you need a software to game efficiently with other people(communicate, coordinate, inform, message etc.) I'm not sure how Slack is related to Discord but they seem the same for me UI wise. I always wondered why Slack didn't purchase Discord and turn it into their gaming division. Before Discord you as a gamer could either use clunky Skype or something like outdated Ventrilo.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  Slight anecdote: on a DIY server, I see a job ad for devs, I sell myself to that person and soon I get invited to a room. It's about making a discord game, turns out my almost new boss is a 13yo boy with business envy. Was highly surprised.
• mordymoop 6y ago
  I can “handle” Twitter, Facebook, etc. These services are part of my life, contained, separate. I cannot “handle” Discord. Discord is far worse for me. By default, the interface bombards me with either notifications or “soft” notifications that change the color of channels to make you wonder what’s going on in there. I’ve come to loathe it. I recently quit Discord, despite the fact that I run a Discord community of several hundred people. Basically just abandoned it. It was killing me. Twitter is like a pleasant minor distraction compared to this quagmire.
  • TameAntelope 6y ago
    You can make it completely impossible for a server (or people) to notify you in any way whatsoever through settings. That's one of the positive features that keeps streamers and communities using it -- you can't bother people who don't want to be bothered.
  • BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
    Couldn't you just stick to Discord on mobile and only open it when a notif comes? That way you don't see any changes in the icon, like on desktop. Plus, the notification settings in general are pretty flexible, one of the few things I genuinely like about Discord.
  • saluk 6y ago
    Mute everything. I solves most of these issues.
• mdoms 6y ago
  They haven't won yet. They were on a really strong path early on but the app is bloating itself into oblivion.
• tehwebguy 6y ago
  or it's because they focused on a niche market that actually like to use computers
• umaar 6y ago
  I've always struggled to log into Discord. 1. Try to log onto a channel, but get presented with a "We've detected something out of the ordinary going on. To continue using Discord" where my only option is to verify by phone, which I don't want to do. 2. Occasionally, I'll figure it's worth a try in incognito. I get a step further, only to read "New login location detected, please check your e-mail.". Go back to non-incognito, check email, open the verify link in an incognito window. 3. Instead of finally signing me in, it says "IP address authorized" and "If you followed this link after trying to login on the desktop or mobile app, please go back and try again.". 4. Fair enough, time to log in, again. Submit credentials, get presented with the bizzarely slow fade-in recaptchas. Fail twice, succeed on the third time. Horray! I can see the channel! 5. Finally try those other organisations invite links (in the form of discord.com/invite/org), but get "This invite may be expired, or you might not have permission to join.".
  • smileybarry 6y ago
    That sounds like your originating IP is linked to abuse, like accounts banned for ToS or botting. Slow-fade, harder captchas are another symptom of that (and could indicate Google/whatever-captcha-they-use also don't trust your IP). Is this over a VPN, Tor, or residential IP?
    • stjohnswarts 6y ago
      They are using an antiquated security and require capchas for VPN users. It's kind of lame. The IP ban should be removed after a day for abuse. It's an ignorant "security measure" and annoyance to users who also value a bit of privacy.
    • ev1 6y ago
      If you enable fingerprinting resistance/block their attempts to run a significant amount of privacy-violating JS, you risk permanent account lockouts. This includes non-VPN. You can get account lockouts for "suspicious" on standard, non-VPN IPs, without any recaptcha weirdness. They may also ask for ID or birthday or phone at any time. This is not something I want in a casual chat app.
  • 6y ago
• jariel 6y ago
  This articles sorely misses the point of target demographics and use cases. I don't like Skype, but still use it pervasively for basic business communications. My aging parents use all sorts of technology, even with their grandkids, and Discord is not on the list. 'Gaming' is a very key, central social aspect to Discord and I'm doubtful that it would exist to such a degree of popularity without it. Also - despite the fact that it is, indeed quite good ... it's also complicated.
• lebaux 6y ago
  I recommend reading https://www.swyx.io/slack-fumble https://www.swyx.io/slack-fumble We are devs or small SEO plugin for WordPress and we use discord for all our comms, despite the fact w.org is using slack. And that they will move to matrix. Because they invested in it.
