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Not to be negative, but teamspeak and ventrilo represent some of the biggest failures of 'getting stuck in your lane' ever. They got fat on hosted server revenu

by ds 6y ago

Not to be negative, but teamspeak and ventrilo represent some of the biggest failures of 'getting stuck in your lane' ever. They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. Ventrilo still has no official ios/android app (lol). Both remind me of craigslist, actually- Except that craigslist is still going strong (for now). Both still exist, granted- And many still use them. Its just that discord really shouldnt exist, it should have been one of these players. The head start they had should have been insurmountable. Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) - Its just I so rarely hear about TS/Vent that I thought it worth me shouting into the ether my disappointment I am not talking to all my friends on vent/ts in 2021.

Macha 6y ago
It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts. That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.
- ds 6y ago
  Id be willing to bet discord makes more gross profit from nitro sales in one week than TS/Vent make in a year, combined.
  - newfeatureok 6y ago
    I highly doubt it - what are you basing this on? I personally don't know a single person who actually pays for discord. Most people I know who use Teamspeak pay for it. That being said, Discord is way more popular than Teamspeak, it does remain to be seen if they can heavily monetize.
    - kungito 6y ago
      Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it
    - jowsie 6y ago
      Majority of people I speak with on Discord do infact pay, nitro and server boosting, etc. Both our examples are anecdotal, though.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Any person who uses animated emotes/reacts is paying for discord nitro. It's not just the people who pay for server boosts, that's a higher tier.
    - unethical_ban 6y ago
      I don't know a single person who uses Teamspeak, and every discord server I'm on has at least one person boosting it. I was paying for discord for a while until I did a trim of my budget - but it gets you a shiny icon, you get to use more emojis, and other little things. You may call me a chump, but Discord is a product I value (like public radio ;) ) and so I tossed a coin to them.
      - geek_at 6y ago
        you're under 20, right?
        unethical_ban 6y ago
        Please, go on and tell me how my comment led you a conclusion about my age.
  - gsich 6y ago
    They probably need it, using someone else's computer is not cheap.
  - schmorptron 6y ago
    Does anyone know how efficient / cheaply they can use their servers? I'm guessing the chat part of the service save for file / image hosting is probably pretty cheap, but the low latency voice chats might be pretty costly, even if they can efficiently host them on virtual servers.
    - zaksoup 6y ago
      Discord's voice chats have no apparent upper limit in how many concurrent users they support - they basically say "the upper limit is how many your client device is able to support without crapping out". I haven't read into this but it seems like they're doing peer-to-peer for audio or the server load is INCREDIBLY efficient, given this.
      - Macha 6y ago
        It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429 https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi... This is observable to still be the case as an end user. When the discord servers are having issues, people's voices become inaudible. This can be resolved by moving the server to a different, less loaded region, even if that region should have worse connectivity to the users in the voice chat. For example, my raid group often have to bounce our server from Europe to the US to workaround reliability issues on the EU servers.
        gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
        > It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview > link describe a P2P WebRTC implementation what am i missing? edit: found it. they use a SFU forwarder. That's the cheap version of going full centralization (MCU) benefits. they probably have a better deal on bandwidth than CPU to justify that, or all their use cases work fine with only one person transmitting at once, which gives you the same benefit of a MCU with less cpu usage...
  - KallDrexx 6y ago
    Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support. They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.
- dancemethis 6y ago
  They already have plenty. Personal user data and metadata. Remember this is the child of OpenFeint.
  - unmind000 6y ago
    No one cares unfortunately. I consider conversations with my friends private. So I do not use discord.
- solatic 6y ago
  We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms. We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people. I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.
  - gsich 6y ago
    It's basically a Slack with more useful features and no bullshit.
    - unmind000 6y ago
      Isn’t there a bit of a privacy concern though? Seems like a corporate nightmare.
      - rakoo 6y ago
        I don't see more issues than with Slack
      - solatic 6y ago
        Less so than with Slack. a) If you're willing to accept using a SaaS for corporate communications, then Discord is no different than Slack. You run the risk that the vendor is recording what you do on the other end of that connection. For what it's worth, such a security stance also requires you to run your own email servers. The IT workload to run all of the above is extremely high, prohibitively so for startups and small companies. Even if, from a security perspective, it would be ideal to host it yourself - for most companies it's simply economically impractical. b) Granted that you accept the risk of your vendor recording your communications, the odds of those communications being recorded are much, much lower for voice communications than they are for text communications, for the sheer cost of storing voice and video data. Running the audio through speech-to-text before discarding the audio may be a threat, but not for users whose office lingua franca is in a language not supported by contemporary speech-to-text tools, let alone automatically deciphering which language the users in a given voice channel are speaking without it being defined ahead of time. In short, as long as you're not buying communication services from a competitor, you're probably fine.
oauea 6y ago
Yes, let's all centralize and commercialize everything and stop making software that you can self host.
- snet0 6y ago
  Why not both?
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Due to network effects, users are a tragedy-of-the-commons resource. The more people use one type of solution, the less people there are to use another. We have to choose, as a society as well as individual agents, which types of solutions we use on principle, not merely what's most popular in the moment, lest we find ourselves stuck in local optima.
    - Nuzzerino 6y ago
