30 ms·

Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

576 points by coloneltcb 6y ago

COGlory 6y ago
What about Discord besides network effect makes it a desirable holding? Do they have any technological advantage?
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Does anyone in this space? At least, that has any user facing affect (i.e., 99.9% uptime vs 99.99% uptime is not something users will be comparing). It's all network effect and business model.
- kungito 6y ago
  It's been a fucking amazing product from day one and they have a lot of features. I only wish they release a non gaming branded version
  - red_trumpet 6y ago
    What would a non-gaming version distinguish from the current one?
    - TkTech 6y ago
      It's hard to pitch discord in the workplace, especially against an incumbent like Slack or Teams. It comes across as very "casual" and unprofessional, which is a shame, because it really is a top-quality product. It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work: > Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
      - meristohm 6y ago
        I’ve used Discord only for gaming and I would prefer all the non-voice stuff to be able to be hidden. If it wasn’t the most reliable audio for group voice chat that we’ve tried (Steam voice is still an echo-y mess for us three, Signal wouldn’t connect us, and then I conceded and went back to Discord), we’d use something else. I don’t like that it tracks what we’re playing, that it tries to be friendly with its treacly messages (it’s a tool; my shovel doesn’t say “welcome back, I missed you!”...), and that it keeps deleted accounts around. I can see that others may want all these and other Facebook-esque features. I like that Discord uses .opus codec, and that the audio is dependable and clear. Maybe Mumble to try next? What open-source options might work for enterprise?
        melkhior 6y ago
        For gaming, you might enjoy Teamspeak. It's closed-source, but you can run own your server, it's very much focused on voice comms, uses Opus and (IMO) has better audio filters.
    - oneepic 6y ago
      Fewer pylons and other gaming memes.
    - bentcorner 6y ago
      Probably better support around auth and identity. They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth. But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It provides a nicer user experience overall.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  Makes the users feel like the devs care.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > Makes the users feel like the devs care. Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO? After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers. Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered) -------- In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer. Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
    - ganzuul 6y ago
      I pay for Discord. They know how to wring money out of their customers.
- prox 6y ago
  It’s one of the most popular destinations for gaming/tech discussion rooms and teamtalk (during games) what they do, they do really well, that’s their advantage.
- keb_ 6y ago
  The UX and featureset of Discord is impressive. The UX in particular is superior to Slack, Teams, or any other modern chat application I've used. I'd like to move my group to Matrix, but Element (fka Riot.im) is nowhere near as polished or user-friendly as Discord.
  - antris 6y ago
    Have you ever tried to disable notifications on Discord? I have tried to do it 500 times and still get those annoying red dots with numbers, red dots without numbers, and just a few weeks ago I started getting random notification sounds (after I had disabled them before) without any clue where they were coming from. My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned. edit: I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
    - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
      Right-click the server icon, select "notifications settings", press "Mute <server name>". When it asks how long, select "until I turn it back on". This will kill the white dot unless you're mentioned (or @everyone'd). Its a little tricky to find but that will solve your issue
      - antris 6y ago
        I want to change my global settings, not server settings. I'm on dozens of Discords and join/leave them and change their order on the sidebar all the time. Going through each of them (and remembering to do it every time I join a new one) sounds like a nightmare. Every time I hear/see a notification that I don't want, I'd have to go through all those dialogs for all of my servers? Nope, not gonna happen.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  Its B2C software so its fundamentally designed for consumers - individual users and community creators. Slack, Teams etc. are B2B so end-users are forced to adopt it. The UX of both reflects this.
- Varriount 6y ago
  I don't know if you consider this a technological advantage, but compared to Slack, Discord puts a relatively heavy emphasis on its live voice channel functionality. You can join and leave them at a whim, mute and control the volume of individual users, etc. I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. Technology progress has plateaued in a great many industries over the last decade so it’s all about the product experience these days. Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    > Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. There is a vast gulf even in terms of „just working“ between garbage like Microsoft Teams and something like Discord.
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      Honestly teams “just works” for a lot of companies. My company had a 100% in-office culture and transitioned to using Teams extensively within a week of the pandemic starting. The fact that it’s built off of Active Directory and integrates with existing Sharepoint and Exchange systems is a huge plus for business users. Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      I find this "Teams is garbage" vs the experience at our company quite interesting. We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit. Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever. There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  It's arguably the best software in the "modern IRC" space. Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.
  - f1refly 6y ago
    > discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effordless voice channels and good UX Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  They have users. If they wanted to they could become the next Steam tomorrow by simply selling games and giving deals. The engaged userbase of discord far surpasses steam, epic, and all other gaming clients. Valve doesn't care about competing or innovating, theyll simply roll over and let it happen. But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    > simply selling games and giving deals They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely. You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
    - anticensor 6y ago
      The game store is still open. They just do not accept more paid games due to understaffing.
  - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
    They already tried, it flopped and they killed off the feature. PC gamers already own games through Steam, no one wants to have to split their library if they can avoid it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- afpx 6y ago
  Do they even have a lot of active users? I haven’t found many public discord channels that seem to be actively used. Or, is discord more for private chat? I’ve used it a few times for organizing online gaming. But, it wasn’t worth it to keep it installed.
- Jweb_Guru 6y ago
  They're way better at dealing with large communities than any other chat application I've used.
- nesarkvechnep 6y ago
  It has a technological advantage - Elixir.
- Merem 6y ago