  • swyx 6y ago
    thanks for the shoutout!
• ajuc 6y ago
  I started using dicord to play D&D online. It's great for that. Then I persuaded our team at work to switch from skype/hangouts/slack to discord. It just work much better, has less connection problems, uses no transfer when you're not talking, filters noise better, allows to change volume level per user, has infinite history on text chat. There's no competition.
• EamonnMR 6y ago
  Discord wins because it allows you, the member of an existing community to set up a new subset of that community over which you have power. For a while I thought discord was paying people to create communities for everything but then I realized, they don't need to; the joy of being in charge is enough.
  • Nuzzerino 6y ago
    Are you really in charge though? Discord has deleted servers over political speech. It sounds nice and agreeable and all when you're calling them out for being "Nazis", but the fact is that there's no due process or chance of a fair appeal if you're arbitrarily labelled as one of these "Nazis". You have the illusion of being in charge but are ultimately a feudal serf. Anyone actively and freely communicating on an actual independent platform is instead seen as a liability to the public because there's no implied threat or leverage over their community. https://blog.discord.com/our-stand-on-racial-equality-320088e83a22 https://blog.discord.com/our-stand-on-racial-equality-320088...
    • EamonnMR 6y ago
      Actual control is irrelevant; it's the feeling of control and the ability to excercise control on others that is the bribe. That said, I think that most people will never run afowl of the above rules so it's not like they'd notice.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  As much as they have made a really good app, it's chat. The moment discord starts becoming expensive , people will switch to mattermost or zulip or ircV3 by that time (ps or matrix). The privacy issues are real and the moat to exit is shallow. We already switched our community to mattermost because , discord doesnt seem sustainable for long term, and we also have control that can't be taken away. It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.
  • wsowens 6y ago
    > It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so. Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      Yes of course, Matrix too. In fact i am waiting for them to make it easy to integrate existing user base to switch to them. Matrix will probably be the ultimate replacement to discord, because it lends itself naturally to the case of a medium sized game-based community.
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    Privacy issues don't outweigh convenience and familiarity, and are provably not a barrier to massive scale and longevity (see every large social network with 1B+ users). I don't think you appreciate how convenient the single-account, cross server approach is. Discord has made its way across a ton of communities and likely will continue to do so. It held up to scale and scrutiny especially in early covid times. The problem with basic protocols is they are inherently very slow to develop and iterate, so problems stick around for a long time. UX can vary widely across different clients for the protocol. SMS has had huge longevity and will stick around for a good while longer, but I don't think anyone is arguing that SMS is actually better than the internet based closed systems that exist today.
• CM30 6y ago
  Part of me wonders if another thing that helped Discord do well was the fact the communities on it were invite only and private by default. Yeah, I don't like this walled garden aspect of most sites either. But let me explain: Basically, on sites like Reddit, if a community gets controversial, it almost certainly will get media attention, and potentially get banned or censored because of that. Similarly, if someone says something controversial on Twitter, that could mean losing their job or what not too. That can't happen as easily on Discord, since you need the invite link to join, and can more easily keep out snooping journalists, moral guardians, etc.
• lmedinas 6y ago
  privacy issues/concerns aside i think Discord is great. Mobile and multi-platform Desktop apps works the same way, it has modern features and integrations. In fact it seems to have killed IRC for many, which is kinda sad. Most of the IRC networks i use are mostly dead now. For me Discord has replaced TS and IRC.
• abrowne2 6y ago
  Discord is an order of magnitude better. It challenged the rigid voice chat where text chat was a secondhand feature, where voip was unreliable, and where a sense of community was lacking. It cultivated all of that. Now you see streamers, gamers, and groups of friends making Discords for their communities.
• tester756 6y ago
  * "serverless" aka no IP grabbing and doxx * voice + chat (with emojis, images, videos) + easy desktop sharing that's all I guess, no other software did offer that. Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble and so on.