      Are you familiar with Matrix though? Its very design is intended to mitigate this effect. You can use Matrix and still communicate via a bridge with users on other platforms. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction
baldfat 6y ago
Well they never were for a seamless purpose. We would mesh Ventrilo and IRC into a real awesome tool but I think we were the intended audience. There weren't millions of us there were tens of thousands of us. It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in. I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  I used IRC regularly for ~20 years and still don't miss it compared to Slack. I miss the people and the tone of the conversations and some of the aesthetic of clients like BitchX but as a technology, I don't really care.
  - rhodozelia 6y ago
    Wow!! I haven’t thought of BitchX in about 15 years. I wonder if my eggdrops are still up?
  - Firehawke 6y ago
    Basically this. IRCv3 never really took off and it's not really feature-comparable to the modern chat clients. I still connect to IRC for one project I'm on, but I think IRC will likely be just the last few holdouts from here on out as it's way too late to pull people back in.
deelowe 6y ago
Where I live, craigslist has all but been replaced by facebook marketplace. There are too many scammers and too much spam on craigslist.
- benbristow 6y ago
  Doesn't help that Craiglist haven't updated their UI for years, isn't the most user friendly site. Also having fixed locations isn't great, esp. in the UK. Cities are covered but smaller towns are chopped off under bigger city 'communities'.
- 650REDHAIR 6y ago
  As a part-time reseller most of the scams and headaches come from platforms other than CL (FB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, etc). Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.
gsich 6y ago
I disagree. WebRTC is utter nonsense. You neither want to implement nor use it. You never know if it's working. With Mumble (TCP and UDP, both can be used for voice) and Teamspeak you know that when you connect to a server, your connection is working. With WebRTC you only have a vague idea, since HTTP is working, but that doesn't mean much.
unethical_ban 6y ago
I've met the owner of Ventrilo a few times at Quakecon a few years back. Super nice guy, pretty smart and nerdy in a good way. Seems to me the guy got pretty wealthy off Ventrilo in its heyday, and was happy with it. Because as people can go search, Ventrilo is essentially abandonware. Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity. If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.
- COGlory 6y ago
  Good for him. Not every business needs to last and grow forever. That's a mandate that can't be met without selling your soul to VC.
- aseipp 6y ago
  Discord also has a big lead in video support that, IMO, now exceeds anything else. It has flexible group based video chat that naturally extends voice chat. It has broadcasting support so you can stream your gameplay to each other, as well as player-in-player, pop out support, and side-by-side view. Almost all of these features work on mobile as well, including PIP/broadcasting (e.g. I streamed Genshin Impact directly off my phone.) These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this. Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    Completely forgot about seamless video conferencing and screensharing.
- Firehawke 6y ago
_n_b 6y ago
In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had. I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has. I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I think Mumble tries to be what you're describing: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/ I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.
  - _n_b 6y ago
    Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew. Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting. On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?
Justsignedup 6y ago
Teamspeak and those tools currently have cross-channel communication which is very useful for large squad games. They are definitely a minority as most games are like 5 players per team. So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue. Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways. Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.
- krrrh 6y ago
  I wouldn’t say that all the Craigslist competitors failed. Dozens of successful startups represent the unbundling of a single category on Craigslist into a more feature rich experience.
  - Cactus2018 6y ago
    > unbundling and re-bundling: https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-of-craigslist https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-...
- uncoder0 6y ago
  I'm a member of several squad gaming communities on discord. We always do our briefings in teamspeak for the better audio codecs and features for ducking and crowd control.
benbristow 6y ago
Teamspeak Server seems to be free for 32 players now. No idea why you wouldn't just use Discord though.
- vinckr 6y ago
  For bigger groups it is actually quite good. Its also a more lightweight experience as opposed to Discord with all the chat ect. functionality. And I have found it to be more ressourceful than Discord. That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  I don't know if it's actively maintained anymore because it's been a while since I played, but there was a mod for Arma 2 that simulated real radio physics and depended on Teamspeak.
  - bovine3dom 6y ago
    Still maintained: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2 https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2 It looks like progress is being made on Mumble support: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980 https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980
Nuzzerino 6y ago
> They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. > Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases. And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.
- baby 6y ago
  > Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases. As an ex-heavy user of teamspeak I can tell you that nobody cared about that.
  - wink 6y ago
    Yes, I think I joined a TS server twice in my life when it wasn't part of a guild or clan or something for online gaming. So it 100% did what it should do. These days most people seem to use Discord which also works fine for up to 30 people (didn't try more) or Mumble (works fine for hundreds), in my filter bubble
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    It matters. In some parts of competitive gaming scene, Teamspeak requires a VPN because of DDoS attacks. Discord doesn't suffer from this, neither does Matrix.
    - baby 6y ago
      How so? That seems like an extraordinary claim.
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        There is nothing extraordinary about this claim. Without using a VPN you can get DDoSed. A DDoS is very cheap and easy. This happens in competitive gaming. Had it happen to myself and peers multiple times. Also, your voice server can get DDoSed as well. Seen that occur as well.
AceJohnny2 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma > Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.

