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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, pers

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.
duskwuff 6y ago
> 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. There is, actually -- you can call a user who you're friends with, or create a call for a group DM. It's just separate from group voice chat.

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.

duskwuff 6y ago

> 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. There is, actually -- you can call a user who you're friends with, or create a call for a group DM. It's just separate from group voice chat.