  • Nuzzerino 6y ago
    If I had to choose between exposing my IP, and exposing my user account ID, user account name, and profile photo (that I've used on literally every other Discord community), I'd go with the former. At least in the case of the former, you can fix that with a VPN. If you use a VPN with Discord on the other hand, they're more likely to disable your account for phone-number verification.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      I prefer the option that people actually want to use so that communities can thrive. This is a requirement for a chat community that is easy to overlook in favor of other advantages, but those advantages aren't very compelling when you, say, are sitting alone in a dying IRC server.
      • Nuzzerino 6y ago
        Obviously I was implying all other things being equal.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
  • nickysielicki 6y ago
    > * "serverless" aka no IP grabbing and doxx So long as you don't join a voice channel, right? As I understand it all the voice and video is webrtc, so p2p.
• quwert95 6y ago
  Discord has not yet "won" for me. Until I can host it myself, use my own certificates, and control the server bitrate and logs I won't use it. For now, Mumble serves all my needs and works great. It is by far the lightest and fastest voice system out there right now.
  • daptaq 6y ago
    All it needs is a more intelligent setup-system, and possibly a (better) web version.
• irrational 6y ago
  I’ve never used Discord. What is it? What other things is it similar to?
  • yborg 6y ago
    Slack for gamers.
• jeffchien 6y ago
  Anecdata/opinion from me: Discord's infinite chat history and search [note 1] is a winning feature for me, and it's frustrating for me that other services I still use don't have that. For example, FB's Messenger app still doesn't have message search, even though the desktop version does. Why?! [Note 1] However, Discord's message search seems to be quite finicky when it comes to searching links. For example, if someone posts a link with "www.twitter.com/user", it wouldn't show up with a "twitter.com/user" search, but it would show up for "twitter.com" or "www.twitter.com/user". Room for improvement.
  • anuila 6y ago
    Facebook Messenger app does certainly have message search both global and for each user, at least on iOS.
  • ivanagas 6y ago
    My Messenger app has message search, although it is hidden. Conversation -> info button in top right -> "Search in conversation."
• lsiebert 6y ago
  Discord doesn't let you thread conversations, and I hate that. If you want to have a related conversation that is accessible to other users but not immediately visible, you have to create a channel. The feature request has been made... in fact it's been made multiple times and been deleted at least once https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360031743291-Message-Threads https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600317... Slack handles this well, even at the free tier, with threads having a separate type of notification. In fact I'm on two communities that use slack... the limits on free slack (10,000 messages mainly) can be a feature for communities, hiding past messages. I'd gladly pay for threads in discord. It gets even worse with private channels. Want to discuss something between three folks on a discord server that don't have a shared role without adding another channel to someone's list? As it stands, this requires knowing someone's username on discord (not what they are called on the server) to add permissions then navigating to edit a channel's permissions, and setting two permissions for each discord user name so they can read and writ. Alternatively, you can do it with the creation of a new role and channel and adding that role to folks, which is annoying if you use roles for communicating anything other than permission levels. And that's if you have the permissions to do that. On Slack you can let anybody thread a conversation. It's annoying, even as as discord owner. I've been contemplating writing a bot to handle it, but frankly it should be built in. And so should message threads.
  • NocturnalWaffle 6y ago
    Someone posted in Discord some thread testing they were doing. The developers responded that they are testing, but it's not being committed to yet. https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/hzobo2/threads_are_being_tested/fzkl2hj/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/hzobo2/threads_...
• anderspitman 6y ago
  Has anyone had luck replacing Slack with Discord? Threads are the major obviously missing feature for me at this point, but I think I might gladly trade that to get a sane Markdown editor back, which Discord has. Also our team doesn't currently pay for Slack (small academic lab), so all our old message history is being held hostage, which has been a bit annoying.
• bytematic 6y ago
  They won because it was free to make servers. All the other competitors you had to purchase from some hosting solution or run it on a server, not a lot of gamers can do this
• Animats 6y ago
  Here are 14 popular servers accounting for nearly $250,000 in revenue per year. So where's the big revenue?
• holtalanm 6y ago
  really love seeing news about Discord being successful. It is a product I use daily, and rarely have issues. their tech blogs have been pretty cool to read, talking about the various problems of scale they have had while leveraging the BEAM vm. I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages.