  Data from a lot of users? I mean, they inspect all audio/video communications in real-time[1] and save all your messages, pictures etc. It also helps a lot that basically no one cares about privacy anymore, so further growth seems secured. [1] https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626 https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-di...
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  I assumed they wanted to buy the userbase. And use it to promote XBox and Game Pass. I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.
- aphextron 6y ago
  The network effect is what makes it desirable. Anyone can push bits these days. Web technology is completely commoditized. But a strong brand and a great product team is priceless (or at least worth more than $10bn).
- m01 6y ago
  They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage. In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir. [1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... EDIT: added reference and clarified that I don't know if they still use Elixir.
  - davidw 6y ago
    https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 mentions 'Rust or Elixir'. Frustratingly, for the longest time, they were 'San Fran or bust' in their hiring, which seemed like an odd thing for a company supposedly enabling communication. Guess the pandemic finally forced them to start looking for remote workers. Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
    - dnautics 6y ago
      > Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO? My guess would be pagerduty is the first?
donkarma 6y ago
Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive
- milkytron 6y ago
  Maybe... Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.
  - krzepah 6y ago
    Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.
      - mopsi 6y ago
        The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment. This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots. I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?
rvz 6y ago
Let's hope that Discord doesn't end up going the way of Slack. Since Slack got overconfident over Microsoft Teams and lost and got acquired by Salesforce.
- sz4kerto 6y ago
  For almost 30 billion.
- Epenthesis 6y ago
  As someone who's never used Discord, what's it do better than Slack? Superficially other than aesthetics/integrations, they seem basically identical
  - JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
    Discord is more like a ventrilo replacement for gamers. It was primarily voice chat in its early days. They've done a lot of work to make the chatroom space on par with any other chat application you'd use otherwise. They also now allow for direct screenshare and game streaming. I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
    - joaonmatos 6y ago
      Discord is still way worse in text chat. I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least. Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had: - No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience. - No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better. - Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack. One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs. Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.
xevrem 6y ago
so.... Discord will be a hellscape in 3-5 years as its inevitably destroyed by corporate greed?
- larinzod 6y ago
  Aye, nothing like investor pressure and quarterly growth targets to kill an otherwise good company/product.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    This is how tech startups work, isn't it? Use investors to build a product with no business model, then the founders cash out via purchase or IPO, and soon after the fact that you have no business model comes to light and the product falls apart trying to find a business model, while users move on to the next shiny thing with no business model.
    - ergot_vacation 6y ago
      Glad I'm not the only one thinking this. Seems obvious, but I always felt like I was missing something. How is it that most of the tech/SV world is just the same con being run over and over again, yet it keeps working? Does it operate on the same psychological glitch as a lottery? Do the giant corps buying these startups all think "I know how it's been in the past, but surely THIS startup WON'T turn to shit the moment I buy it because it was never a real business to begin with! This time for sure!" Or are the real suckers the investors, and the corps are just doing these purchases in a performative capacity to keep razzle-dazzling them?
      - whall6 6y ago
        Have you read through any of Facebook’s recent 10-Ks?
        echelon 6y ago
        If they're that bad, what keeps the stock price propped up and the morale high?
1zhangdey 6y ago
based and redpilled
etempleton 6y ago
I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.
- xyhopguy 6y ago
  'discord professional' seems like pretty low hanging fruit and an obvious upgrade over slack + zoom
  - brundolf 6y ago
    It would risk chasing off their core market, even if it were just a branding pivot
    - poidos 6y ago
      It would probably have to be a separate application with the same features and internals to really work.
      - all2 6y ago
        Accord Communications: Enterprise Edition
    - novok 6y ago
      I think discord biz edition was obvious for a long time, and they've steadfastly refused to do it for that amount of time too.
    - steveklabnik 6y ago
      The removed the Gamer branding by default a long time ago now.
  - stdgy 6y ago
    Absolutely. I'd kill to be able to use Discord for work. It's just silly how much better it is than Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc.
debacle 6y ago
Amazon (Twitch), Epic, and Valve are all targeting gaming verticals. Each of them are integrating the other's features as also-rans: streaming, marketplace, reviews, community, platform. Most people would probably be surprized to know that you can buy games on Twitch and stream on Steam. What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world.
- leereeves 6y ago
  Does Epic have reviews and community now? Last time I used it, Epic didn't have much more than an advertisement and a buy button.
- mehlmao 6y ago
  Can you still buy games from Twitch? I thought they shut that store down. They still offer free games for Prime members though.
- elithrar 6y ago
  > What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world. Do you mean that in a positive or negative way? Netflix is doing very well - it's the other, broadcasters-cum-streaming platforms that are struggling.
- evanextreme 6y ago
  Discord will always have a market as long as competing marketplaces / ecosystems exist on PC. Discord's platform agnosticism makes it a safer bet than the three companies you mentioned, all of which are incentivized to build closed content ecosystems that antagonize each other in order to move more product. There is simply no other solution that allows me to see what my friends are playing, jump into their channel, and see the gameplay broadcast live from multiple perspectives in a private environment. The Netflix analogy is not particularly apt here either, as where Netflix produces the content, here the content is user generated. So its about technological executions, platform agnosticism, and features sets. Valve's Steam app on iOS didnt even support iPhone X screen resolutions until a year and a half ago so I wouldnt hold my breath for them to compete well in this space at all. Maybe Epic's acquisition of houseparty could cause some competition for them? But I doubt it.
logronoide 6y ago
I can’t believe any of the people complaining here about low quality of the VoIP of Teams have used the VoIP of Discord, because they simply can’t compare. Teams have anti-coupling features and you can use it with speakers out of the box. Discord does not have a good anti-coupling algorithms and it’s almost impossible to use it without headphones. Perfect for gamers, but not for business. Discord is amazing to create communities, that’s what Microsoft wanted.
- parksy 6y ago