by ds 6y ago

Macha 6y ago

It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts. That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.

ds 6y ago
Id be willing to bet discord makes more gross profit from nitro sales in one week than TS/Vent make in a year, combined.
- newfeatureok 6y ago
  I highly doubt it - what are you basing this on? I personally don't know a single person who actually pays for discord. Most people I know who use Teamspeak pay for it. That being said, Discord is way more popular than Teamspeak, it does remain to be seen if they can heavily monetize.
  - kungito 6y ago
    Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it
  - jowsie 6y ago
    Majority of people I speak with on Discord do infact pay, nitro and server boosting, etc. Both our examples are anecdotal, though.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Any person who uses animated emotes/reacts is paying for discord nitro. It's not just the people who pay for server boosts, that's a higher tier.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    I don't know a single person who uses Teamspeak, and every discord server I'm on has at least one person boosting it. I was paying for discord for a while until I did a trim of my budget - but it gets you a shiny icon, you get to use more emojis, and other little things. You may call me a chump, but Discord is a product I value (like public radio ;) ) and so I tossed a coin to them.
    - geek_at 6y ago
      you're under 20, right?
      - unethical_ban 6y ago
        Please, go on and tell me how my comment led you a conclusion about my age.
- gsich 6y ago
  They probably need it, using someone else's computer is not cheap.
- schmorptron 6y ago
  Does anyone know how efficient / cheaply they can use their servers? I'm guessing the chat part of the service save for file / image hosting is probably pretty cheap, but the low latency voice chats might be pretty costly, even if they can efficiently host them on virtual servers.
  - zaksoup 6y ago
    Discord's voice chats have no apparent upper limit in how many concurrent users they support - they basically say "the upper limit is how many your client device is able to support without crapping out". I haven't read into this but it seems like they're doing peer-to-peer for audio or the server load is INCREDIBLY efficient, given this.
    - Macha 6y ago
      It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429 https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi... This is observable to still be the case as an end user. When the discord servers are having issues, people's voices become inaudible. This can be resolved by moving the server to a different, less loaded region, even if that region should have worse connectivity to the users in the voice chat. For example, my raid group often have to bounce our server from Europe to the US to workaround reliability issues on the EU servers.
      - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
        > It's not P2P. Here's a technical overview > link describe a P2P WebRTC implementation what am i missing? edit: found it. they use a SFU forwarder. That's the cheap version of going full centralization (MCU) benefits. they probably have a better deal on bandwidth than CPU to justify that, or all their use cases work fine with only one person transmitting at once, which gives you the same benefit of a MCU with less cpu usage...
- KallDrexx 6y ago
  Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support. They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.
dancemethis 6y ago
They already have plenty. Personal user data and metadata. Remember this is the child of OpenFeint.
- unmind000 6y ago
  No one cares unfortunately. I consider conversations with my friends private. So I do not use discord.
solatic 6y ago
We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms. We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people. I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.
- gsich 6y ago
  It's basically a Slack with more useful features and no bullshit.
  - unmind000 6y ago
    Isn’t there a bit of a privacy concern though? Seems like a corporate nightmare.
    - rakoo 6y ago
      I don't see more issues than with Slack
    - solatic 6y ago
      Less so than with Slack. a) If you're willing to accept using a SaaS for corporate communications, then Discord is no different than Slack. You run the risk that the vendor is recording what you do on the other end of that connection. For what it's worth, such a security stance also requires you to run your own email servers. The IT workload to run all of the above is extremely high, prohibitively so for startups and small companies. Even if, from a security perspective, it would be ideal to host it yourself - for most companies it's simply economically impractical. b) Granted that you accept the risk of your vendor recording your communications, the odds of those communications being recorded are much, much lower for voice communications than they are for text communications, for the sheer cost of storing voice and video data. Running the audio through speech-to-text before discarding the audio may be a threat, but not for users whose office lingua franca is in a language not supported by contemporary speech-to-text tools, let alone automatically deciphering which language the users in a given voice channel are speaking without it being defined ahead of time. In short, as long as you're not buying communication services from a competitor, you're probably fine.