  • Nuzzerino 6y ago
    >I'll be honest that one of the things I find most interesting is that Discord is probably the most well-known company in the world whose core technology is built with Elixir, which is still one of my favorite programming languages. I remember looking through their engineering job postings once recently, and not one of them mentioned Elixir, making me wonder how much they are really committed to it.
    • jhgg 6y ago
      We don't have an open req for our chat infra team right now which heavily uses Elixir. We are quite committed to Elixir, actually, we were interviewed by José Valim about how we use Elixir :) https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Discord won because the competition sucked. What are the alternatives? Let's break it down: XMPP - Stuck in the past, lacks modern basic features like "If I leave my laptop open and receive a message, it doesn't disappear into the ether and I can still read it on my phone". And if you do manage to configure it to match modern messaging services, you just spent hours in config-file land, which 99% of users aren't interested in attempting. Hipchat, Slack - So now at work, when you present in meetings, and show your Slack window, everyone will see that you're in "Dave's Sexy Game Server" as well as BigSeriousCorp? No thanks. Google Hangouts - In typical Google fashion, they've taken the perpetual-MVP approach to this product. Somewhere, someone inside Google is arguing that removing chat functionality from their chat platform is the best way to simplify the product and cut costs. Oh okay. I'll describe it. It's a 200px by 200px window of sadness with no searchable chat history. Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger - Mobile-first experiences. Forums (PhpBB etc.) - Better for offline communication, mobile sucks, hard to keep track of new messages to conversations.
  • the_jeremy 6y ago
    I don't think any of those were alternatives for gaming, which is what it was (still is?) marketed for. If you wanted to play a game and do voice chat with a group of friends, TeamSpeak, Discord, and Mumble were the only options that were group-first (easier to do lobbies than single-person calls). Discord's UI is 2 decades ahead of Mumble / TS, and it's free.
    • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      The gaming alternatives were mumble and teamspeak which also sucked. Its no wonder discord took off when all of the competition sucked.
  • fomine3 6y ago
    IIRC Hangouts chats are searchable from Gmail. It works well like Gmail.
    • jeltz 6y ago
• esfandia 6y ago
  Is it reasonable to consider using Discord as an online forum for residents of a condo building? I'm looking for something cheap/free, easy to use and to set up.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Yes, as long as people would actually install it and care to use that medium at all. Like I think everyone my age (30s) would do it, but I know my parents wouldn't. But as an easy social/community tool for a small group when you want something more than just a WhatsApp group, it's great. The downside is that it's just chat and thus any important info being discussed can be hard to link, find, and centralize. I'm part of some organizations that handle this by having a Facebook group as a lightweight forum and landing page of the organization along with the Discord for more hangout and meet each other vibes.
• daptaq 6y ago
  If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I am resentful of Discord. I hate that it exists, I hate that it is used, and most of all I hate that it is popular. It's irrational hatred (I think distate is legitamate), but I can't deny it. I don't know if it's my general aversion to gamer culture, or the fact that it's an electron application, or that it just came out of nowhere, and suddenly was everywhere. I decide not to use it, but still feel left out. I'm glad and sad. I go out of my way to ensure that my contacts don't use Discord. At the begining of the pandemic, my friends wanted to use it (the TeamSpeak server we used to use was full), but it didn't work on my end, AFAIK because of strict browser policies. Luckly we swiched to mumble, and it works great. The effort to configure it at first it greater, and the defaults can be improved, but I'm far happier this way, without being sucked into another horrible service.