  > Discord is amazing to create communities, that’s what Microsoft wanted. Microsoft can easily recreate the platform, they don't want the capability, they want the existing audience.
  - logronoide 6y ago
    Microsoft wants the audience AND the know-how about how to engage with them and atract new one. Due to Microsoft culture they don’t know how to do it.
mehlmao 6y ago
So what is Discord's path to profitability? They tried selling video games and closed the store not too long after launching it. Nitro/Server Boosts definitely don't come close to the cost of operation.
- DethNinja 6y ago
  Advertisements I guess? I still cannot believe how fast they captured game chat market, even with lots of other competitors. Honestly I also would like to enter to this market but breaking the market share of discord will be very hard indeed.
  - tacticalmook 6y ago
    That's not surprising to me. Discord offers free hosting for a feature-rich IRC and group voice service. Nobody else did that. A gaming clan no longer needs to maintain their own Teamspeak/Ventrilo server + their own website and forum. The convenience of having it all in one centralized program wins out over Discord's UX oddities, privacy concerns and more recent bloat. This ease of use also lowered the barrier to create a clan, so it captures a larger audience than its predecessors ever did. And yet it still provides powerful tools for moderation and user permissions, an API for chat bots, video streaming...
  - chrononaut 6y ago
    To be fair, I think everyone always thinks about that regarding the incumbent(s). Xfire / Ventrilo / TeamSpeak all likely seemed like a daunting adversary at their peaks.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  How do you know that? Why would it be expensive to run a glorified irc server network?
  - mehlmao 6y ago
    For starters, storage costs. Free users can upload files, images, and videos up to 8MB (25MB for Nitro members). Storing and serving those in perpetuity adds up, plus bandwidth for voice and video chat and 800+ employees.
fish45 6y ago
Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing AFAIK that can replicate this particular experience except for Teamspeak, which has other problems.
- lrvick 6y ago
  Why not matrix?
  - y2bd 6y ago
    AFAIK there are no Matrix clients with voice channels.
  - pyr0hu 6y ago
    Discord is free, no need for maintenance and much easier to onboard non-tech friends IMO.
    - kevincox 6y ago
      There are also many free Matrix severs. But I agree that Discord has much more UX polish right now. (Especially around onboarding).
  - rakoo 6y ago
    Matrix the protocol is not there yet. Element, its main client, lacks too many features to have the same experience: - No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1772/proposals/1772-groups-as-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...) is in progress - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi - Even if you have Jitsi the experience is not the same. Discord's experience is like a chat room, except with audio and video. In Element it's more like a standard call
joshmn 6y ago
It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
- saddestcatever 6y ago
  Seriously! It's a shame that Xfire became a thing of the past. I feel like Steam baked in enough of the "community" features to steal their lunch, without ever delivering on the full community element that Discord is thriving on!
  - hobs 6y ago
    As far as I remember it xfire mostly developed their own client into the grave, making it more complex and less useful on each change.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Speaking of Steam, it's also a shame they snoozed on it until way after Discord picked up steam. They were also very well situated to replicate it, but to date they STILL don't have message history in chat conversations...
- ev0lv 6y ago
  TeamSpeak is still used heavily in the gaming community. Discord sucks when you have 50 people in the same voice chat.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    I'm a big gamer and heavy Discord user. Haven't heard anyone even mention TeamSpeak in a long time so I'm surprised by this comment.
    - 6y ago
mouldysammich 6y ago
I wish there was anything comparably easy to use and of the same quality or even in the vicinity in foss communication platforms. Mumble isnt easy to use but has great voice and terrible text, matrix and irc are both -- for most non techy people -- hard to use and esentially text only, jitsi is video conferencing, xmpp is mainly not about voice and suffers the same issues as matrix. I really hate the state of things as I would love to contribute and join some oss communities but they only exist on matrix and I hate using it. Its one of those things i wish i had the know how to start building my self, but webrtc alone seems impenetrable for mumble/discord style audio.
- kitkat_new 6y ago
  u tried Matrix with Element? It doesn't feel as bad as you describe
29athrowaway 6y ago
Thank you. Discord works well on Linux, Skype doesn't. None of the new Minecraft games work on Linux. This is the best thing I have heard today.
thedudeabides5 6y ago
If Clubhouse is worth $4, I'd buy Discord at $12bn easy. https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/19/clubhouse/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/19/clubhouse/
sbagel 6y ago
Discord does not give users a choice to opt-out of their wildly invasive data collection methods including logging executables running on your system while the desktop client is open, not just games. This data alone is very valuable. Comment from a 2019 support thread "I am pretty flabbergasted that people aren't making a bigger deal of this than they are. Discord actively monitors your executables, but the larger concern for people now seems to be its inaccuracy in identifying them as games. As if to say "make it better at identifying games" instead of "stop scanning my programs"." https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030731072--Game-Activity- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600307...
- c7DJTLrn 6y ago
  It sends a list of running programs, including the command line arguments to the server. It's worrying because although it's bad practice some programs get passed credentials like this. With regards to Discord's invasion of privacy as a whole, I'm not sure if it's malice or incompetence.
  - AceJohnny2 6y ago
    For one thing, command-line arguments are public information about processes in every OS since forever. Putting security-sensitive information there is a fault of its developers, not Discord. For another, Discord spies on the system to report what games you're playing, including which mods. It's a cool feature for some, but indeed requires a set of abilities that are indistinguishable from malware.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    it doesn't send anything like that anywhere. it matches a list of executables it downloads with what it sees running, to determine if you are running a game.
    - c7DJTLrn 6y ago
      One of my GDPR data downloads contained a list of programs I had ran along with the command line arguments. Not sure how you can explain that if it's not sent to the server.
JulianMorrison 6y ago
I'm really glad it's going to stay independent. I'd hate for it to be gradually degraded into another Skype.
nikolay 6y ago
I guess, we should expect a version of Discord built by Microsoft, integrated into Xbox and Minecraft.
- DigitalSea 6y ago
  And if Teams is any indication as to the resulting quality of the end product, it won't be very good. It amazes me a company as rich and big as Microsoft struggles to build good software when it comes to copying competitors.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    Let's be fair! Slack copied Yammer in large parts, which was acquired by Microsoft. And Teams is actually better than Slack in many ways. I don't think they will just add features to Teams that compete with Discord. It probably would "fix" Skype.
btown 6y ago
Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are very few other platforms that encourage you to use a single account to join servers for work and gaming and anime and music? And users trust that Discord will allow them to keep their membership in spaces a secret unless someone is already a member of both spaces. That's a feat that's almost impossible to fathom. The interest graph alone is staggeringly valuable, and it's no doubt monetizable in subtle and trust-maintaining ways. And... some of it may be toxic to a company like Microsoft. The moment Discord needs to start censoring across platforms (not just blocking iOS access to certain content as they've needed to do to play in Apple's garden) is the moment it starts to feel unsafe for content creation. I'm not surprised they walked away. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. If anyone from Discord is reading this: - not letting people opt-in to be prompted to set a username before entering a server and having a bot announce our membership, and - not letting people set unique profile pictures for each server creates situations where one could either leak a real-world identity to a server on which they desire anonymity, or leak a pseudonymous online identity to coworkers. And this gets REALLY bad for people using Discord to explore their gender identity, where this could cause a profile picture or name that indicates identity to leak between spaces when that's not desired. I've met people who need to be incredibly careful to create multiple Discord accounts to avoid being outed, and Discord makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to do this, with its deep browser integrations that forward to the native app. It is no joke that Discord's UX choices could hurt people, here. But it speaks to the strength of the platform that Discord is still an incredibly vibrant place for communities like gender-questioning communities that rely on pseudonymous identities. Because it puts natural conversations at people's fingertips. It was Clubhouse before Clubhouse, just divided into communities of like-minded people. In certain ways it's the superposition of Clubhouse and Slack. And the UX problems are solvable problems. I think Discord is really going places.
- meowface 6y ago
  >I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. These suggestions wouldn't really help. Every Discord account has a permanent public user ID attached to it that stays the same regardless of if the username changes. Someone wishing to track an account across multiple servers is always going to be able to. Using multiple accounts is the only real option, and I think that's what Discord should recommend to people. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to use multiple accounts simultaneously. (Desktop app + any number of browsers.) I agree they could improve the multi-account UX. If you have only your browser tab open and not the desktop app, joining a server will start the desktop app as well, but it doesn't actually join the server in the desktop app, from my experience. So it's initially concerning, but I don't think unsafe. I'm not sure if other people have observed it joining a server with an unintended account, though.
jrm4 6y ago
Higher ed instructor here. I've been teaching online for well over a decade, frequently subjected to the Blackboards and the Canvases and lately Zoom. I can name no tool that has improved what I do from when I started except Discord. I'm old-ish, so it was a bit hard to get to at first, but after some time with it, I'd replace everything with it if I could. (And this is coming from a big time free/open source guy! I'm not thrilled with how centralized it is, but I'll take it for now)
- Dangeranger 6y ago
  Can you talk about your instructional workflow a bit more and how you replaced your former tools?
  - jrm4 6y ago
    Most of the comment was intended to say, I would replace everything if I could. But the biggest benefit by far has been groupwork. As far as I see, pretty much all of the big synchronous players (Zoom, Collaborate, etc) and asynchronous (all the LMS's) work atrociously if you're dealing with anyone who isn't a toddler -- which is to say, they are all too centralized and top-down. E.g. - In real-life groupwork, I would tell them with words to go to their rooms or to sit in groups, and they would take themselves there. In most of these goofy systems, I am personally responsible to "physically" place people in rooms, even if they disconnect or whatever. It's ridiculous. Now, I do all my group work in Discord. I make however many text and voice rooms, and tell them to go there. I don't even worry about the "roles" part, because, again, my students aren't toddlers. Bonus, of course -- these sub rooms plus a main room, available at all hours, facilitates interaction between students as well as with me. Contrast to most of the LMS which are both clunky AND frequently have policies against non-school chatter (which, in the age of online teaching is asinine.)
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/lXyuZ https://archive.is/lXyuZ
DigitalSea 6y ago
As a 30 something, I have been using Discord for a few years now. Like many long-term users, I started out being a member of gaming-affiliated servers and now, I am a member of numerous technology and cryptocurrency/blockchain related servers as well as gaming (but not primarily). Many of the big Twitch streamers have Discord servers and special roles for paid subscribers as do many content creators on Youtube (especially those who create reaction videos and cannot monetise it on Youtube itself). Pretty much every large blockchain/cryptocurrency project has a Discord server, many open source projects have Discord servers too. The most impressive thing of all is Discord seemingly worked out stable audio/video years ago. I've had numerous calls on Discord which were more stable than calls through Slack, Zoom and even Facebook Messenger. The obvious choice for Discord is a professional offering, seeing as their core market is growing up with the product and largely probably in its late 20's, early 30's. I can see why Microsoft would have been interested, calls via Teams are like pulling teeth. Forget the terrible UI, the call quality (for me at least) through Teams has been atrocious and surprising given Microsoft have the resources to invest in making this component at least comparable to other products around. Discord really needs to address the lack of server-specific avatars, though. Why can I change my username per-server, but I am stuck using the same avatar image for every server? Now that I use Discord for a wide variety of uses, I have needed this ability for a while now. Many of us have been crying out for this for years now.
- xyzzy21 6y ago
  Teams is surprising OK compared to WebEx or Skype or Facetime these days. I ever run Teams on my Mac just fine. So I guess YMMV but it's been fine. Discord hasn't grabbed me (but I can't play any video games without getting motion sickness so there's that).
  - tracker1 6y ago
    Teams is one of those "Good Enough" at most things suites from MS... It's not the best at anything it does, but in aggregate does more than most of the others. It's also already paid for by Office365 subs in many businesses, so kind of a no brainer to use it.
  - 6y ago
voidfunc 6y ago
In theory could Microsoft just wait for them to go public then buy up a huge number of shares and give themselves a stronger voice inside the company for acquisition?
sadness3 6y ago
Thank goodness
de6u99er 6y ago
Here's an interesting blog post from 3 years ago titled "How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users using WebRTC" [1]. I guess the number of connections has increased in the meanwhile. [1] 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...
emodendroket 6y ago
I thought it was strange they were keen on it at all. Didn't they pass on Slack to build Teams?
rmm 6y ago
Teams for Xbox incoming.
natas 6y ago
I'm glad microsoft didn't listen to my discord chats :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