oauea 6y ago

Yes, let's all centralize and commercialize everything and stop making software that you can self host.

snet0 6y ago
Why not both?
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Due to network effects, users are a tragedy-of-the-commons resource. The more people use one type of solution, the less people there are to use another. We have to choose, as a society as well as individual agents, which types of solutions we use on principle, not merely what's most popular in the moment, lest we find ourselves stuck in local optima.
  - Nuzzerino 6y ago
    Are you familiar with Matrix though? Its very design is intended to mitigate this effect. You can use Matrix and still communicate via a bridge with users on other platforms. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction

baldfat 6y ago

Well they never were for a seamless purpose. We would mesh Ventrilo and IRC into a real awesome tool but I think we were the intended audience. There weren't millions of us there were tens of thousands of us. It wasn't till there was millions of users that Discord started targeting them. First there was Curse that got bought out by Twitch and then Discord jumped in. I still am the cranky guy who thinks IRC is the best communication tool out there and get mad looking at my Slacker screen.

VectorLock 6y ago
I used IRC regularly for ~20 years and still don't miss it compared to Slack. I miss the people and the tone of the conversations and some of the aesthetic of clients like BitchX but as a technology, I don't really care.
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  Wow!! I haven’t thought of BitchX in about 15 years. I wonder if my eggdrops are still up?
- Firehawke 6y ago
  Basically this. IRCv3 never really took off and it's not really feature-comparable to the modern chat clients. I still connect to IRC for one project I'm on, but I think IRC will likely be just the last few holdouts from here on out as it's way too late to pull people back in.

deelowe 6y ago

Where I live, craigslist has all but been replaced by facebook marketplace. There are too many scammers and too much spam on craigslist.

benbristow 6y ago
Doesn't help that Craiglist haven't updated their UI for years, isn't the most user friendly site. Also having fixed locations isn't great, esp. in the UK. Cities are covered but smaller towns are chopped off under bigger city 'communities'.
650REDHAIR 6y ago
As a part-time reseller most of the scams and headaches come from platforms other than CL (FB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, etc). Maybe it's just the Bay Area, but CL is almost always better for me. If it's a niche item I'll try Reddit or eBay and have pretty much written off the others.

gsich 6y ago

I disagree. WebRTC is utter nonsense. You neither want to implement nor use it. You never know if it's working. With Mumble (TCP and UDP, both can be used for voice) and Teamspeak you know that when you connect to a server, your connection is working. With WebRTC you only have a vague idea, since HTTP is working, but that doesn't mean much.

unethical_ban 6y ago

I've met the owner of Ventrilo a few times at Quakecon a few years back. Super nice guy, pretty smart and nerdy in a good way. Seems to me the guy got pretty wealthy off Ventrilo in its heyday, and was happy with it. Because as people can go search, Ventrilo is essentially abandonware. Discord's main benefits are the persistent chat with "slack-like" link embeds, emojis, and whatnot; as well as easier role management; and finally, federated identity. If Mumble, for instance, could make their chat interface more appealing, and if someone had a lightweight user directory for it and friend management, it might have a chance of competing. But Discord has really taken over.

