7 ms·

> but it is also not >$10B of software engineering Really? How did you come to this conclusion? Discord is, without a doubt, 10x better than Slack, Teams, or

> but it is also not >$10B of software engineering Really? How did you come to this conclusion? Discord is, without a doubt, 10x better than Slack, Teams, or Zoom combined. They've solved the problem of a communication in the non-business space. That's huge. For comparison, look at Coinbase, who has a 100B valuation. What they're doing is relatively trivial. Is that >10x the value of Discord? I don't even think Coinbase is overvalued. 10B for Discord is just a steal.

quantified 6y ago
It’s not only better than Teams or Slack, but it has a great gamer community. Connect that with XBox, maybe it’s a monetary win.
tshaddox 6y ago
Imagine how much Microsoft would pay Discord for just a hosted version of the Discord service, or even an on-prem version that includes maintenance. Do you think they would still pay $10B for that, with none of the accounts, account data, brand reputation, etc.? Do you think they’d pay even 1% of $10B?
- machineko 6y ago
  I would say few B for sure just so they can compete in that space
- bluecalm 6y ago
  Well, imagine how much someone would pay for NVidia if the only thing you could do with their GPUs was to watch videos. Surely not 300B. Yet you can do so much more with the GPUs and you can do so much more with Discord then keeping it as in house tool.
ALittleLight 6y ago
Suppose you have seven dev teams of ten, plus a manager, tester, and a pm for each, plus an executive team of 9 people. 100 total people on the team. They each make an average of 200k a year. How many years will it take this team to recreate Discord? If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. I think the point is that almost all of the value of Discord comes from the network effect of people locked in to using it. On the one hand, that's kind of a trivial observation, of course the users are value comes from. But, if you don't realize this, it's important to know. It means you that if even if you build something identical to Discord you're not going to be worth anything like as much - unless you also happen to get users. Or, put another way, you could build something technically worse, but if people adopted it for some reason, you'd be worth more.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community. Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    >I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc. The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
    - b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
      If Microsoft buys Discord I think several people would be looking to switch.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom. The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.
framecowbird 6y ago
Could you expand on how it's better? Genuinely curious. I love Slack and tried Discord but found the UI pretty clunky, and the lack of threads annoying, but didn't probe it much further so I'm wondering if I'm missing something...
- omnimus 6y ago
  Well it has started has voice chat for gamers. Their latency and sound quality is top notch. You can have voice call with 5000 people. You can finetune sound of each individual. They have mass moderation tools... it surprises me with something in a good ways. It feels like theyve nailed the technical part.
  - IceWreck 6y ago
    > You can have voice call with 5000 people Discord with a voice call of > 50 people really starts cracking about and it just isn't usable. audio quality goes way down. Not sure how you got the 5000 number.
    - whatbutwhy 6y ago
      I've personally been in voice calls on discord with thousands of people. Obviously it's impossible to pick out anything discernable with that many people but discord handles it well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- torbital 6y ago
  FWIW, I probably hate Slack more than anyone else on Hackernews (because everyone somehow seems to like it). Keep in mind I also don't use the Slack desktop app but I do use the Discord desktop app, so right away this isn't a fair comparison but I'll continue with my rant anyway. I mainly just find the user-experience to be terrible. I hate how each server is separated as if it is it's own isolated website or something. On Discord, I can switch from server to server in a click easily. Playing GTA? I can join the GTA Discord server. Playing League? I can join that one. It's all right there. It's also the weird SSO Slack has going on that just seems broken. When I open up Discord, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to. When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess? I'm never sure weather to use my work account or not. Sometimes the @domain matters, so this creates even more of a mess. Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.
popinman322 6y ago
Discord nailed reliability, quality, and usability. Its tech is still not worth $10B, though, even if the tech needs to be as good as it is to keep attracting users. Tangential: I really do fear for them if they get acquired, though. Their tech is built on the actor model, which almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on. It feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally (probably to use Azure) or have their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  > almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on Tools like Akka are very much alive and well. > t feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally I doubt that, unless they're using a lot of proprietary GCP tech. A Microsoft-owned business using Azure to (most likely) save money is kind of an obvious move, and I don't consider it a bad thing. > their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure. Or maybe even the other way around? Discord's tech is no slouch.
- EdwinLarkin 6y ago
  Does not MS employ people like Sylvan Clebsch? I am sure they employ a lot of folks that understand the actor model.
- tybit 6y ago
  Microsoft is surprisingly open to the actor model. They’ve had various implementations of virtual actors after publishing the research, e.g Project Orleans for .NET and Durable ~Functions~ Entities on Azure.
  - verst 6y ago
    Don't forget about DAPR :) https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks/actors/actors-overview/ https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks...
- reducesuffering 6y ago
kortilla 6y ago
Discord hasn’t solved it anymore than slack, iMessage, teams, etc. The experience is more polished but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally special. If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio. The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there. > Really? How did you come to this conclusion? Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts? If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Do chat apps lock in users for long? My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.
- bluecalm 6y ago
  Try following some projects on Discord. Maybe a small one like Leela Chess Zero. It's a completely different experience than Slack. Maybe you and your friends could be happy there but for projects with hundred/thousands of fans/developers/contributors it's in league of its own. It got it users because of it. It didn't luckily stumble into a userbase. If it disappeared today people would be sad and switch to something else if it would reappear in 2 years everyone would be switching back ASAP.
ewindal 6y ago
Discord will forever be behind Slack in usability as long as it doesn’t have threads. Nothing quite like having three different conversations going on at once in the same channel.
amelius 6y ago
The value is in product design, branding and userbase, not so much in software engineering.