576 points by coloneltcb 6y ago

COGlory 6y ago

What about Discord besides network effect makes it a desirable holding? Do they have any technological advantage?

lostcolony 6y ago
Does anyone in this space? At least, that has any user facing affect (i.e., 99.9% uptime vs 99.99% uptime is not something users will be comparing). It's all network effect and business model.
kungito 6y ago
It's been a fucking amazing product from day one and they have a lot of features. I only wish they release a non gaming branded version
- red_trumpet 6y ago
  What would a non-gaming version distinguish from the current one?
  - TkTech 6y ago
    It's hard to pitch discord in the workplace, especially against an incumbent like Slack or Teams. It comes across as very "casual" and unprofessional, which is a shame, because it really is a top-quality product. It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work: > Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
    - meristohm 6y ago
      I’ve used Discord only for gaming and I would prefer all the non-voice stuff to be able to be hidden. If it wasn’t the most reliable audio for group voice chat that we’ve tried (Steam voice is still an echo-y mess for us three, Signal wouldn’t connect us, and then I conceded and went back to Discord), we’d use something else. I don’t like that it tracks what we’re playing, that it tries to be friendly with its treacly messages (it’s a tool; my shovel doesn’t say “welcome back, I missed you!”...), and that it keeps deleted accounts around. I can see that others may want all these and other Facebook-esque features. I like that Discord uses .opus codec, and that the audio is dependable and clear. Maybe Mumble to try next? What open-source options might work for enterprise?
      - melkhior 6y ago
        For gaming, you might enjoy Teamspeak. It's closed-source, but you can run own your server, it's very much focused on voice comms, uses Opus and (IMO) has better audio filters.
  - oneepic 6y ago
    Fewer pylons and other gaming memes.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    Probably better support around auth and identity. They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth. But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.
speedgoose 6y ago
It provides a nicer user experience overall.
ganzuul 6y ago
Makes the users feel like the devs care.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > Makes the users feel like the devs care. Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO? After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers. Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered) -------- In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer. Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    I pay for Discord. They know how to wring money out of their customers.
prox 6y ago
It’s one of the most popular destinations for gaming/tech discussion rooms and teamtalk (during games) what they do, they do really well, that’s their advantage.
keb_ 6y ago
The UX and featureset of Discord is impressive. The UX in particular is superior to Slack, Teams, or any other modern chat application I've used. I'd like to move my group to Matrix, but Element (fka Riot.im) is nowhere near as polished or user-friendly as Discord.
- antris 6y ago
  Have you ever tried to disable notifications on Discord? I have tried to do it 500 times and still get those annoying red dots with numbers, red dots without numbers, and just a few weeks ago I started getting random notification sounds (after I had disabled them before) without any clue where they were coming from. My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned. edit: I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
  - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
    Right-click the server icon, select "notifications settings", press "Mute <server name>". When it asks how long, select "until I turn it back on". This will kill the white dot unless you're mentioned (or @everyone'd). Its a little tricky to find but that will solve your issue
    - antris 6y ago
      I want to change my global settings, not server settings. I'm on dozens of Discords and join/leave them and change their order on the sidebar all the time. Going through each of them (and remembering to do it every time I join a new one) sounds like a nightmare. Every time I hear/see a notification that I don't want, I'd have to go through all those dialogs for all of my servers? Nope, not gonna happen.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Its B2C software so its fundamentally designed for consumers - individual users and community creators. Slack, Teams etc. are B2B so end-users are forced to adopt it. The UX of both reflects this.
Varriount 6y ago
I don't know if you consider this a technological advantage, but compared to Slack, Discord puts a relatively heavy emphasis on its live voice channel functionality. You can join and leave them at a whim, mute and control the volume of individual users, etc. I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.
wayoutthere 6y ago
Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. Technology progress has plateaued in a great many industries over the last decade so it’s all about the product experience these days. Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  > Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. There is a vast gulf even in terms of „just working“ between garbage like Microsoft Teams and something like Discord.
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Honestly teams “just works” for a lot of companies. My company had a 100% in-office culture and transitioned to using Teams extensively within a week of the pandemic starting. The fact that it’s built off of Active Directory and integrates with existing Sharepoint and Exchange systems is a huge plus for business users. Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    I find this "Teams is garbage" vs the experience at our company quite interesting. We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit. Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever. There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.
wongarsu 6y ago
It's arguably the best software in the "modern IRC" space. Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.
- f1refly 6y ago
  > discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effordless voice channels and good UX Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.
devwastaken 6y ago
They have users. If they wanted to they could become the next Steam tomorrow by simply selling games and giving deals. The engaged userbase of discord far surpasses steam, epic, and all other gaming clients. Valve doesn't care about competing or innovating, theyll simply roll over and let it happen. But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > simply selling games and giving deals They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely. You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    The game store is still open. They just do not accept more paid games due to understaffing.
- Notorious_BLT 6y ago
  They already tried, it flopped and they killed off the feature. PC gamers already own games through Steam, no one wants to have to split their library if they can avoid it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
afpx 6y ago
Do they even have a lot of active users? I haven’t found many public discord channels that seem to be actively used. Or, is discord more for private chat? I’ve used it a few times for organizing online gaming. But, it wasn’t worth it to keep it installed.
Jweb_Guru 6y ago
They're way better at dealing with large communities than any other chat application I've used.
nesarkvechnep 6y ago
It has a technological advantage - Elixir.
Merem 6y ago
Data from a lot of users? I mean, they inspect all audio/video communications in real-time[1] and save all your messages, pictures etc. It also helps a lot that basically no one cares about privacy anymore, so further growth seems secured. [1] https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626 https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-di...
whoopdedo 6y ago
I assumed they wanted to buy the userbase. And use it to promote XBox and Game Pass. I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.
aphextron 6y ago
The network effect is what makes it desirable. Anyone can push bits these days. Web technology is completely commoditized. But a strong brand and a great product team is priceless (or at least worth more than $10bn).
m01 6y ago
They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage. In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir. [1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... EDIT: added reference and clarified that I don't know if they still use Elixir.
- davidw 6y ago
  https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 mentions 'Rust or Elixir'. Frustratingly, for the longest time, they were 'San Fran or bust' in their hiring, which seemed like an odd thing for a company supposedly enabling communication. Guess the pandemic finally forced them to start looking for remote workers. Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
  - dnautics 6y ago
    > Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO? My guess would be pagerduty is the first?

