11 ms·
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 t
by 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.
- est31 6y agoAgree with all your points. Couldn't be express it better myself. Just recently I tried to access reddit from my phone while being logged out, and got a "community preview, view this in app" kind of screen. Terrible. On a similar note, Github is slowly auth-walling off parts of its website. I can't access github actions logs on my phone, nor can I access "hidden" outdated etc. comments/discussions without an account, even though I'd like to view what is inside. For the real time chat space, my personal hope is that Matrix will eventually take off. Currently it is still in a phase where there is lots of development and technological improvements, but I hope that eventually there will be an ecosystem of compliant clients as well as a large user base. Another good alternative to matrix is zulip, although it's hard to maintain which discussions one wants to stay up to date with vs which discussions to ignore.
- fredrickd 6y agoI think you're right but you're wrong. The thing that Discord is missing and is failing at is that it doesn't have any sort of a friend graph or social structure. Discord users want this sort of Reddit anonymity where people are semi-social but not really. Discord isn't a social app and Reddit looks like where Discord will grow to, not mass market, not super data heavy because there's no friend graph and structure.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago> I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies. It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience. Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing. Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd. Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice. And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit. It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?