  • Nuzzerino 6y ago
    I feel similarly but for different reasons. It effectively killed forums, and the context-switch-heavy UX design enables more people to do drive-by, low-quality posting, rather than more deliberate and thought out discourse. Gaming culture has been severely downgraded as a result.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Though forums were of course dying before Discord came around, probably mainly because mainstream users aren't going to register for a bunch of different forums. So a centralized forum like Reddit had the advantage of people not needing to be enough of an <interest> fanatic to join <Interest>Forum.com but enough to want to poke around on r/<interest> from time to time. So r/<interest> is going to have an advantage over the forum. And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online. And I don't think Discord is as competitive with forums as you think. My forum has a Discord. Yeah, people hang out on it, and now it's an essential part of the community. A lot of our casual conversations and friend-making is just shooting the shit which forums are awful at. But now I see my users engaging each other on more and more personal levels and getting to know each other. But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse. I think it's much better now because it went mainstream. When I was growing up, being a "gamer" still had that loser virgin stereotype. Now I see my friend's 13yo son in Discord voice chats when I'm hanging out at their place and you hear a healthy assortment of even women gamers. Seems so so much better than when I was 13yo. Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands. There are always things that change for the worse in these kinds of shifts, but it's also important to understand the upsides.
• iEchoic 6y ago
  To add a competitive perspective: I'm the founder of Guilded, which is (afaik) the only VC-funded startup in direct competition with Discord. Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why? In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it. Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers. My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime). If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way. Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_vs_guilded_a_quick_thoughtopen_discussion/g8ey936 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...
  • xmprt 6y ago
    You're entirely correct about Discord but it will be difficult to switch over completely unless you make it almost a drop in replacement for discord (eg. supporting discord bots). I can imagine moving over some of the small servers with just a few friends but getting bigger communities to switch is a hard problem and unless you do that, almost everyone will still have a reason to stay on discord.
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
• rsuelzer 6y ago
  The biggest thing missing from discord right now is the ability to upload videos. I understand you can pay to upgrade to be able to do this, but my friends and I switched to discord from hangouts, and not being able to upload funny videos is a bummer.
• Nuzzerino 6y ago
  I guess I'll be the one to say it. Discord has a serious privacy problem. And I'm not talking about the potential eavesdropping by the company on your private messages. Your username, user ID, profile photo, mutual friends, and mutual servers are always visible to anyone. Something you said years ago could potentially come back to screw you over at any time. Changing your username does not help, as the messages you posted back then will be displayed under your new username. Want to start a serious game project as a developer? That clan you posted drunk messages in 5 years ago might still have someone in it who can then use those messages against you, for little or no reason at all. Gaming communities can be savage. Sure, you can make a brand new account, but that's easier said than done, because: 1) You can't be logged into two accounts at the same time on the desktop. You must use different browser profiles or a similar sandboxing method. Definitely out of the question for mobile. 2) No way to transfer your old servers, friends, roles, etc, to a new account. 3) Making a new account isn't always a reasonable option even if you are willing to lose all of your old data. Moving from one role to another to another in a gaming career often is done gradually through connections and community (but that doesn't imply you should have to be forced to expose your system username and user id to everyone everywhere). 4) Even if you do make a new account, that new account might get disabled automatically until you provide a phone number. Throwaway numbers don't work.
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    There are dozens of mod related issues I've found with discord that seem simple but just haven't been implemented. A lot of people on discord forums voiced their dissatisfaction as well. The moment I stopped being a mod though these problems seemed void to me.
• spoiler 6y ago
  This article is clickbait, and it's full of... Nonsense? I like Discord as software and I like them as a company, but a lot of what's beining attributed to Discord isn't true here. Firstly: won what? Discord was born _years_ (over a decade for some) after some of the "competitors" mentioned became defunct, while others are still thriwing, and is built on top of the foundations and groundwork laid by that same competition. For casual or small parties, Discord is great. For large scale multi-squad coordination Discord is the worst out of all the competition (priority speaker feature does not solve this on its own).
• egypturnash 6y ago
  > It is easy to switch to Discord. Inviting people is two clicks and a paste. Joining a server (once you have an account) is two clicks. It is so simple you don’t even think about it. ...and then you have to delete that account because you're not logged in on the browser, and log in to the main site with your browser, and click on the invite link again I think there is a "get verification link in email" step somewhere in there for me too, it's always a major pain in the ass to accept an invite for me and I kind of dread getting discord invites because of this.