donkarma 6y ago

Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive

milkytron 6y ago
Maybe... Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.
- krzepah 6y ago
  Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.
    - mopsi 6y ago
      The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment. This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots. I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?

rvz 6y ago

Let's hope that Discord doesn't end up going the way of Slack. Since Slack got overconfident over Microsoft Teams and lost and got acquired by Salesforce.

sz4kerto 6y ago
For almost 30 billion.
Epenthesis 6y ago
As someone who's never used Discord, what's it do better than Slack? Superficially other than aesthetics/integrations, they seem basically identical
- JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
  Discord is more like a ventrilo replacement for gamers. It was primarily voice chat in its early days. They've done a lot of work to make the chatroom space on par with any other chat application you'd use otherwise. They also now allow for direct screenshare and game streaming. I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
  - joaonmatos 6y ago
    Discord is still way worse in text chat. I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least. Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had: - No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience. - No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better. - Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack. One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs. Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.

xevrem 6y ago

so.... Discord will be a hellscape in 3-5 years as its inevitably destroyed by corporate greed?

larinzod 6y ago
Aye, nothing like investor pressure and quarterly growth targets to kill an otherwise good company/product.
- coldpie 6y ago
  This is how tech startups work, isn't it? Use investors to build a product with no business model, then the founders cash out via purchase or IPO, and soon after the fact that you have no business model comes to light and the product falls apart trying to find a business model, while users move on to the next shiny thing with no business model.
  - ergot_vacation 6y ago
    Glad I'm not the only one thinking this. Seems obvious, but I always felt like I was missing something. How is it that most of the tech/SV world is just the same con being run over and over again, yet it keeps working? Does it operate on the same psychological glitch as a lottery? Do the giant corps buying these startups all think "I know how it's been in the past, but surely THIS startup WON'T turn to shit the moment I buy it because it was never a real business to begin with! This time for sure!" Or are the real suckers the investors, and the corps are just doing these purchases in a performative capacity to keep razzle-dazzling them?
    - whall6 6y ago
      Have you read through any of Facebook’s recent 10-Ks?
      - echelon 6y ago
        If they're that bad, what keeps the stock price propped up and the morale high?

1zhangdey 6y ago

based and redpilled

etempleton 6y ago

I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.

xyhopguy 6y ago
'discord professional' seems like pretty low hanging fruit and an obvious upgrade over slack + zoom
- brundolf 6y ago
  It would risk chasing off their core market, even if it were just a branding pivot
  - poidos 6y ago
    It would probably have to be a separate application with the same features and internals to really work.
    - all2 6y ago
      Accord Communications: Enterprise Edition
  - novok 6y ago
    I think discord biz edition was obvious for a long time, and they've steadfastly refused to do it for that amount of time too.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    The removed the Gamer branding by default a long time ago now.
- stdgy 6y ago
  Absolutely. I'd kill to be able to use Discord for work. It's just silly how much better it is than Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc.

debacle 6y ago

Amazon (Twitch), Epic, and Valve are all targeting gaming verticals. Each of them are integrating the other's features as also-rans: streaming, marketplace, reviews, community, platform. Most people would probably be surprized to know that you can buy games on Twitch and stream on Steam. What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world.

leereeves 6y ago
Does Epic have reviews and community now? Last time I used it, Epic didn't have much more than an advertisement and a buy button.
mehlmao 6y ago
Can you still buy games from Twitch? I thought they shut that store down. They still offer free games for Prime members though.
elithrar 6y ago
> What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world. Do you mean that in a positive or negative way? Netflix is doing very well - it's the other, broadcasters-cum-streaming platforms that are struggling.
evanextreme 6y ago
Discord will always have a market as long as competing marketplaces / ecosystems exist on PC. Discord's platform agnosticism makes it a safer bet than the three companies you mentioned, all of which are incentivized to build closed content ecosystems that antagonize each other in order to move more product. There is simply no other solution that allows me to see what my friends are playing, jump into their channel, and see the gameplay broadcast live from multiple perspectives in a private environment. The Netflix analogy is not particularly apt here either, as where Netflix produces the content, here the content is user generated. So its about technological executions, platform agnosticism, and features sets. Valve's Steam app on iOS didnt even support iPhone X screen resolutions until a year and a half ago so I wouldnt hold my breath for them to compete well in this space at all. Maybe Epic's acquisition of houseparty could cause some competition for them? But I doubt it.

logronoide 6y ago

I can’t believe any of the people complaining here about low quality of the VoIP of Teams have used the VoIP of Discord, because they simply can’t compare. Teams have anti-coupling features and you can use it with speakers out of the box. Discord does not have a good anti-coupling algorithms and it’s almost impossible to use it without headphones. Perfect for gamers, but not for business. Discord is amazing to create communities, that’s what Microsoft wanted.

parksy 6y ago
> Discord is amazing to create communities, that’s what Microsoft wanted. Microsoft can easily recreate the platform, they don't want the capability, they want the existing audience.
- logronoide 6y ago
  Microsoft wants the audience AND the know-how about how to engage with them and atract new one. Due to Microsoft culture they don’t know how to do it.

mehlmao 6y ago

So what is Discord's path to profitability? They tried selling video games and closed the store not too long after launching it. Nitro/Server Boosts definitely don't come close to the cost of operation.