quantified 6y ago

It’s not only better than Teams or Slack, but it has a great gamer community. Connect that with XBox, maybe it’s a monetary win.

tshaddox 6y ago

Imagine how much Microsoft would pay Discord for just a hosted version of the Discord service, or even an on-prem version that includes maintenance. Do you think they would still pay $10B for that, with none of the accounts, account data, brand reputation, etc.? Do you think they’d pay even 1% of $10B?

machineko 6y ago
I would say few B for sure just so they can compete in that space
bluecalm 6y ago
Well, imagine how much someone would pay for NVidia if the only thing you could do with their GPUs was to watch videos. Surely not 300B. Yet you can do so much more with the GPUs and you can do so much more with Discord then keeping it as in house tool.

ALittleLight 6y ago

Suppose you have seven dev teams of ten, plus a manager, tester, and a pm for each, plus an executive team of 9 people. 100 total people on the team. They each make an average of 200k a year. How many years will it take this team to recreate Discord? If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software. I think the point is that almost all of the value of Discord comes from the network effect of people locked in to using it. On the one hand, that's kind of a trivial observation, of course the users are value comes from. But, if you don't realize this, it's important to know. It means you that if even if you build something identical to Discord you're not going to be worth anything like as much - unless you also happen to get users. Or, put another way, you could build something technically worse, but if people adopted it for some reason, you'd be worth more.

lostmsu 6y ago
I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community. Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
- kortilla 6y ago
  >I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology. Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc. The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
  - b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
    If Microsoft buys Discord I think several people would be looking to switch.
- xmprt 6y ago
  If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom. The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.

framecowbird 6y ago

Could you expand on how it's better? Genuinely curious. I love Slack and tried Discord but found the UI pretty clunky, and the lack of threads annoying, but didn't probe it much further so I'm wondering if I'm missing something...

omnimus 6y ago
Well it has started has voice chat for gamers. Their latency and sound quality is top notch. You can have voice call with 5000 people. You can finetune sound of each individual. They have mass moderation tools... it surprises me with something in a good ways. It feels like theyve nailed the technical part.
- IceWreck 6y ago
  > You can have voice call with 5000 people Discord with a voice call of > 50 people really starts cracking about and it just isn't usable. audio quality goes way down. Not sure how you got the 5000 number.
  - whatbutwhy 6y ago
    I've personally been in voice calls on discord with thousands of people. Obviously it's impossible to pick out anything discernable with that many people but discord handles it well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
torbital 6y ago
FWIW, I probably hate Slack more than anyone else on Hackernews (because everyone somehow seems to like it). Keep in mind I also don't use the Slack desktop app but I do use the Discord desktop app, so right away this isn't a fair comparison but I'll continue with my rant anyway. I mainly just find the user-experience to be terrible. I hate how each server is separated as if it is it's own isolated website or something. On Discord, I can switch from server to server in a click easily. Playing GTA? I can join the GTA Discord server. Playing League? I can join that one. It's all right there. It's also the weird SSO Slack has going on that just seems broken. When I open up Discord, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to. When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess? I'm never sure weather to use my work account or not. Sometimes the @domain matters, so this creates even more of a mess. Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.

popinman322 6y ago

Discord nailed reliability, quality, and usability. Its tech is still not worth $10B, though, even if the tech needs to be as good as it is to keep attracting users. Tangential: I really do fear for them if they get acquired, though. Their tech is built on the actor model, which almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on. It feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally (probably to use Azure) or have their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.

tomnipotent 6y ago
> almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on Tools like Akka are very much alive and well. > t feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally I doubt that, unless they're using a lot of proprietary GCP tech. A Microsoft-owned business using Azure to (most likely) save money is kind of an obvious move, and I don't consider it a bad thing. > their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure. Or maybe even the other way around? Discord's tech is no slouch.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
Does not MS employ people like Sylvan Clebsch? I am sure they employ a lot of folks that understand the actor model.
tybit 6y ago
Microsoft is surprisingly open to the actor model. They’ve had various implementations of virtual actors after publishing the research, e.g Project Orleans for .NET and Durable ~Functions~ Entities on Azure.
- verst 6y ago
  Don't forget about DAPR :) https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks/actors/actors-overview/ https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks...
reducesuffering 6y ago

kortilla 6y ago

Discord hasn’t solved it anymore than slack, iMessage, teams, etc. The experience is more polished but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally special. If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio. The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there. > Really? How did you come to this conclusion? Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts? If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.

saalweachter 6y ago
Do chat apps lock in users for long? My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.
bluecalm 6y ago
Try following some projects on Discord. Maybe a small one like Leela Chess Zero. It's a completely different experience than Slack. Maybe you and your friends could be happy there but for projects with hundred/thousands of fans/developers/contributors it's in league of its own. It got it users because of it. It didn't luckily stumble into a userbase. If it disappeared today people would be sad and switch to something else if it would reappear in 2 years everyone would be switching back ASAP.

ewindal 6y ago

Discord will forever be behind Slack in usability as long as it doesn’t have threads. Nothing quite like having three different conversations going on at once in the same channel.

amelius 6y ago

The value is in product design, branding and userbase, not so much in software engineering.