9 ms·

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

by 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.

by eska 6y ago

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.