• flxy 6y ago
  I remember when I first heard of discord back in 2015 before it became the huge thing it is these days. It seemed like a cool idea and reminded me of IRC, which I still used then, + voice chat if you needed it. Back then I had trouble getting my gaming friends on board as communication was split between Skype, Steam, TeamSpeak, the odd Mumble server, some IRC, etc. When people finally joined in and you were able to talk to most of them in one place, either via text or voice, it was great and made things a lot easier. Nowadays though, I'm kind of weary of it. Their struggles to find a proper way of monetization makes me feel a bit uneasy at times to be quite honest. I would prefer to have a way to talk to my friends on a service that is either self-hosted, such as Matrix, or at least a little more transparent and trustworthy. But now it very hard to get people away from it and even if, it would probably create split groups again which would be a step backwards. They certainly did fill a niche of easy community building in a time when you would either have to set something up yourself, i.e. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, or rely on arguably worse services such as Skype. I guess it also helped that they looked towards Slack for some inspiration in a way. But there's still the issue that any of the open-source alternatives are arguable worse to this day, so a lot of people are stuck with it, sadly.
• alphachloride 6y ago
  As someone who has never paid for cosmetic or superficial features for a service (chat, games, websites etc), I am grateful for people who do.
• baxtr 6y ago
  > Discord won the competition for the gaming chat platform of choice, and now it wants to be the platform for all internet communities. This means they will be competing with the “big dogs” like Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Epic. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep their edge once they expand into other areas
• markshepard 6y ago
  From a competitor perspective, Discord is a great product. There is no question about it. But the UI/UX and lingo is heavily optimized for gaming communities. Discord's UX/UI can be disorienting and complex for professional communities. With AirSend, We are targeting the professional niche with clean and simple UX (https://www.airsend.io/build-community https://www.airsend.io/build-community). While Discord is trying to cross over to other communities, there is a good possibility that it will alienate their original supporters and make the system more complex overall. For Discord, there is definitely a multi-billion dollar opportunity in just gaming itself.
• emerged 6y ago
  What's fascinating to me is that I've been a developer for more than 20 years and have never used Discord. It's very popular obviously, but how have I managed not to be sucked in? I haven't made any effort to avoid it.
  • kakkan 6y ago
    I guess if you're in a crowd that is into gaming and gen-z culture, you'd get sucked in in no time. Most of the time, how I ended up joining discord communities was while searching for something like "Community for X" or while going through a subreddit and they had a Discord channel. But most often, you only stay if you have friends who are active on there and uses the voice chat feature frequently.
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• _peeley 6y ago
  One of the few things I find to be an unrelenting pain in the ass about Discord as an unfamiliar user is account management - is my account tied to the server I've joined? Is it tied to my email? If I click a link to join a server and set a username, how do I link that with my existing account? If I set my username/profile picture on one server, does it change across all the servers I've joined? As a college student that's constantly told to join Discord servers for every class/club/friend group, it's so annoying for this not to work intuitively, and the Discord documentation isn't too helpful either. I think I must have joined about 6 different servers across 3 different email addresses by now just because of how obtuse it is.
• russellbeattie 6y ago
  So much overanalysis. Discord "won" this round of social musical chairs because of pure luck, just like AIM and MySpace and Friendster and Facebook and Snap and Tiktok, etc. In a few years, its users will be "old" and then the next generation will flock to some other "cool" service. You can't control, nor predict, nor copy anything about this sort of service. It either gains traction, for whatever reason, or it doesn't. Once it does, network effects take over and growth is exponential. Analyze Discord to death, it won't give you any clue how to duplicate it.
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  Discord: the app I am proud to have installed on my phone. Twitter/Reddit: the apps I feel forced to have on my phone.
• nuker 6y ago
  How does it compares to Disqus?
• dancemethis 6y ago
  there's no victory when the users lose. praising a proprietary platform like Discord is not quite a nice thing, at best. computers are more than mere quick abacuses, they define our lives. the amount of personal user data and metadata that crap gathers is quite frightening. user privacy loses bad with Discord. Being proprietary, who knows what else will be the best step in their malicious software. it's cute to think UX is everything, but not everyone laughs at each PRISM reveal.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  "Won" is a bad term. It implies that the game is over. Of course, it is not over. Yahoo "won". So did Skype, and MySpace, the list of internet tech companies/websites that " won" are probably longer than the number of sites that you visited today. The game is never over.