DethNinja 6y ago
Advertisements I guess? I still cannot believe how fast they captured game chat market, even with lots of other competitors. Honestly I also would like to enter to this market but breaking the market share of discord will be very hard indeed.
- tacticalmook 6y ago
  That's not surprising to me. Discord offers free hosting for a feature-rich IRC and group voice service. Nobody else did that. A gaming clan no longer needs to maintain their own Teamspeak/Ventrilo server + their own website and forum. The convenience of having it all in one centralized program wins out over Discord's UX oddities, privacy concerns and more recent bloat. This ease of use also lowered the barrier to create a clan, so it captures a larger audience than its predecessors ever did. And yet it still provides powerful tools for moderation and user permissions, an API for chat bots, video streaming...
- chrononaut 6y ago
  To be fair, I think everyone always thinks about that regarding the incumbent(s). Xfire / Ventrilo / TeamSpeak all likely seemed like a daunting adversary at their peaks.
tinus_hn 6y ago
How do you know that? Why would it be expensive to run a glorified irc server network?
- mehlmao 6y ago
  For starters, storage costs. Free users can upload files, images, and videos up to 8MB (25MB for Nitro members). Storing and serving those in perpetuity adds up, plus bandwidth for voice and video chat and 800+ employees.

fish45 6y ago

Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing AFAIK that can replicate this particular experience except for Teamspeak, which has other problems.

lrvick 6y ago
Why not matrix?
- y2bd 6y ago
  AFAIK there are no Matrix clients with voice channels.
- pyr0hu 6y ago
  Discord is free, no need for maintenance and much easier to onboard non-tech friends IMO.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    There are also many free Matrix severs. But I agree that Discord has much more UX polish right now. (Especially around onboarding).
- rakoo 6y ago
  Matrix the protocol is not there yet. Element, its main client, lacks too many features to have the same experience: - No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1772/proposals/1772-groups-as-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...) is in progress - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi - Even if you have Jitsi the experience is not the same. Discord's experience is like a chat room, except with audio and video. In Element it's more like a standard call

joshmn 6y ago

It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.

saddestcatever 6y ago
Seriously! It's a shame that Xfire became a thing of the past. I feel like Steam baked in enough of the "community" features to steal their lunch, without ever delivering on the full community element that Discord is thriving on!
- hobs 6y ago
  As far as I remember it xfire mostly developed their own client into the grave, making it more complex and less useful on each change.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Speaking of Steam, it's also a shame they snoozed on it until way after Discord picked up steam. They were also very well situated to replicate it, but to date they STILL don't have message history in chat conversations...
ev0lv 6y ago
TeamSpeak is still used heavily in the gaming community. Discord sucks when you have 50 people in the same voice chat.
- Kiro 6y ago
  I'm a big gamer and heavy Discord user. Haven't heard anyone even mention TeamSpeak in a long time so I'm surprised by this comment.
  - 6y ago

mouldysammich 6y ago

I wish there was anything comparably easy to use and of the same quality or even in the vicinity in foss communication platforms. Mumble isnt easy to use but has great voice and terrible text, matrix and irc are both -- for most non techy people -- hard to use and esentially text only, jitsi is video conferencing, xmpp is mainly not about voice and suffers the same issues as matrix. I really hate the state of things as I would love to contribute and join some oss communities but they only exist on matrix and I hate using it. Its one of those things i wish i had the know how to start building my self, but webrtc alone seems impenetrable for mumble/discord style audio.

kitkat_new 6y ago
u tried Matrix with Element? It doesn't feel as bad as you describe

29athrowaway 6y ago

Thank you. Discord works well on Linux, Skype doesn't. None of the new Minecraft games work on Linux. This is the best thing I have heard today.

thedudeabides5 6y ago

If Clubhouse is worth $4, I'd buy Discord at $12bn easy. https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/19/clubhouse/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/19/clubhouse/

sbagel 6y ago

Discord does not give users a choice to opt-out of their wildly invasive data collection methods including logging executables running on your system while the desktop client is open, not just games. This data alone is very valuable. Comment from a 2019 support thread "I am pretty flabbergasted that people aren't making a bigger deal of this than they are. Discord actively monitors your executables, but the larger concern for people now seems to be its inaccuracy in identifying them as games. As if to say "make it better at identifying games" instead of "stop scanning my programs"." https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030731072--Game-Activity- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600307...

c7DJTLrn 6y ago
It sends a list of running programs, including the command line arguments to the server. It's worrying because although it's bad practice some programs get passed credentials like this. With regards to Discord's invasion of privacy as a whole, I'm not sure if it's malice or incompetence.
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  For one thing, command-line arguments are public information about processes in every OS since forever. Putting security-sensitive information there is a fault of its developers, not Discord. For another, Discord spies on the system to report what games you're playing, including which mods. It's a cool feature for some, but indeed requires a set of abilities that are indistinguishable from malware.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  it doesn't send anything like that anywhere. it matches a list of executables it downloads with what it sees running, to determine if you are running a game.
  - c7DJTLrn 6y ago
    One of my GDPR data downloads contained a list of programs I had ran along with the command line arguments. Not sure how you can explain that if it's not sent to the server.

JulianMorrison 6y ago

I'm really glad it's going to stay independent. I'd hate for it to be gradually degraded into another Skype.

nikolay 6y ago

I guess, we should expect a version of Discord built by Microsoft, integrated into Xbox and Minecraft.