COGlory 6y ago
Good for him. Not every business needs to last and grow forever. That's a mandate that can't be met without selling your soul to VC.
aseipp 6y ago
Discord also has a big lead in video support that, IMO, now exceeds anything else. It has flexible group based video chat that naturally extends voice chat. It has broadcasting support so you can stream your gameplay to each other, as well as player-in-player, pop out support, and side-by-side view. Almost all of these features work on mobile as well, including PIP/broadcasting (e.g. I streamed Genshin Impact directly off my phone.) These may seem like gimmicks, but I use all these features extensively in a server of ~8 regulars to the point we reflexively broadcast to each other and regularly watch each others gameplay, comment, or just use it to hang out. I think this stuff will probably significantly solidify Discord's lead, especially considering the technical infrastructure necessary for features like this. Before all that though, the slack-like features, and definitely the moderation features for bigger channels, were - still are! - major attractions.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Completely forgot about seamless video conferencing and screensharing.
Firehawke 6y ago

_n_b 6y ago

In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had. I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has. I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.

mikepurvis 6y ago
I think Mumble tries to be what you're describing: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/ I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.
- _n_b 6y ago
  Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew. Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting. On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?

Justsignedup 6y ago

Teamspeak and those tools currently have cross-channel communication which is very useful for large squad games. They are definitely a minority as most games are like 5 players per team. So they have their niche uses (mumble too). guilded.gg is trying to fix that issue. Having said all that, TS is definitely not a freemium business model. And they did well for themselves. But they are certainly stuck in their old ways. Craigslist had many attempts to modernize. Turns out... people like the minimalistic nature of it. There are like a billion competitors, and they all failed.

krrrh 6y ago
I wouldn’t say that all the Craigslist competitors failed. Dozens of successful startups represent the unbundling of a single category on Craigslist into a more feature rich experience.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  > unbundling and re-bundling: https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-of-craigslist https://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-re-bundling-...
uncoder0 6y ago
I'm a member of several squad gaming communities on discord. We always do our briefings in teamspeak for the better audio codecs and features for ducking and crowd control.

benbristow 6y ago

Teamspeak Server seems to be free for 32 players now. No idea why you wouldn't just use Discord though.

vinckr 6y ago
For bigger groups it is actually quite good. Its also a more lightweight experience as opposed to Discord with all the chat ect. functionality. And I have found it to be more ressourceful than Discord. That being said nowadays I use Discord 95% of the time.
HideousKojima 6y ago
I don't know if it's actively maintained anymore because it's been a while since I played, but there was a mod for Arma 2 that simulated real radio physics and depended on Teamspeak.
- bovine3dom 6y ago
  Still maintained: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2 https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2 It looks like progress is being made on Mumble support: https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980 https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2/pull/980

Nuzzerino 6y ago

> They got fat on hosted server revenue and never iterated. Both of them had years (decade?) on discord and never thought to make their product free, web based or have a better chat. > Also, apologies for not really commenting on the subject at hand (TS supporting matrix) As a former developer of a chat app that used Matrix, I'm actually thinking that this is a good direction for Teamspeak and has the potential to make it a viable alternative to Discord. Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases. And this is of course something the world badly needs right now.

baby 6y ago
> Matrix has some decentralization that should allow for censorship-resistant use cases. As an ex-heavy user of teamspeak I can tell you that nobody cared about that.
- wink 6y ago
  Yes, I think I joined a TS server twice in my life when it wasn't part of a guild or clan or something for online gaming. So it 100% did what it should do. These days most people seem to use Discord which also works fine for up to 30 people (didn't try more) or Mumble (works fine for hundreds), in my filter bubble
- Fnoord 6y ago
  It matters. In some parts of competitive gaming scene, Teamspeak requires a VPN because of DDoS attacks. Discord doesn't suffer from this, neither does Matrix.
  - baby 6y ago
    How so? That seems like an extraordinary claim.
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      There is nothing extraordinary about this claim. Without using a VPN you can get DDoSed. A DDoS is very cheap and easy. This happens in competitive gaming. Had it happen to myself and peers multiple times. Also, your voice server can get DDoSed as well. Seen that occur as well.

AceJohnny2 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma > Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.