• LoSboccacc 6y ago
  something that is not underlined enough is that you're allowed to purchase Nitro for someone else channel you enjoy, via gifts. that removes a lot of friction, compared to, say, splitting a teamserver costs or putting a paypal donation button.
• kevsim 6y ago
  I'm a founder of a company making Jira/Trello competitor [0] and we actually just released a Discord integration this week (we've had a Slack one for ages) because we had a number of customers and potential customers ask for it. So a small N, but it does seem to be gaining in popularity inside companies, at least smaller ones. 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
• anilakar 6y ago
  There's something fishy with the sign-up UX, though. I constantly keep seeing new users accidentally creating two accounts (the record being four!) when they join a server for the first time.
  • szhu 6y ago
    I've seen this happen quite a lot with servers that I'm in. I've this this happen when someone is not logged into Discord in their browser and is logged in in the Discord app. When they click the server join link, Discord creates a new dangling (no-email-attached) account. However, since they are logged into the Discord app, their real account also joins the server when they launch the app from the browser. I'm pretty keen on sharing this knowledge because I recently realized I've done this myself, and it took me way too long to figure it out. I "started" using Discord a few months ago, and in one of the servers I joined, I saw an account with an oddly-familiar username that joined a server about a minute before I did. And then I saw the same thing happen in another server! After a few weeks of having a weird feeling about this, I finally found out that in my browser, I was logged into a dangling account I created back in 2018, before I really knew what Discord was. (I think back then I thought Discord was just a voice chat service without permanent accounts.) I would love for Discord to solve this and a few other identity management-related issues!
• mikkelam 6y ago
  I introduced discord at a startup I was a part of. We worked completely remotely and I felt super lonely. I tried to create a culture of everyone who wanted to, could just roam our discord channels and get that watercooler like chatting. It was mildly successful though it was mostly the gamers that were used to sitting around in that type of setting all day. Might be an opportunity for discord there, perhaps integrate with slack
• kazinator 6y ago
  > There is a good reason people do not use Skype and it is because it sucks. Nope! (Well yes, but, historically ...) Skype cracked down on free conference calls. I seem to recall this was before the Microsoft acquisition which ultimately destroyed it. Skype was bustling with fun conference calls, when they were free.
• eska 6y ago
  This analysis completely misses the mark and spreads a lot of untruths. The two major points are: 1. Discord makes money by letting users elevate their status, while offering core feature for free. 2. It is 10x better than other offerings. Regarding 1, immediately after making that statement, the author lists perks such as bigger upload file size limits, better audio quality, screen sharing resolution, etc. These features are not about status, they are core. I therefore do not accept the premise that Discord is "free to play" like the mentioned League of Legends. Ironically, live game coaches for League of Legends will tell their customers to not share the screen on Discord, but on Skype, due to better quality and latency, for free. Regarding 2, the 10x factor is obviously marketing speech for "significantly better", but even that is factually wrong. As mentioned in 1), a lot of core features such as audio and video quality are limited, unlike rivaling software. Even IRC offered unlimited file sharing of even gigabytes in size (and therefore had a community around it). Meanwhile Discord will not even allow you to share short video clips less than a minute of length due to file size. Skype is being criticized, but what's conveniently being left out is that Skype rose to fame before it was bought by Microsoft and had its architecture changed from peer-to-peer to server-client. Skype used to be much better than it is now and used to have less limitations, and was give-or-take better or worse than Discord. Certainly no 10x here. The real point IMO, and other commenters have written about this in great detail already, is the ease of onboarding. The article only talks about the ease of joining a channel etc. and compares that to Skype for example, but calling somebody in Skype is also only 2 clicks. It's really account creation and server joining (click a link). And the fact that competitors drove their software into the ground.