DigitalSea 6y ago
And if Teams is any indication as to the resulting quality of the end product, it won't be very good. It amazes me a company as rich and big as Microsoft struggles to build good software when it comes to copying competitors.
- nikolay 6y ago
  Let's be fair! Slack copied Yammer in large parts, which was acquired by Microsoft. And Teams is actually better than Slack in many ways. I don't think they will just add features to Teams that compete with Discord. It probably would "fix" Skype.

btown 6y ago

Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are very few other platforms that encourage you to use a single account to join servers for work and gaming and anime and music? And users trust that Discord will allow them to keep their membership in spaces a secret unless someone is already a member of both spaces. That's a feat that's almost impossible to fathom. The interest graph alone is staggeringly valuable, and it's no doubt monetizable in subtle and trust-maintaining ways. And... some of it may be toxic to a company like Microsoft. The moment Discord needs to start censoring across platforms (not just blocking iOS access to certain content as they've needed to do to play in Apple's garden) is the moment it starts to feel unsafe for content creation. I'm not surprised they walked away. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. If anyone from Discord is reading this: - not letting people opt-in to be prompted to set a username before entering a server and having a bot announce our membership, and - not letting people set unique profile pictures for each server creates situations where one could either leak a real-world identity to a server on which they desire anonymity, or leak a pseudonymous online identity to coworkers. And this gets REALLY bad for people using Discord to explore their gender identity, where this could cause a profile picture or name that indicates identity to leak between spaces when that's not desired. I've met people who need to be incredibly careful to create multiple Discord accounts to avoid being outed, and Discord makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to do this, with its deep browser integrations that forward to the native app. It is no joke that Discord's UX choices could hurt people, here. But it speaks to the strength of the platform that Discord is still an incredibly vibrant place for communities like gender-questioning communities that rely on pseudonymous identities. Because it puts natural conversations at people's fingertips. It was Clubhouse before Clubhouse, just divided into communities of like-minded people. In certain ways it's the superposition of Clubhouse and Slack. And the UX problems are solvable problems. I think Discord is really going places.

meowface 6y ago
>I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. These suggestions wouldn't really help. Every Discord account has a permanent public user ID attached to it that stays the same regardless of if the username changes. Someone wishing to track an account across multiple servers is always going to be able to. Using multiple accounts is the only real option, and I think that's what Discord should recommend to people. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to use multiple accounts simultaneously. (Desktop app + any number of browsers.) I agree they could improve the multi-account UX. If you have only your browser tab open and not the desktop app, joining a server will start the desktop app as well, but it doesn't actually join the server in the desktop app, from my experience. So it's initially concerning, but I don't think unsafe. I'm not sure if other people have observed it joining a server with an unintended account, though.

jrm4 6y ago

Higher ed instructor here. I've been teaching online for well over a decade, frequently subjected to the Blackboards and the Canvases and lately Zoom. I can name no tool that has improved what I do from when I started except Discord. I'm old-ish, so it was a bit hard to get to at first, but after some time with it, I'd replace everything with it if I could. (And this is coming from a big time free/open source guy! I'm not thrilled with how centralized it is, but I'll take it for now)

Dangeranger 6y ago
Can you talk about your instructional workflow a bit more and how you replaced your former tools?
- jrm4 6y ago
  Most of the comment was intended to say, I would replace everything if I could. But the biggest benefit by far has been groupwork. As far as I see, pretty much all of the big synchronous players (Zoom, Collaborate, etc) and asynchronous (all the LMS's) work atrociously if you're dealing with anyone who isn't a toddler -- which is to say, they are all too centralized and top-down. E.g. - In real-life groupwork, I would tell them with words to go to their rooms or to sit in groups, and they would take themselves there. In most of these goofy systems, I am personally responsible to "physically" place people in rooms, even if they disconnect or whatever. It's ridiculous. Now, I do all my group work in Discord. I make however many text and voice rooms, and tell them to go there. I don't even worry about the "roles" part, because, again, my students aren't toddlers. Bonus, of course -- these sub rooms plus a main room, available at all hours, facilitates interaction between students as well as with me. Contrast to most of the LMS which are both clunky AND frequently have policies against non-school chatter (which, in the age of online teaching is asinine.)

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/lXyuZ https://archive.is/lXyuZ

DigitalSea 6y ago

As a 30 something, I have been using Discord for a few years now. Like many long-term users, I started out being a member of gaming-affiliated servers and now, I am a member of numerous technology and cryptocurrency/blockchain related servers as well as gaming (but not primarily). Many of the big Twitch streamers have Discord servers and special roles for paid subscribers as do many content creators on Youtube (especially those who create reaction videos and cannot monetise it on Youtube itself). Pretty much every large blockchain/cryptocurrency project has a Discord server, many open source projects have Discord servers too. The most impressive thing of all is Discord seemingly worked out stable audio/video years ago. I've had numerous calls on Discord which were more stable than calls through Slack, Zoom and even Facebook Messenger. The obvious choice for Discord is a professional offering, seeing as their core market is growing up with the product and largely probably in its late 20's, early 30's. I can see why Microsoft would have been interested, calls via Teams are like pulling teeth. Forget the terrible UI, the call quality (for me at least) through Teams has been atrocious and surprising given Microsoft have the resources to invest in making this component at least comparable to other products around. Discord really needs to address the lack of server-specific avatars, though. Why can I change my username per-server, but I am stuck using the same avatar image for every server? Now that I use Discord for a wide variety of uses, I have needed this ability for a while now. Many of us have been crying out for this for years now.

xyzzy21 6y ago
Teams is surprising OK compared to WebEx or Skype or Facetime these days. I ever run Teams on my Mac just fine. So I guess YMMV but it's been fine. Discord hasn't grabbed me (but I can't play any video games without getting motion sickness so there's that).
- tracker1 6y ago
  Teams is one of those "Good Enough" at most things suites from MS... It's not the best at anything it does, but in aggregate does more than most of the others. It's also already paid for by Office365 subs in many businesses, so kind of a no brainer to use it.
- 6y ago

voidfunc 6y ago

In theory could Microsoft just wait for them to go public then buy up a huge number of shares and give themselves a stronger voice inside the company for acquisition?

sadness3 6y ago

Thank goodness

de6u99er 6y ago

Here's an interesting blog post from 3 years ago titled "How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users using WebRTC" [1]. I guess the number of connections has increased in the meanwhile. [1] 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...

emodendroket 6y ago

I thought it was strange they were keen on it at all. Didn't they pass on Slack to build Teams?

rmm 6y ago

Teams for Xbox incoming.

natas 6y ago

I'm glad microsoft didn't listen to my discord chats :)

deleted 6y ago

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