  • Slartie 6y ago
    This comment is spot-on. Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at better-than-Discord quality (not talking about Skype here, but Teamspeak and Ventrilo) and with better-than-Discord administrative control over groups (especially Teamspeak had this nailed, with very extensive rights management that's even suitable to the largest and best-organized gaming guilds). What Discord nailed is ease-of-setup, especially of the server part: by offering free hosting that imitated the "one server = one guild" structure well-known to gamers while actually implementing a much-cheaper hosting structure serving thousands of users from one physical server they eliminated one of the typical pain points with existing solutions, which all depended on either having one technically-savvy gamer hosting the server on his own hardware (mostly virtual private servers were used here), or someone paying for hosted versions. This structure provided an opening for Discord: since gamer clans and guilds come and go in quick succession, each time this happens, the continued use of "classic" voice chat solutions like Teamspeak etc. depended on whether "the guy with the server" would continue hosting the voice server for the new guild. Often enough, the new guild simply wasn't lucky enough to have that guy, so they look out for solutions, and Discord offered them one: a free "server" providing a good-enough group voice chat solution. With regard to monetization one could even argue that Discord failed a lot in that department. The attempt to sell games was largely unsuccessful, and besides the Nitro program they didn't really find anything that works. And even the Nitro program had to be made into an actual "premium" program in order to lead to significant-enough adoption, offering better quality on core features of the service instead of purely cosmetic status-boosting, which is AFAIK not what they originally intended to do with the program.
• Razengan 6y ago
  @Discord Team • Why does Discord snoop my clipboard/pasteboard without any explicit paste action from me? (iOS 14 has exposed a bunch of other apps that do this. I can only hope this is not malicious.) • Why can't I mass delete my own messages?
• miki123211 6y ago
  Considering the "pay for status and get everything else for free" strategy, it's understandable why Discord was promoting itself as a gamer-only platform for so long. In a professional or educational setting, custom emojis and cool-looking animations aren't that important. You just want a tool that does the job and does it well. If it does it for free, even better. If you look at it from that perspective, companies and educational institutions were a problem for Discord. They were using the service same as everyone else, while not bringing much revenue. This was especially true for school groups, which consisted mostly of kids that didn't have credit cards. The marketing move to appeal only to gamers, making the service unattractive for others, may have been deliberate after all. Nowadays, Discord has enough features to justify paying for, even if you don't care about status, so the strategy has changed.
• ChrisRR 6y ago
  I feel like I'm in the minority that I don't find discord miles better than the competition. I've not historically had a problem with skype for voice chat, so I don't see how discord is "10x better" than skype
• 02020202 6y ago
  dis-who?
• koffiezet 6y ago
  I'm more of a casual gamer these days, but a friend of mine was (and still is) a pretty hardcore gamer. I encountered discord somewhere in it's early days before anyone really knew about it, and recommended it to him at a time when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart. He then introduced discord to that group which revived it completely, and afaik, they're still pretty active. He's also paying for the nitro stuff and a pretty happy user. I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too. Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.
  • pityJuke 6y ago
    >when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart. Speaking of this, I think Discord also conquered one more application in relative secrecy, and that's the gaming community forum. reddit took on regular forums, but for smaller communities I think reddit fails at this. Discord gives you multiple channels to talk in, which allows conversation grouping like sub-forums, and extensive chat histories with search, removing the non-permanence of other chat options.
• daitangio 6y ago
  It is free but it is closed source as far as I can understand (or am I wrong?) I think the article is a little biased, also the price table is not explained very well. I think Discord guys are great, but I'd like to not underestimate Slack and MS-Teams on this area
• the__alchemist 6y ago
  "10x better"? Citation needed.
• EmilioMartinez 6y ago
  >In short, it is a way for someone to pay to stand out. Oh boy, that is putting it so naively. The tricky part with "status for sale" is projecting some semblance of legitimacy. Specially among more tech savy and piraty communities (eg gaming), if you are paying extra for a free service and making a big deal about it with flair, you are just a fool. They did a great job in integrating technical perks with flair in a continum; from audio quality, through animations and banners, to vanity URLs. And the boost system creates a ladder with different steps. And it only worked because of how discerning their users are (for contrast, some people are plainly oblivious to media degradation in places like whatsapp). They knew very well their market and how to package legitimate status to them.